This year Cisco’s partner summit took place in Miami. Never having been there I was quite surprised at the heat and humidity after the UK wet and cold Autumn. Bright skies and pastel-coloured buildings line this southern coastal city in the US. A very latino feel – with music and rhythm, allowing me to dust of my Spanish to good effect.
Here are the top three things I learnt from the summit.
Cisco is committed to sustainability and has a new tool that can help customers reduce their energy use.
I had heard all sorts of rumours about what might be announced, and I was particularly keen to hear news of Cisco's sustainability tool that we've heard so much about.
So here it is. The new “Sustainability Tool” allows customers to estimate their energy use so they can gauge what is with their current hardware and see how they can reduce it using new, more energy efficient models. The tool has already been used to help a UK bank justify replacing their 6500 platform with Cat9K on the energy saving alone over a 5-year period. This "estimator tool" launched to Environmental Sustainability Specialist partner, of which Cistor were the first in the UK, partners on the 20th of November.
I think this is a great step forward but it’s worth remembering that energy usage is just one part of the sustainability journey. By combining Cisco’s sustainability focus with our circular economy knowledge, our customers can go on a sustainable technology transformation that really moves the dial on their Net Zero goals.
Sustainability is one of Cisco's top five customer priorities.
Cisco announced sustainability was now one of their top five customer priorities, and how they were going to make a difference. They talked about case studies where they had worked with customers to help them to reduced energy use.
This chimes with what we are hearing from our customers, who are now factoring sustainability into their IT procurement. In fact, recent research from Gartner indicates that by 2030 up to 80% of vendors hardware portfolios will be linked to circular initiatives.
For most of our customers this means stopping and thinking through how sustainability gets integrated into their core strategy, and how do they engage their whole organisation to achieve their goals.
The building blocks for sustainability success
It’s clear to be that Cisco are putting some great groundwork in when it comes to sustainability. For them to be successful here, I think they’ll need their partners to help them build credibility through broader sustainability outcomes.
Cistor and the Circularity First Group are well placed to help Cisco with this as we’ve worked with our customers to build credibility in this space. Through our focus on sustainability advisory services, carbon impact reporting, remanufactured hardware, we already working with Cisco users to deliver sustainable outcomes.
In summary, I came away from the partner summit thinking that this is just the start in Cisco’s sustainability journey and that there is a great opportunity for us to work with them to make a real impact with our customers. At a strategic level, this means continuing to advise customers on their overall sustainable approach to IT, but also gluing together Cisco’s products and services like Green Pay and the estimator tool, with our design capabilities, carbon reporting, maintenance, asset recovery and of course Cisco Refresh. Exciting times indeed!
