Cisco's new Hybrid Cloud Sales Play is a go-to-market cloud strategy for partners. Here are eight things partners need to know.

Here are the 10 vendors that garnered the highest scores for partnership in this year's Annual Report Card survey.

Channel companies are providing matching donation programs, fundraising drives and free IT products and support as Southeast Texas communities and companies recover from a horrific week of weather.

"Everyone's situation has changed since Friday – some have experienced flooding or lost power, while others who may have been fine on Monday now have two feet of water in their houses," said one solution provider CEO of his Houston-area employees.

Cisco's big spending on a software company focused on hyper-converged infrastructure sends a positive signal to partners who are looking for alternative offerings to SimpliVity, now part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Cisco announced plans to acquire Springpath, its partner in hyper-converged technology, for $320 million to differentiate its next-generation data center portfolio for partners and end customers.

Buying $300M SPS will provide ConvergeOne more technical expertise, professional services and managed services around Cisco and Avaya, and more depth around its video offerings.

"We needed words that were going to bring the country together around what happened this weekend. I don't think we got those words," said Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, in an interview with CNBC.

CRN's Mark Haranas speaks with Cisco Vice President of Product Management Ramesh Prabagaran at about what solution providers can expect now that Cisco's acquisition of Viptela has closed.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said the company's Intuitive Network platform is the beginning of a coming wave of innovation as the networking giant's switching and routing sales decline 9 percent during the quarter.

"We aren't Cisco or HPE, nor do we want to be. We want to move with a lot of speed for our partners," said Extreme's channel leader Gordon Mackintosh at XChange 2017.

Cisco's updated UCS server line includes blade and rack servers, an enhanced UCS Director, a new Intel processor and a Workload Optimization Manager.

ConvergeOne's purchase of 800-person Strategic Products and Services would bring together two solution providers focused heavily on Avaya and Cisco and roughly double ConvergeOne's headcount.

Patrick Piwowarczyk is now head of channel development in the Americas for unified communications specialist Polycom.

Emilio Ghilardi steps down as president of Lenovo's North America Business, AppDynamics launches a new Titan Partner Program, and Kaspersky Lab names Jason Stein as its new head of North American channels.

For the week ending Aug. 4, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their 'A' game to the channel.

"Not only do Cisco partners get all the goodness from reselling infrastructure and the services – now they can also provide additional value at the application level," said AppDynamics channel leader Ghazal Asif.

Services implementation training, back end rebates and field channel manager support are just a few gems inside AppDynamics new Titan Partner Program.

"The intuitive network is an intelligent, highly secure platform — powered by intent and informed by context and Viptela's solution is perfectly aligned with that vision," said Cisco Senior Vice President Scott Harrell.

The new program formalizes the startup's channel relationships and gives partners a new way to tap into the work that NetApp and Cisco are doing in the hybrid cloud data protection and management business, the company says.