We consumers put extremely high demands on companies to provide just the right experiences, hour after hour and day after day. Which means that those companies\u2014Cisco\u2019s customers and partners\u2014face increasing pressure to provide complex, delightful, differentiated experiences, all while remaining flexible and increasing profits.<\/p>\n

They simply can\u2019t do it alone. The demands are too complex, the costs of doing business too high, the pace of change too fast. But we CAN do it together\u2014we\u2019re greater together! Partnerships are the way to do business because they\u2019re the best way to create the experiences\u2014outcomes\u2014that consumers want so badly.<\/p>\n

And we\u2019re already doing it. Last year, 82% of Cisco partners said they are growing their managed services, and 95% of Cisco\u2019s managed services were sold through partners.<\/p>\n

In EMEA, where Cisco Live happens next week, we have a $42B managed services opportunity and projected double-digit growth in the complex areas of security, observability, and Datacenter. In one example, a European auto and truck manufacturer established an agile, centralized IT environment, with managed hybrid cloud and security, which enabled staff to prioritize innovation, streamline secure network access, and meet sustainability goals. The result? A 60% reduction in energy consumption.<\/p>\n

DNA and dominoes: A simplified model<\/h2>\n

With partnerships firmly established, let\u2019s talk about what they mean on a granular, practical level. Exactly how does a partner make this shift to the new ecosystem? We need a model, a blueprint, a vocabulary to help them build their services, identify where they can specialize, and determine where they can be profitable. We need to connect the dots.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s go back for a moment to the movie theater. It\u2019s worth-leaving-the-house-for, multi-sensory outcome is the result of multiple technologies, multiple partners, whose services are stitched together in complex configurations. That stitched-together set of services is an \u201coutcome chain.\u201d It\u2019s an evolution of the traditional \u201cvalue chain\u201d which involved consecutive steps in providing services, and it\u2019s a more detailed, more accurate rendering of a service stack.<\/p>\n

The outcome chain gives us a way to talk about who does what\u2014identifying roles and specializations\u2014and allows for the flexibility and composability required to create outcomes.<\/p>\n

But it can be hard to conceptualize. These analogies may help.<\/p>\n

We can think of the outcome chain as a bit like DNA: structured yet flexible, multi-faceted and built for change. A close look reveals the beautiful double helix complexity: parallel, twisting strands like rails of a spiral staircase, held together by pairs of nucleotides that look like stair steps. The flexible structure is what allows DNA to do the work of life as it does, unwinding, opening, replicating, transcribing, closing again, over and over and over. Form is function.<\/p>\n

The game of Dominoes offers another good analogy. This classic game has a few basic rules, so patterns and connections exist between the dominoes\u2014the structure as it spreads across the table is not random. Yet instead of just one straight line of tiles, each game generates a range of different lines feeding into each other, with a range of points of entry depending on specific rules and relationships.<\/p>\n

Neither DNA nor Dominoes are 100% handcrafted, bespoke patterns\u2014those just aren\u2019t scalable. Similarly, the outcome chain is a model that sits right in the sweet spot: flexible enough to accommodate the shifting nature of partner relationships in outcome creation, yet structured enough for clarity, efficiency, scalability and repeatability.<\/p>\n