News

Cisco Reorganizes Partner Program in Wake of Employee Cuts

• By Gladys Rama
• July 21, 2011

After disclosing its plans to shed 6,500 employees earlier this week, Cisco on Thursday announced more structural changes, this time to its Worldwide Partner Organization.

The number of Cisco partner regions will go from seven to just three, wrote Kevin Goodwin, senior vice president of Worldwide Channels at Cisco, in a blog post. The new Americas region will be led by Jim Sherriff; the Europe, Middle East and Africa region by Milo Schacher; and the Asia-Pacific, Japan and Greater China region by Stanimira Koleva.

The new partner regions coincide with changes Cisco announced in May as part of a larger reorganization project that will take place through September. At that time, Cisco said its worldwide field operations would be reorganized into the same three regions -- Americas, EMEA and APJC -- in order to "drive faster decision making with greater accountability and alignment."

Goodwin also announced that its Partner Led program, in which Cisco collaborates with partner resellers to manage customer sales, will now fall under the purview of its Worldwide Partner Organization. Cisco has named Andrew Sage, previously the head of Cisco Small Business Sales, to the vice president position of Partner Led.

A third change to Cisco's partner program is the recategorization of its Partner Marketing group under the Cisco Global Marketing umbrella. "[W]e are evolving partner marketing to better scale and support our Partner-Led model while growing our marketing investments in you, our partners," Goodwin wrote.

Heading the Partner Marketing group will be Amanda Jobbins, who will report to Cisco Chief Marketing Officer Blair Christie.

"Amanda will also be an active member of my senior leadership team. I strongly believe this structure will allow us to simplify how you work with us, and most importantly, will ensure additional marketing investments in you, our Partners," he concluded.

Simplicity appears to be the overarching goal of Cisco's recent reorganization efforts; CEO John Chambers prefaced the May reorg announcement with this prepared statement: "Today, the market is driving toward simplification and it's why the network matters. Our role as the leading network platform provider is strong, we have great customers, talent and expertise -- and we know how to bring innovation to every aspect of the network. It's time to simplify the way we execute our strategy, and today's announcement is a key step forward."

On Monday, the company categorized its planned layoffs as part of an effort to "simplify the organization, refine operations, and reduce annual operations expenses."