Cisco Expands Certification Portfolio to Drive Business Transformation

Cisco is expanding its training and certification portfolio to further support business transformation towards cloud computing, IoT, analytics, agile data centers, cybersecurity, mobility, and similar areas of focus.

The current business value certifications are intended to enhance learners’ ability to work across customer lines of business, thereby enabling IT organizations to better understand motivations and desired business outcomes, help them to architect the correct approach, and effectively communicate value.

Cisco announced that it has a pipeline of role-oriented program extensions planned throughout the next year around innovation, digital marketing and technical project management that will help create the talent required to drive business transformation.

“Business transformation is enabled by technology and driven by talent,” said Tejas Vashi, senior director of product strategy & marketing at Cisco Services. “Technology alone is not enough—skills are the bridge to digital transformation.”

A forthcoming certification for a newly defined category of Customer Success Manager (CuSM) is a key focal point of the strategy. The emphasis of this role is on strengthening customer relationships through a core set of skills to help ensure that customers achieve the desired business outcomes, to increase and expand adoption and ensure that customers realize enough value to renew contracts. This training includes a full instructor-led or virtual instructor-led program in preparation for a certification exam at the specialist level.

Channel Impact^®
The customer success manager role is a very interesting development designed to plug a gap that is experienced by many vendors and channel partners – and also, by extension, the customers, themselves.