Throughout history, we've used labels to describe the attitude and characteristics of certain time periods in our past such as The Dark Ages, The Age of Discovery, and The Space Age to name a few.

During the last 30 years of the Information Age, Cisco has been committed to changing the way the world works, lives, plays, and learns. With you, we've been able to help our customers innovate, manage market transitions, and turn technology into business advantage. Software is the key to that transformation and Cisco is there. We're continuing to help customers around the world digitize their business through software.

The Software Opportunity

The software opportunity is ours for the taking and together, we're ideally positioned to execute. Our Cisco Partner Ecosystem is evolving to allow you to develop the practices that will enhance the roles you play with your customers, and so you can profit and grow. Let's look at the roles you play and how we can help.

As aReseller, whether you are Gold or Premier you're likely already reselling Cisco ONE, security, or collaboration-you have access to our entire software portfolio today. New licensing agreements and buying terms are available to provide you with the more flexible consumption models in order to meet all the needs of your customers

As aProvider, you're deploying technology in the way that works best for your customers. That's why we made our software available in the cloud, on-prem, or as partner hosted/managed service -so you can choose what fits your company and customers best.

To really drive top line and profitability, as aLifecycle Advisoryou can drive to the worldwide adoption, expansion, and renewal of every offer. If you're reselling software, developing a lifecycle practice is a natural extension of what you're already doing. Increase the stickiness of your customer relationships by continuously showing them the value of the outcome you originally sold them.  You can easily make more money by expanding into that role.

If you want to further expand, enhance or even leverage existing capabilities to deliver custom software solutions, become anIntegratorand develop the capabilities yourself. When you integrate a custom software solution, you'll earn incentives as well as high-margin professional services that often far exceed the value of software deal. Or, you could acquire a company that's already doing it really well, or partner with someone else in the ecosystem. It all depends on what you want to do with your business.

You have thousands of customers in your base-every one of you is sitting on a gold mine. The easiest way to grow your business is to grow and enhance your relationship with your existing customers. What better way to grow than to start helping your customers with adopting the solutions you sold them, helping them expand into new parts of their business, and preserve your own annuity revenue by being proactive in capturing those renewal opportunities as they come up.

Now is the perfect time to begin planning your own digital transformation and to identify the products, services, and solutions that will help your customers achieve theirs. In the next few weeks Jason Gallo will share how to take the next step while Grace Lo will show how we'll help you accelerate growth and profitability.

So, how do you determine what role you'd like to play in the software space? Take a few moments to build your knowledge base on the existing and new roles now available within the Cisco Partner Ecosystem.