Partner Consulting Academy

Snyder said a major initiative is underway inside Cisco to nudge their partner account managers and sales engineers create a new conversation with the channel. Cisco's Partner Consulting Academy is an extensive training curriculum to help drive more profits for partners.

"I'm asking them to change it up from being much more than just partner relationship managers, to asking them to be business managers, general managers, when dealing with partners," he said. "We're giving them a whole set of analytics and tools using big data and analytics capabilities, and business insight dashboards by leveraging SAP and Tableau [software] … that helps our partner account managers sit down with a partner to help them understand the opportunities they have in their business. [That helps a partner] really understand where they can change it up to do something differently to drive profitability and go really where the money is."