The Business Case For ELearning [Electronic resources]

Certifying Partners or Resellers at Cisco

Partners who resell and deploy Cisco hardware and solutions follow a stringent set of guidelines from Cisco to maintain their value proposition. The Cisco Partner Program affords organizations strength in the marketplace through technology learning, specialization, best practices, and credibility. The Cisco Partner Program provides a level playing field so that value-add partners are not at a disadvantage to pure hardware resellers. The company also consistently evaluates its partner requirements to ensure that they support sustainable business models. Partner status in the Cisco environment is based on meeting certain criteria.

Based on an evaluation of their strengths, Cisco assigns the partner organization Gold, Silver, or Premier status. The distinction between each of the tiers is based on the level of support and human resources dedicated to supporting Cisco solutions. So a reseller who makes a larger commitment in terms of people and resources to supporting and selling Cisco gear would be entitled to a higher tier and, as a result, preferred discount rates. Table 10-1 details the differences in each level of partner certification.

Career certified individuals

Cisco offers career certifications at the Associate, Professional, and Expert levels to validate skills among networking professionals and to help companies identify networking talent for recruitment. Having Cisco-certified individuals on staff adds value to a partner organization when customers consider organizational competence to deploy networking solutions.

Support requirements

Support requirements measure an organization's ability to respond to customer support needs. Partners demonstrate strength of factors such as call center support, availability of technical assistance, response time to customer call, and management oversight under this criterion.

Customer satisfaction

Partners are expected to meet or exceed regional targets for average customer satisfaction scores on a rating scale of 1 to 5.

Specialization points

The Cisco Partner Specialization Program allows Cisco partners to develop and demonstrate their expertise in technologies, solutions, and services through structured training road maps and a knowledge-validation process. With increased emphasis in the networking marketplace on specific technology areas such as content networking, security, wireless, and IP telephony, Cisco often encourages partners to pursue specific skills in those areas beyond the general skills. The expertise enables an organization to differentiate itself from competitors, pursue new markets, and migrate to higher-margin, services-based and solutions-based business models. Partners receive points for completing a specialization toward their status.

Extra credit (by exceeding the previous metrics)

The extra credit points needed to achieve Silver or Gold certification can be earned by having additional specializations, extra career-certified individuals above and beyond those required in the base requirements, or by exceeding the customer satisfaction target for the region. This component of the program allows an organization to gain either more specialization or technical expertise, or to be rewarded for providing higher levels of customer satisfaction. Table 10-2 shows the point system.