Cisco Promises SaaS Push, Debuts Spark Service

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Cisco Senior Vice President Nick Earle promised a ’very different’ company than the one the channel knows, one that increasingly focuses on software.

’Everything that we make is going to become available as a SaaS offering,’ Earle told the crowd at The Channel Company’s NexGen Cloud conference in San Diego.

Earle cited the success of Cisco’s 19-year-old business WebEx, which has grown 23 percent. Last week, Cisco unveiled its new Cisco Spark Service, which allows for phones and video endpoints to connect to Cisco Collaboration Cloud. Earle said partners can ’make a lot of money in this space.’

’Everything that we do is moving to the cloud,’ he said.

The new Cisco will also focus on deferred revenue, collaboration, software subscriptions and security.

’Managed threat defense, end-to-end, not firewall,’ Earle specified.

’With 80 percent of the world’s Internet going through our boxes, we can make the Internet programmable, and that’s what we’re going to do,’ he added.

PUBLISHED DEC. 15, 2015