Back in November 2016, we had the opportunity to introduce three emerging portfolio companies to the senior leadership of Dimension Data at Cisco Partner Summit. These three companies were Flashpoint and Verodin, two security startups, and Helpshift, a mobile customer support startup. That meeting was about raising awareness, but by the end of the afternoon, we had shared ideas for integrating solutions and collaborating on various joint customer opportunities.
The success of that first meeting led to the potential solution integration of Helpshift with contact center solutions, joint customer opportunities for Flashpoint, and introductions for Verodin to one of Dimension Data's sister companies.
So what was next for Dimension Data and Cisco Investments? We met again in January 2017 and decided to expand this opportunity to meet three additional portfolio companies. This time, we decided to broaden the diversity of the group to include more recent investments and three additional market categories including IoT, DevOps, and the Cloud.
Ayla Networking (IoT) - Enterprise Software Platform enables manufacturers and service providers to bring connected products to market quickly
Puppet Labs (DevOps) - Puppet Enterprise - IT automation for cloud, security, and DevOps
Datos.IO (Cloud) - Industry-first cloud scale data protection software for next-generation applications deployed on non-relational, cloud databases
There were active discussions around how each of the companies could work with Dimension Data, ranging from joint customer opportunities and internal usage. The meeting ended with an agreement to look at how we can accelerate onboarding some of these exciting solutions, continuing executive sponsorship and subsequent Cisco Investment portfolio overviews. As with the first group, we expect the combination of Cisco portfolio companies with Dimension Data will create additional value for our customers and lead to joint opportunities for both. My team looks forward to discovering more future opportunities for Cisco Portfolio companies and Cisco Channel partners to engage in a meaningful manner.
