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When I started at TD-K 10 years ago, the Cisco business was pretty much non-existent, and I was the very first networking employee. Back then it was unthinkable that we could reach “Gold” status within a few years, considering the very complex requirements that partners had to fulfill.
Nevertheless, it was a natural step for me to invest in Cisco training and eventually become CCIE certified. At the same time, my team has grown to 9 employees, each of them certified in Cisco.
When the program changed to the new Cisco 360 Partner Program, it suddenly became possible to reach the “Gold” status that I had been aiming for for 10 years. The name is different though: Cisco Preferred Networking Partner.
So what is the Cisco Preferred Networking Partner?
The designation is given to Partners who have achieved advanced technical expertise, invested deeply in customer engagement, and built foundational practices.
Recognized for deep sales and technical skills, lifecycle practices, and the ability to deliver specialized solutions tailored to customer needs. Cisco Preferred Partners can further differentiate their expertise and technical capabilities with specializations aligned to Cisco’s flagship offers and solutions. Said in simpler terms: it is the new “Gold” status.
How did we get there?
The program measures four categories: Foundational, Capabilities, Performance, and Engagement.
Capabilities
Since the program started, we reached the maximum points in Capabilities due to my CCIE certification. I had already spent more than 1000 hours on this, mainly outside office hours. Both our Black Belt certification and Career Certification maturity were above the index from the start. Easy, right?
However, kudos to Cisco for designing the new program to consider individual capabilities. Unfortunately, this was not enough for us to become a Preferred Partner, which was the ultimate goal.
Performance
This is a tough one, especially considering our size. However, all the services I have built were designed with MSP in mind, so our renewal rates are very high and our bookings are increasing. Because of that, we reached 6/10 in the performance score.
Engagement
This category requires a lot of work, both in the completion of deals and adoption of solutions.
While we haven’t done anything specifically to increase the score, we have always created deals for almost all our orders, which eventually improved the score.
Foundational
I left this for last, because most of the work in the past six months has been done in this category. The score is heavily impacted by Customer Success Practice Maturity and Managed Services Practice Maturity. We had already invested in becoming a Select Provider due to its advantages, such as automatic deal approval and fixed discounts, but that was not enough.
We then invested in upgrading to a Premier Provider, both to improve our PVI score and to gain even better discounts and benefits.The process for becoming a Premier Provider is quite complex. It requires an extensive audit that ensures you are delivering Cisco services with the same quality standards used worldwide.
To make this happen, we decided to go for two Cisco Powered Services:
Meraki Access
Meraki Security & SD-WAN
I had already built these services a few years ago, as our company mainly operates as an MSP, but they needed to be formally certified. The audit process was quite complex, but the end result was great. We received a lot of positive feedback from the auditor. You can read some of the comments below.
But was this enough? Not yet. Our score in the Foundational category still needed a boost. So I decided we should pursue the Cisco Customer Success Practice Maturity.
Another audit? Really?...
After submitting a large set of documents and screenshots across all the tools and systems we use to manage customers and solutions, everything was reviewed—and we passed.
This was the final push toward reaching the golden 7.5 points. And funnily enough, I didn’t even notice we had achieved the score until an email arrived with Cisco U All Access Passes for 10 of our employees, which is one of the benefits of the designation.
Conclusion
After literally thousands of hours of work, I’m incredibly grateful that the Cisco business we started from scratch 10 years ago has flourished. Today, we are one of only 8 partners in Denmark, out of 161 Cisco partners, to receive the Cisco Preferred Networking Partner designation.
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