As networking hardware giant Cisco evolves toward being a global software leader, it has strengthened its services business to include customer experience (CX) Cloud and strategic advisory services. Cisco executives called the business its “secret sauce.”

“You can think about the customer experience organization as the flywheel that does everything around software adoption, all the way down to renewals,” broadly focusing on driving innovation and customer transformation with Cisco’s services, Thimaya Subaiya, SVP and GM of Global Customer Experience at Cisco, told SDxCentral.

What constitutes Cisco Services? “I think of it as everything post sale,” Subaiya said. It includes products and technology implementation, advisory, proactive support, customer success, management, certification, and learning services.

Subaiya became the service business head approximately six months ago. Under his leadership, the team has been working to build an entire partner ecosystem. 

“It starts with the implementation because we've seen that 80% of our customers who don't end up adopting a product and further renewing do so because implementation is not done right. That is why partnering is essential along the whole journey,” he noted.

Taking security as an example, the Cisco service team will look at customers’ entire network and give a holistic security analysis focusing on the outcomes. They will recommend the right products from Cisco, a partner, or even from its competitors, Subaiya claims. 

“This has been a secret sauce for us because a lot of times customers feel like we take such a neutral ground,” he said. “The next time we go to a customer, they don't look at us as a vendor, they look at us as a strategic partner.”

Cisco also launched its Partner Lifecycle Services last October, which opens up the Cisco portfolio from a service and adoption perspective to all its partners, Subaiya noted.

The effort helped drive services revenue to over $3.3 billion, about a third of Cisco’s quarterly revenue for the second fiscal quarter of 2022.

Among Cisco's services, CX cloud has started to gain momentum. 

The vendor used to have about 80 different customer-facing dashboards, which “is sometimes conflicting; tends to throw everyone off,” Subaiya said. 

“So what we did was we collapsed everything and we built something called the CX cloud,” he added. “It was basically AI-led optimization, that's real-time with the automation built in.”

This digital fabric will help organizations integrate, control, and manage their cloud-based services using AI engines, Subaiya said.

“As I think about where the entire industry is headed, it’s not going to become a marketplace of vendors. It’s truly going to start to become a marketplace of various different services that you consume,” he concluded. “And I think services truly has a place to play in it.”