Simon Brown | Marketing Manager - EMEAR Partner Marketing
Marketing Velocity is our flagship event for the partner marketing community. Previously a global event, this year for the first time it was managed in the region.
Between 24 – 26 June we hosted 39 of our top marketing partners at the Radisson Blu, Amsterdam. Amsterdam was chosen for its excellent transport system, Schiphol airport being one of Europe's four major hubs and the city is recognised for its culture, history and architecture. The conference space was within the hotel of which we had exclusive use, and 90% of partners in attendance also stayed there.
The agenda was built around our partner careabouts and topics included; Cisco’s partner marketing strategy and priorities, evolving marketing trends, influencer marketing, customer experience, ABM, sales and marketing alignment, understanding the omnichannel experience and cultural diversity. There were also breakout sessions covering the opportunities for partners in Small Business, Customer Advocacy and Lifecycle Advantage, as well as an opportunity to hear from our new Partner Organisation Leader, David Meads. During the event we held a build a bike challenge which helped to build relationships between partners and Cisco, and also contributed to a good cause through the Give-a-Bike Foundation.
The event itself was intimate and informal to encourage two-way peer-to-peer interaction throughout between partners and Cisco, and also between partners. This was achieved through general, breakout and networking sessions, general Q&A with Cisco executives, and 28 x executive 1:1 meetings totalling 14 hours over the 2 days. There was also a welcome reception on the Monday evening, and on Tuesday evening an event at the House of Bols.
Since the event we’ve continued the conversation through post event communications such as a thank you message from Emma, which included an event summary delegates could share with their teams. We’ve also posted all the session recordings, partner soundbites and presentations on the Marketing Velocity hub and communicated this to the event attendees, and the wider partner marketing community that couldn’t attend Amsterdam. In addition, there is also a WebEx Teams space available for those that attended.
Initial feedback from partners indicates they preferred the smaller, more tailored regional approach as it gave them more opportunities to ask questions and speak directly with Cisco leaders. This is also reflected in the survey scores with an overall event score of 4.6 out of 5 and 4.7 for a valuable experience.
Please feel free to review and share the content on the Marketing Velocity Hub with your partner.
Diala El Joukhadar Khairallah | Country Marketing Manager, West Gulf
Cisco Qatar SB Summit 2019 has taken our partners on a journey of education and fun, just as planned. The opening audience gathered 287 Cisco partners in addition to 70+ attendees from Cisco and its participating distributors.
With 12 breakout sessions, 90 distinct demo instances including DevNet challenges and a Cisco Hub that covered everything in between, we are confident that our Qatar partners have left that day, well equipped to break into the SB space with Cisco.
We check the mark on every objective that has driven the SB Summit Roadshow in our region ✅ Excite & Accelerate Sales ✅ Drive Market Awareness ✅ Educate and Enable our partners on why Cisco is developing the SB market and how they can capture this business opportunity.
The highlight of Qatar’s Summit opening session was an impactful marketing message delivered by our EMEAR VP of Marketing, Emma Roffey who took the audience on a journey through the digital age and its implications on customer behavior and expectations.
The Ministry of Transport and Communications (MOTC) was our guest speaker and invaluable contributor to the session, revealing the opportunity that Qatar’s Digital economy holds for the digital transformation of SMEs.
Through the rest of the sessions, our keynote speakers Shane Heraty, Ignacio Castroverde and Osama AL-Zoubi, shared with partners key messages of why Small Business is Big Business, the market opportunity and how they can capitalize on it.
Mohammad Alnahwi | Country Marketing Manager, Saudi Arabia Maliha Hussain | Partner Marketing Manager, Saudi Arabia
The first summit of MEA Small Business Summit tour, The 2 days summit focused on Cisco’s Small Business Purpose-built Portfolio for Networking, Collaboration, Datacenter and Security and targeted mainly tier 2 active and prospect partners to enable, educate and recruit.
We engaged with the guests and delivered sessions on Enterprise Agreements, Cisco’s CX and Cisco’s Channel programs and promotions, DevNet, Small Office and Meraki portfolios.
