Cisco has given its channel a free software tool that may analyze cloud usage with organizations to find cloud solutions for businesses. Through this, Cisco hopes to inspire more cloud adoption and recurring revenues for partners. Chris Treille, director of cloud and managed services partner enablement at Cisco, has stated in an interview with CRN, “This is not Cisco selling its professional services; this is Cisco providing the intellectual property and the assets for partners to create their own professional services. This tool helps partners in the conversation with the customer by showing them how much they’re going to gain on their top or bottom line, and how much more competitive and productive they can be with cloud.”

The Cisco Business Cloud Advisor analyzes a company’s cloud adoption level, peer comparison by geography, industry and company size, and cost and time-to-market improvement estimates based on cloud adoption. Partners may then offer their own cloud services or Cisco’s cloud professional service options, such as Cloud-Consumption-as-a-Service, Cloud Threat Defense Service, UCS Director FastStart and solutions around Intercloud. Trielle added, “We know that our partners actually make very good money in the professional services that support cloud and hybrid IT, so this will help augment that for the channel.”

Bob Hollander, vice president of sales and marketing for Netelligent, which was one of the first partners of Cisco to pilot the tool, has claimed his company has begun to see results.  It’s helping my team go out in the market and organize the customers’ thoughts, score where they are in cloud and set a direction,” said Hollander. “We’ve already seen quantifiable opportunity come out. Now we’ve got a path forward with this customer versus, honestly, just three weeks ago, we didn’t.”

Partners of Cisco may give customers a short survey to receive a free, personalized report pertaining to the company’s cloud adoption and business benefits.  Then, in a deeper level of analysis, the new cloud advisor tool may measure the impact of potential cloud adoption across a wide range of performance factors. This cloud advisor tool was released along with a global study from market researcher IDC on cloud adoption. The study found that 53 percent of companies expect cloud to drive increased revenue over the next two years, although only 1 percent of organizations have an optimized cloud strategy. About 32 percent of the 3,400 companies interviewed across 17 counties say that they have no cloud strategy at all.

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