Cisco Outlines New AWS Opportunities For Partners

Before AWS become all the rage, say a decade ago, Cisco was one of the biggest names in networking and datacenter technologies. Since then, the company has steadily seen market share declines.

But it has now put together the new Intuitive Network architecture, which the company believes can be a market disrupter.

In an interview with CRN, Cisco Channel Chief Wendy Bahr claimed that with their new Catalyst 9000, they are doing something that they have not done in a long time. She also talked about new partner opportunities with Amazon Web Services and Apple.

On how Cisco partners should view AWS:

“They should view them as an opportunity. Chuck [Robbins] articulated in his keynote that it’s not just one cloud – a public cloud, a private cloud. It’s a world of many clouds and AWS is a key player in that market — as is Azure, as is Google, as are many others. We have an opportunity with our partners to connect Cisco technology to public clouds [through] cloud services routers, virtual ASA, our Umbrella Security capabilities. When a customer has a need to put a workload in a public cloud, we hope the partner will choose the right cloud, and we’ll connect as much Cisco capability as possible to that customer’s particular need.”

The ultimate strategy here being encouraging partners that are using the Amazon Web Services platform to ensure that they also attach Cisco whenever possible to that solutions set.

Remains to be seen how this all pans out, and how this new network system fares on the market, but the California based networking giant was quite confident of its success at the Cisco Live 2017 conference in Las Vegas.