We also had a presentation booth for partners to record a 3 minutes Cisco pitch to be reviewed by the team and recognize the top presenters.
Planned, organized and executed in 4 weeks, delivered 40 breakout sessions, showcased 29 live demos, hosted 1050 guests from 2000 registrations. The summit was a huge success, the attendees were overwhelmed, the feedback was very positive, and the partner’s engagement and excitement was excellent.
Didem Cetin Nunes | Partner Marketing Manager, West Gulf & Turkey Gulben Kovanlik Argeso | Country Marketing Manager, Turkey
Under the theme of “Discover Cisco Small Business World”, this event aimed at showcasing to our partners Cisco’s Small Business vision including our Small Business Solutions, Channel Programs, Customer experience strategy, best practices on Digital Marketing and how we can capture the Small Business opportunity together with our partners.
The event was packed in one day and included opening session, keynote speech, panels, breakout sessions, customer case studies, Cisco Small Business Technology World and finally the networking event.
In the mini amphitheater, 5 breakout sessions on Network/Meraki, Collaborate, Compute, Secure and Customer Experience took place.
In addition to the stands of Cisco architectures (Network, Compute, Secure, Collaborate), CX, Channel, Innovation and Digital Marketing, we created an “Upside-down room” as a photo booth for fun but also to emphasize the message of changing the perspective and discovering the exciting opportunities in Cisco Small Business World.
In Digital Marketing stand in Cisco SB Technology World, We made demos of Partner Marketing Central, analyzed the social media accounts and websites of the partners and also briefed our partners on digital marketing tactics.
Tasos Papageorgiou | Partner Marketing Manager, East Gulf
Cisco Partner Summit 2019 offered an amazing experience to our partners. With over 300 attendees, it was a successful full-day event which delivered passionate keynotes, breakout sessions and hosted a buzzing Cisco Small Business Campus area. A great day in which we have achieved our main objectives; to Excite & Accelerate Sales, Drive Market Awareness as well Educate and Enable our partners on why Cisco is developing the SB market and how they can capture this business opportunity. The keynote sessions delivered key messages on why Small Business is Big Business and how to take advantage of this new revenue stream, growth prospect and profitability opportunity that truly resonated with our partners. In the Cisco Small Business Campus area, our partners had the chance to interact with our own Cisco Small Business experts as well as our distributors.
All designated areas were themed with a campus specific label like Collaboration Library, Hyperflex Café, Network Lab, Security Atrium etc. and each partner received a passport to use as their navigator around the Campus area. Moreover, used the Office of Partner’s success as a platform to spread awareness about our Channel partner programs and promotions as well the opportunity Customer Experience offers to our partners at every step of the lifecycle.
Aadil Hassim | Sales specialist Enterprise networks
Date:16 April 2019 Venue: The Munro Boutique Hotel, Houghton Number of Customers: 30 Audience: Financial Industry
The modern workforce is increasingly mobile, and business-critical applications are running over the Internet across multiple clouds. Traditional WAN architectures can't keep up, because of lack of available bandwidth, limited security, and increased complexity, which prevents IT from responding to business needs faster. Cisco hosted 30 financial industry professionals where they were given insights into how they can securely connect any user, any application, anywhere, with the power of the cloud.
Bruce Peters | Commercial Lead, Southern Africa
Date: 30 May 2019 Venue: Century City Conference Centre , Cape Town Audience: Channel Partners Number of Attendees: 30 Author: Bruce Peters
The last leg of #CiscoOntheRoad technology update was intended for our eco – system of our valued partners based in Cape Town. Delegates got an opportunity to listen to our insights and new solutions. We took delegates through Cisco’s Secure Intelligent platform to set the scene before diving deeper into the individual solutions in the portfolio. Corien Vermaak spoke to the topic "Security Everywhere" from a partners' perspective. We also focused on Small Business touching on "Why Cisco Small and Medium Business Solutions“ and Cisco Services to emphasis their importance as key Cisco priorities.
Bibi Goba | Head Public Sector
Date: 11- 13 June 2019 Venue: Unisa, Mackleneuk Campus, Pretoria, Target Customers: Higher Education delegates
Cisco was a gold sponsor at ASAudit which brought together the higher education ICT community together to share ideas, learn from experiences and build a network of fellow practitioners.
The event was a combination of plenary sessions and tracks running concurrently covering a wide range of technical themes.
Cisco led was the theme “connected universities “ which showcased Cisco Digital Education Platform which includes education-focused solutions and services for Digital Learning and the Digital Campus, both supported by security-focused, highly efficient, end-to-end IT platform.
Cathy Burns | Marketing Lead, Africa
Date: 28-29 May 2019 Venue: Sandton Convention Centre Audience: Customers and partners Number of attendees: 500
ITWeb's Security Summit is the South African business event of choice in the information security industry and is a high-profile conference and business exhibition that equips delegates with tools to tackle today's mission-critical security objectives – no matter how rampant the user ignorance or non-compliance that runs throughout their organisations.
Cisco was once again the official event sponsor which gave us the greatest exposure to conference delegates .TK Keanini, Cisco Distinguished Engineer of Advanced Threat Solutions was one of the international keynote speakers and addressed delegates, on the future of security analytics.
There were over 50+ expert presenters who will address everything from strategy and user awareness, governance, risk and compliance, to the latest trends in cybersecurity, across 8 tracks. This included a presentation by Cisco Cybersecurity Specialist, Corien Vermaak, who gave an update on the Cybercrimes Bill and James Brown, Head of Product, Cloud Security for the EMEAR region speaking on Cloud security.
Date: 19 June 2019 Venue: The Pavilion , Sandton Convention Centre Number of partners: 300
The Cisco Small Business Summit that took place in South Africa saw 250 tier 2 partners attend this first of its kind event and got them exposed to the opportunities that exist in the Small Business segment focusing on the 4 pillars of “Connect”, “Meet”, “Secure” and “Collaborate. Cisco wants our small business partners to be enabled, supported and succeed and the summit was an opportunity for delegates to explore the strategy we have put in place from pricing, product,
training, marketing resources and distribution.Some of the EMEAR leadership that joined us for included Abdelilah Nejjari, Steven Kewley, Dorian Breakspear-Coyle and Ignacio Castroverde who was also our opening keynote speaker. There were lots of activities a we simulated small businesses at the #CiscoSmallBusinessSummit such as Thando’s Boutique’ (retail) and JJ’s Attorneys’ (office).
There was also #DevNet and #CustomerExperience zones on the floor for our delegates to understand how the after service and continuous R&D is valuable for their small business. We had @WeBuyCars_SA as the closing keynote who shared some great insights into how the IT function within their organisation has transformed from being hardware centric to focusing on #AI, data science and application development.
Antonio Desantos | Systems Engineer
Date: 13 June 2019 Venue: The park house of events on 7, Hyde Park Target Customers: Data Centre customers
VeeamON Tour grants delegates the opportunity to learn how Intelligent Data Management will benefit their business by meeting demand securely, across multi-cloud infrastructures to exceed the expectations of the mobile, Always-On world. Cisco was one of 6 gold sponsors at VeeamOn Tour. Mohammed Atia took delegates through the Cisco and Veeam Better Together value proposition.
Isioma Udeozo | Channel Lead West Africa
Date: 21 June 2019 Venue: Cisco Office, Lagos – Nigeria
Cisco Nigeria Hosted a CIO roundtable for FSI customers. The event focused on sharing Cisco's point of view on industry-wide movements and the opportunities that they present as we move forth in digitization. The key Speakers, Patrick Bikar and Al Slamecka provided a deep dive on how Cisco provides the unmatched experience, innovative technology, and secure foundation firms require to build their bank of the future, secure what matters most, and open the door to limitless innovation.
