At its Partner Summit in Boston, Cisco announced several initiatives to help its global channel navigate the economic storm while preparing for the upturn. These initiatives include an extension of Cisco's channel partner financing, the expansion of its managed services channel program and the evolution of its flagship partner profitability program'.

"Given the economic climate, this might be the most important summit ever," started Cisco senior vice president Worldwide Channels, Keith Goodwin (left) at the opening keynote. "Every economic storm we navigated together, we came out stronger. This time, it's not just a storm but a hurricane. This is the time to prepare for the upturn, to navigate to accelerate."

The first of Cisco Navigate to Accelerate initiatives, is the extension of its channel financing terms to 90 days, an initiative warmly applauded by the 3,000 partners present at the summit. With the tightening of the credit, Cisco has provided the credit support to drive a $2bn (€1.4bn) in sales since October 2008.

"We continue to expand our channel financing program (which is already offered in 140 countries) to include more partners around the world, and our efforts will be focused in Asia Pacific and Europe," explained senior vice president, Go-to-Market Group, Edison Peres (left) at the global press conference.

Cisco also announced the expansion of its ‘flagship profitability program' - its existingValue Incentive Program (VIP) introduced in 2003 to reward partners investing in unified communications, security, wireless and data center. Cisco's VIP evolves as its channel partners move to architectural capabilities around collaboration, virtualisation and borderless network "three multi-billions opportunity architectural plays" says Goodwin: collaboration would be a $34bn (€26bn) market opportunity,while virtualisation and data center would be worth $20bn (€14bn) and borderless networks $40bn (€29bn).

"We want to encourage partners to move up the chain and focus on architecture to drive transformation," explained Peres. For the first time, VIP will reward channel partners for selling routing, switching, storage networking, wide-area networking optimisation and emerging technologies, such as Cisco TelePresence. And as part of the borderless network architecture, Cisco is offering its partners the Smart Business Architecture designed for Mid-sized Networks (for businesses with 250 to 1,000 employees).

Eventually, Cisco announced the next generation of its Managed Services Channel Program (MSCP) to support managed services providers. Indeed, as customers needs are changing from CAPEX to OPEX, the current economic environment creates huge opportunities for managed services. According to Ovum Research, managed services is a $42bn (€30bn) market opportunity and is growing 19% annually (twice as much as the IT industry), and the latest survey of businesses by Nemertes Research says 63% of businesses expect to adopt some level of managed services in 2009.

"Managed services is the perfect storm," said Peres, "it provides partners with competitive differentiation, annual revenue streams and a better customer relationship". "This is the best time and the least risky to upgrade your network, you need to prepare for the upturn, the networks have to be ready for when we'll get out of the crisis," continued senior VP, Wireless Technology Group, Brett Galloway (left). "Needs are borderless. The network must be borderless," he concluded.

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