The Cisco Live Milan week kicked off with the Cisco Developer Network day on Monday. We had a great preso from Steve Benvenuto of Cisco in the opening session. He zoomed in on two things: The first is how Cisco is working hard to turn around from relationships focussed on IT to relationships focussed on line of business (LOB). The second is how the sales organization now recognizes the deals leverage they get from partners.

Analysis internally has proven that the value of deals to Cisco increases by between 2 and 7 times when the right combination of partners is brought into the mix. Sales are under pressure to deliver. The temptation is to book orders early - for example by trying to close the Cisco side of a deal ahead of the partners. Steve explained that this can lead to the worst case - a complete loss of the sale.

In one of the breakout group sessions afterward, SPARKL presented the transaction router technology in a talk entitled “New Internet, New Router” . It plays well to the point Steve made about relating sales to customer line of business.

The SPARKL Transaction Router is all about basic business transaction types such as a bank trade, a product delivery or a customer call being made. This means it’s easy to talk to a customer about what the transaction router does and why they need it. All business people know what their transaction types are even if they’re completely in the dark about the technology. So even if the discussion gets to technical features of the transaction router (such as just-in-time provisioning and SDN topology management), it’s always in the context of some real objective the business customer understands.