Olakunle Oloruntimehin | General Manager, West Africa
Date :24 June 2019 Venue: Kempinski Gold Coast Hotel, Accra – Ghana
As part of her West Africa Tour, Francine Katsoudas, Cisco Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer hosted a CIO Customers and Partner CIO's event in Ghana. The networking event primarily focused on learning the CIO perspective of business, Cisco’s commitment to open Cisco Edge Centers and repair centers in the country, our focus to tackle Grey in the region, strategies and opportunities to keep both partners and customers profitable. In attendance we also had Clayton Naidoo, Esther Ayorinde, and Olakunle Oloruntimenhin.
Olakunle Oloruntimehin | General Manager, Cisco West Africa
Date: 22 June 2019 Venue: Federal Science and Technical College, Lagos – Nigeria
Fran Katsoudas hosted a celebratory event for Netacad success in Nigeria, having opened up 200 centres in the country, the biggest in Africa. The event had various sessions of Netacad students showcasing the skills they have learnt via the Netacad Program and the innovations they have come up with in the process. The event also recognized Linda Azah - 1 of the only 2 CCIE's in West Africa, a feat she achieved via the support of Netacad.
Date :20 June 2019 Venue: Cisco Office, Lagos – Nigeria
As part of her West Africa Tour, Fran Katsoudas graced an all hands with the Cisco West Africa Team. This was the first ever EVP visit to the region & was highly welcomed by the team.
Ayman Elgohary | General Manager, North and West Central Africa
Date: 11 – 12 June Attendance: 600 partners and customers
Under the theme, “Transform your Future, Grow your business”, we hosted our partners and customers over 2 days in a journey taking them through Cisco global strategy for Small Business, and how our portfolio can help partners and customers to build their digital future.
Key highlights
SB Journey (world of solutions) covered all 4 pillars of SB and featured Programs and Promotions booth, and Customer Experience.
Engagement with our delegates:
Hazel Burton | UKI Security Audience Expert
Gunay Oksar | Event Program Manager Section: Events
Infosecurity London is the largest cybersecurity tradeshow in Europe, attracting 15,000+ security professionals over the course of three days in early June.
Cisco Security took on a range of brand awareness activities and thought leadership speaking opportunities in order to further our reputation as a leading Security vendor in EMEAR.
We had two major aims from a storytelling perspective.
One was to show up as ‘one company’, with a strong sense of alignment between Cisco Security, Cisco Umbrella, Duo, Tetration and Meraki.
The second was to take on the theme of our new branding and show our customers how we could help them go from overwhelmed to empowered.
We showcased eight demos, as well as a Webex Board for more ‘freestyle’ demos.
We had the new branding on the booth which gave it a really clean and open, welcoming feel. Additionally, we had a digital screen at the top of the booth, which looped all the demo names so people could see what we were showcasing no matter where they were standing.
We had a theater on our booth which ran TED-style talks every 20 mins, on every aspect of our portfolio as well as threat intelligence and customer care-abouts.
And finally, we had a brand-new game which we based on the CISO Benchmarks Study.
‘Threat Eater’ is based on the Pac-Man arcade game, and visitors to the booth had to help a CISO named Steve, who was being kept up at night by the thought of targeting phishing emails, data breaches, malicious crypto mining (and lots of other things!). Using a joystick, they would lead Steve through the maze, collecting points, whilst trying to avoid the ghosts (aka malware) and using Cisco Security solutions including Email Security, Umbrella, Talos and NGFW, as power ups to thwart the malware and earn more points.
The aim was to draw footfall to the booth and encourage people to learn about the different solutions we have available to thwart the various types of cyberthreats we’re seeing in today’s landscape.
Aside from the booth, we also participated in a ‘Leaders Lounge’ where our GSSO and Umbrella team led a round table discussion with CISOs on Cloud Security, and how to position an organisation to thwart emerging attack.
We held three ‘Tech Talks’ in the Tech Talk theatre which we sponsored as well.
We also had two, interactive 2-hour workshops focusing on the same subjects to give different participants a chance to experience it.
As well as promoting our stand and talks, we used social media (@CiscoUKI) to do live broadcasts, ranging from 90 second demos, to longer panel discussions and thought leadership topics. We had 2,800+ views in total across all broadcasts.
