Message from the GM – Happy Holidays!

What a year it has been for Cisco Partners and the difference they make to Cisco’s bottom line. At Partner Summit, Jeff Sharrits, EVP and Chief Customer and Partner Officer at Cisco, confirmed that 95% of Cisco sales are made by Partners.

At Netformx we were pleased that we could be a part of helping you achieve your business outcomes and Cisco’s as well.

Netformx has enjoyed supporting customers in 2023 with:

• Validated rich graphical proposals after accurately baselining the network for upgrades that will meet the needs of the customer’s business.
• Early insight to help you capture more Cisco rebates and rewards.
• The ability to model a deal to present a more competitive quote.
• Visibility to the deadlines and sometimes elusive actions needed to capture your Cisco program dollars.
• The reports you need on your Cisco Business to deliver to your finance team.
• Simpler renewals by being able to map a customer’s contracts and subscriptions into a consolidated view no matter how the agreement was named.
• An extra set of hands to upload BOM’s, recommend opening cases for missed rebate and reward opportunities, or offering advice on selling motions to capture more program dollars.

We were happy to help and appreciate the trust you placed in us and our tools. 2024 is going to be an exciting year as we are finding ways to evolve our tools to provide even more value to Cisco Partners, IT Solution Providers, and Managed Service Providers.

Tis’ the Season to Increase Cisco VIP42 Rebates

A blog by Mike Johnson, Customer Success Manager

During this holiday season with the New Year fast approaching, it’s time to keep an eye on whether your company has hit their Cisco VIP booking targets for every subtrack that you are enrolled in. Check out this blog “Tis’ the Season to Increase Cisco VIP42 Rebates” for the next steps to confirm your VIP42 Status, optimize your VIP rebates or get some assistance before the VIP42 season ends.

How a Discovery Upgrade to the Cloud can Help You!!

Coming Soon!

We have been sharing news about how AssetXpert will be evolving to include Discovery for a much more robust solution to monitor your customers network on an ongoing basis, identify vulnerabilities, determine upgrades as needed and not only at renewal time. IT Solution Providers and Managed Solution Providers will benefit from Discovery which will soon be a cloud solution that can assess networks on a regular basis, do topology mapping, have a dashboard view, and even provide end customer portals.

For those that are happy with their current AssetXpert features, please know that the Classic version will still be available to you as AssetXpert-Classic. We look forward to being able to demo and provide access in early 2024. Contact sales or your account manager if you want to hear more.

DesignXpert Users – CCO User ID changes may be needed

Cisco recently changed their login process around CCO ID credentials with updated Username requirements.

This may cause some challenges for DesignXpert users when they are trying to login. If you experience an issue, please view the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) article with 5 simple steps.

For future questions or challenges, we recommend visiting these pages for quick product answers, otherwise feel free to reach out to support@netformx.com.

• Hot Product Notices: Up-to-date information on changes, interruptions, and workarounds
• FAQs: Answers to your top product related questions filtered by product
• Product Updates: All the latest news and updates by product

Thank You to Partners who Shared the Netformx Value

Recently we interviewed a handful of Cisco Partners regarding the different Netformx products they use.

While most stated a variety of values they get from the tools they use, we asked for them to prioritize the key value. Here is what we heard on some the differentiators that they can’t get with Cisco tools:

• DesignXpert/Discovery
  • Multivendor design aspects and the rich discovery data supports their consulting with qualitative data
  • Easy to use UI for uploading BOMs and reporting is key
  • Designing proposals/orders for sharing with downstream teams
  • The custom reports that simplify sharing information with the appropriate people
• Pipeline Insight Tool (PIT) / VIP Calculator
  • Leverage VIP Rebates to determine the best margin
  • Modeling for competitive deal situations based on various Cisco programs and partner status
  • Calculating VIP for Annuity and Solutions Track, sharing the numbers with Finance
• ChannelXpert
  • The consolidation of rebates and all their programs into one view
  • Richer reporting that they can’t get elsewhere to provide Finance and others the information they need
  • The major time savings for tracking potential VIP rebates
  • Visibility to VIP Payment Trends – now and in the future

Thank you to all the Partners that took a few minutes of their time to share their stories.

The Winner of our Discovery Usage Survey is . . .

Thank you to everyone that participated in our brief survey about your Discovery usage. We chose one random person as the winner of a $100 e-Gift card. The winner is Umesh Tanna! Congratulations Umesh!

A few highlights for the information that was shared:

• 94% use it to baseline a network for new or renewal customers
• 54% of users use Discovery for Pre-Sales and the rest use it for Post-Sales.
• 56% use Discovery to maintain end customer network assets throughout the year
• 70% of the users have a Managed Services Provider (MSP) organization in their company.

A New Framework for Cybersecurity

An Article by Jacob Ukelson, CTO of Netformx and Orchestra Group

Gartner’s Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) model has been getting a lot of attention. It suggests an effective framework for the space that is served with Orchestra Group’s Harmony Purple all-in-one platform that will integrate with the expanded version of Netformx AssetXpert that is coming soon. This Integrated solution is designed to primarily meet the cybersecurity needs of small and medium sized enterprises.

For a better understanding on the need for “A New Framework for Cybersecurity” like CTEM we recommend reading the article by Orchestra Group’s CTO, Jacob Ukelson, that was just published in the December 2023 issue of Pipeline Publishing.

What a busy time of year!

As time is short and the work is plentiful, we want you to know that we are here to help. We are around much of the holiday season to support you with uploading BOMs, finding more margin in those important deals, optimizing VIP, CSPP, or LCI program dollar capture, or getting the reports you need into the hands of finance.

We hope you find value in this message and thank you for taking the time to read it. If you missed my last message with extra tips, you will find them in the posted blog.

More importantly we wish you, your colleagues and loved ones a safe and healthy holiday season, and prosperity in the New Year.

Feel free to reach out to us at any time for other assistance at sales@netformx.com.