Cisco Formalizes Education Program, Bringing New Revenue Opportunities to Channel Partners

April 5, 2005

These days, networking customers face an increasing array of technologies and options, from basic local area networks, to Internet protocol-based telephone systems, to wireless, security and storage. Fortunately, Cisco Systems has a rich ecosystem of education partners who can help businesses and organizations make the most of their Cisco equipment. To help connect Cisco customers with the over 250 Cisco-authorized learning partners, the company has created the Cisco Learning Credits Program. The program provides an easy way for customers to pay for and enroll in the training programs best suited to their technical networking interests. The program has been in pilot testing for two years in the United States and last year Cisco rolled it out internationally. Cisco is now taking the highly promising program mainstream by making it an official part of its services offerings. News@Cisco spoke with Lyle Speirs, director of Cisco's Global Learning Alliances group for worldwide channels, about the Learning Credits Program and how Cisco is making networking training and education more accessible to both customers and our channel partners.

How does the Cisco Learning Credits Program work?

Lyle Speirs: The Cisco Learning Credits are credits a Cisco customer can buy at the time of purchase of our networking equipment. The customer can exchange the Learning Credits within a year of sale to attend any Cisco authorized training and networking education programs offered by our learning partners. Just like Cisco equipment, software, or our other services, Cisco and its group of 20,000 sales channel partners can now sell learning credits to customers looking to make the most of their network equipment purchases. This makes it easy for our channel partners to promote and sell our training programs. It also gives us a more formalized way to let our customers know about the various training and educational options we offer. We have also created an online management tool that customers can use to track their credits and their employee class enrollment.

Why did Cisco create the Learning Credits Program?

Lyle Speirs: Historically, Cisco has never had a formalized program for selling education services to our customers. We've always maintained a rich ecosystem of training and educational partners, but Cisco has not actively encouraged customer enrollment in programs or directed customers to the programs in any organized way. In the past we left it up to the customer to find training, or, in many cases, the customer expected training for free. By giving our channel partners a way to sell training, we address questions about education upfront and create a new revenue opportunity for our channel partners.

How will the Cisco Learning Credits Program help Cisco's channel partners?

Lyle Speirs: The Learning Credits Program helps Cisco channel partners in a number of ways. First, it gives them one more item to sell, creating a new source of revenue. Next, it can help improve customer satisfaction by providing channel partners a more structured way of directing Cisco customers to the appropriate training programs. It can also help channel partners develop closer relationships with their customers by assuming the role of a training advisor. Finally, it makes our channel partners more competitive by giving them another way they can enrich their offerings to customers.

Perhaps most importantly, the Learning Credits Program will help our channel partners address a new trend in how businesses make networking equipment purchases. In the past, customers would only enroll in Cisco training programs after purchasing equipment. But now we are finding that 25 percent of customers attend Cisco classes before buying equipment. They do this as a way to educate themselves about their options as networking products become much more diverse and complex. So as part of the Learning Credits Program, Cisco and its channel partners can offer customers learning credits to help them make their purchasing decisions.

How will the Learning Credits Program help Cisco's learning partners?

Lyle Speirs: We believe the Learning Credits Program will make it far easier for our channel partners to promote and sell the education services offered by our learning partners. Our learning partners took a big hit with the end of the dotcom era and the resulting economic contraction. Before, there were not enough qualified technicians for networking deployments. After the dotcom bubble burst, the demand for network engineers dropped dramatically, and, as a result, demand for training dropped precipitously. Over the past 24 months we have completely rebuilt our learning partner channel by creating a two-tiered program, one for direct partners and another for indirect partners. Cisco now has 30 direct learning partners and more than 220 indirect learning channel partners. This new structure has made it easier for us to work with and support these partners. And now with the Learning Channel Program, channel partners have a formal way and excellent incentive for steering students to our learning channel partners.

The Learning Credits Program helps educate customers. How is Cisco also improving access to training and education for its channel partners?

Lyle Speirs: Over the past couple of years we have been working on several programs to make it easier and less expensive for our channel partners to get the training they need to have the best engineers in the business. One of those ways has been with our online lab capabilities. In the past channel partners had to invest a significant amount of money to create their own networking labs, where they tested and learned the ins and outs of setting up various Cisco technologies. Now we are providing more and more remote lab offerings, which partners can access through Web sites. Currently we have 246 remote labs with 350,000 users. We are working with Cisco's award-winning Partner e-Learning Connection to create a common access point for all of these lab resources, which are offered by various Cisco groups around the world as well as some of our channel partners. This will help bring lab resources to more of our channel partners; especially smaller ones who cannot afford to create their own labs. At the same time, we're also working on creating more remote labs to effectively cover the wide array of networking technologies we now offer.