Before the event, we worked with the digital team and the DRT team to brief them on the event and the type of leads that would be coming through. We also created a thank you email and entered nurture leads into our UK omnichannel journey.
We used Eloqua Hand-raiser form for hot leads. For warm and nurture leads, we took a BYOD lead capture approach, and all the sales team downloaded the conference app in order to scan the leads and gain consent.
Between Cisco Security, Cloud Security, Meraki and DUO, we had +2,000 unique attendees and 100+ leads and created $3m+ opportunity pipeline for sales.
Dulce Rabassa | Spain Partner Marketing & Communication Manager
Cisco is helping to progress Spain’s Digital Transformation under its Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) program. Called #Digitaliza in Spanish, CDA aligned with the country’s digitization goals. It collaborates with the public sector, the industry, including ICT, energy, finance, industrial companies, service providers, small medium businesses (SMBs), start-ups from any vertical, and partners plus academia. On June 12 we held #LeadingTheChange Partner engagement event in Madrid with more than 100 attendees between Partners and Cisco.
The objective was to explain the most important initiatives that we are developing to capture the big transformation we see in the market and how to achieve it together.
The Cisco Spain CEO Andrés Vilamitjana welcomed the attendees, in a half-day format were made nine presentations with relevant contents: #Digitaliza: How Cisco invests in Spain, Software practice: How to enable the customers' transformation, CX (Customer eXperience), Customer Satisfaction, Financial impact of the Change, the Co-Innovation Center and DevNet Opportunity, etc.
Jose Luis Abajo an exceptional Olympic fencing medalist was introducing the presentations and explaining his own personal transformation, and improvement to achieve objectives, ending the event with a fencing practice DEMO involving all attendees. After lunch the Partners could hold informal meetings with the speakers. The result was amazing with a 100% satisfaction percentage degree regarding content, engagement, venue and format.
Yuliya Bogoslavets | Partner Marketing Manager UCIS Tetyana Oleynik | Engagement Manager UCIS
Cisco Forum Cyber19 was held 21st of May at stadium NSK Olimpiyskiy in Kyiv. We believe we made the biggest security focused event hosted in Ukraine so far with 780+ live attendees and 250 online participants from key customers, partners and distributors. 90% of registrations came from Facebook and email campaign.
There were guests not only from Ukraine, but also from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and virtual participants from other CIS countries.
Cisco Forum page with all materials Cisco Forum Video Report Cisco Forum Photos
Julia Lukaschuk | Partner Marketing Manager, Russia
Cisco Partner Summit’19, June 21st held in Moscow and gathered 200 TOP level Partners’ management to bring them an idea of our vision for FY20, how Cisco transform the business and where we see our Partners next year.
The event took place in atmosphere of yacht club started with round table for top management from partners and distributors to discuss open questions in close environment. Then common business part included speeches from Channel – “Digital Transformation and Partner Development Strategy”, Sales – “Together to the Success” and Marketing – “Marketing of the Future”.
Channel team shared the Canalys report: partners expectations for 2019, readiness for digital transformation; followed with Perform and Transform strategy and Customer Experience lifecycle.
Sales team shared several unique customer cases: Bank of Russia (SD-WAN, SD-Access), Russian Railways (competitor replacement for Cisco core and LAN), Salym Petroleum (step for ACI projects, Stealthwatch, SD-WAN).
Marketing presentation was about trends in marketing and artificial intelligence, how it helps to predict customers behaviors.
Afterwards 40 best UCS Partners were awarded in celebration of 10 Years UCS at Russian Market.
Then business part followed by the motivation performance of the spaceman, Russian Hero, Alexander Misurkin.
His speech was highly evaluated by all partners attended as incentive to make the next step to the goal and as evidence of Cisco words. Nice bonus: everyone had a great possibility to ask any question of spaceman and take a picture with him.
After business part partners had time for informal communication with Cisco, to celebrate joint success and open-air activities.
Link to the event
