Techaisle Blog

Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer, Liz Centoni's vision for Cisco's Customer Experience (CX) organization is bold, future-ready, transformative, and complete. This vision is fundamentally reshaping how customers interact with and derive value from their technology investments. Cisco's CX strategy centers on leveraging Generative AI and Agentic AI to move beyond reactive support towards proactive, predictive, and personalized assistance throughout the entire customer lifecycle—from initial planning and deployment to ongoing operation and renewals.

Cisco is achieving this by digitizing decades of historical knowledge, establishing standardized workflows, and developing AI-powered tools, such as intelligent agents, delivered through unified platforms. These innovations provide actionable insights, tailored recommendations, and automated actions. The overarching goal is to revolutionize customer experience by simplifying operations, enhancing customer value, and accelerating time to value for both customers and partners, all while carefully maintaining the critical elements of human expertise and trust. I firmly believe that this forward-thinking strategy positions Cisco CX to enhance resilience and simplify complexity in an increasingly intricate technological landscape.

As an industry analyst at Techaisle, my analysis of Cisco's CX strategy reveals several critical insights. Here, I will delve into the competitive differentiation these developments offer Cisco, their tangible benefits for customers, and the fresh opportunities they unlock for channel partners:

Dell Technologies World 2025 (DTW) recently provided a comprehensive look into Dell's strategy and vision, with a particular focus on the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for businesses of all sizes. Keynotes from Michael Dell and Jeff Clarke, alongside detailed briefings on Client Solutions Group (CSG) and Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), painted a picture of a company positioning itself as the end-to-end partner for the AI journey. While much attention often focuses on hyperscalers and large enterprises, Dell offers significant opportunities and tailored strategies for the midmarket as well as the vital channel partners who serve them.

Here are my seven key takeaways:

1. The Dell AI Factory is an End-to-End AI Framework, Not Just Hardware

Dell introduced and expanded upon the concept of the Dell AI Factory, describing it as an unmatched set of capabilities in the industry designed to help businesses get started with Generative AI and scale it. It is presented as an open, modular infrastructure with a rich ecosystem, delivering powerful GPUs, scalable storage, high-throughput networking, curated tooling, and integrated cutting-edge models, supported by deployment services. This framework covers the entire computing architecture for modern AI workloads, from PCs to data centers and the edge. Dell has helped over 3,000 businesses build their factories and launched over 200 new features since its inception a year ago. The vision is for customers to bring their own company data to the AI Factory, driving unique business outcomes.

Why this is important for Midmarket and Channel Partners: This framework provides a structured approach to AI adoption. For midmarket, it demystifies the complex landscape of AI infrastructure by offering a seemingly integrated and supported stack. They don't need to piece together disparate components or become AI experts overnight. For channel partners, the AI Factory is a complete solution portfolio to take to customers. Dell is making it easier to consume and deploy through reference architectures and packaged software. This enables partners to concentrate on delivering value and outcomes, rather than merely selling individual pieces of hardware. The concept of bringing "your own company data" to drive outcomes resonates strongly with businesses of all sizes, emphasizing that AI value is tied to their unique operations and data, which partners are often intimately familiar with.

In today's business landscape, characterized by economic volatility, geopolitical conflicts, and an unrelenting pace of technological change, CEOs feel immense pressure. They are tasked with the challenging duality of funding existing operations while simultaneously investing in innovation and driving growth. These were the themes laid out by Mohamad Ali, SVP and Head of IBM Consulting, during his keynote at their annual Think conference. Technology, particularly AI, is no longer just a tool; it has become the source of competitive advantage. Yet, navigating this new era is complex, and many organizations are struggling to move beyond AI experimentation to realize tangible business value. This is where consulting plays a crucial role, and IBM Consulting is positioning itself uniquely with an approach it calls the "Science of Consulting".

Defining the 'Science of Consulting

At its core, the "Science of Consulting" is about combining science and technology, including AI, with IBM's deep pool of human talent – its consultants, engineers, and designers – to deliver "outsized results" for clients. This represents an evolution of the traditional consulting model, acknowledging that in the age of AI, human expertise must be augmented and accelerated by technology.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN), launched in 2012, has been instrumental in AWS’s success since its inception in 2006. This vibrant ecosystem fosters collaboration and the development of innovative solutions for customers globally. Recognizing the significant role of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the global economy, AWS introduced the SMB Competency Program in January 2024 as a strategic initiative tailored to empower partners serving this crucial segment. This program, the first AWS go-to-market specialization explicitly for partners serving SMBs, was developed after extensive discussions with partners to understand their unique requirements deeply. Now, AWS is doubling down on its commitment by introducing a suite of enhanced benefits designed to accelerate the growth of these partners further and enable them to deliver even greater value to their SMB customers.

The AWS SMB Competency recognizes partners with a proven track record of helping SMBs thrive in the cloud by offering rigorously vetted solutions in areas such as migration, modernization, security, data storage, disaster recovery, AI/ML, and SaaS solutions. The inaugural cohort of 30 partners unanimously endorsed the program. This is crucial as 55% of customers view, as per Techaisle data, partner competencies as “absolutely essential” when assessing partner capabilities. The SMB market presents a substantial opportunity, with SMBs and midmarket firms projected to spend over $650 billion on cloud solutions in 2025 – Techaisle data. Notably, AWS is actively focusing on both the "middle" and previously "overlooked" SMB segments, recognizing the evolving channel dynamics and the pivotal role SMBs now play.

The new benefits amplify the existing advantages of the competency, reinforcing AWS's dedication to a thriving ecosystem focused on the unique needs of SMBs. These enhanced offerings include: