The industry-leading Resale Channel Program enables partners to drive growth and differentiate their business by extending their capabilities to meet customer requirements. Through the program's specializations and certifications, Cisco recognizes your technology expertise, helping you increase customer demand for Cisco advanced technologies and services. The program also provides a way for you to validate customer satisfaction and your presales and postsales support capabilities—key differentiators in today's competitive markets.

Cisco Certification

Cisco certifications reflect a partner's breadth of technology skills across certain technologies. The four certification levels, Select, Premier, Silver, and Gold, correlate to the number and type of technology specializations achieved. Each certification level has specific requirements in these areas:

1. Specializations in sales, technical, and lifecycle services training
2. Number of individuals that hold certifications
3. Service and support capabilities relevant to each certification level
4. Customer satisfaction ratings as required by certification level

With each increased level of certification, partners benefit from an increased level of support, branding, and economic incentives from Cisco, including access to best-in-class products and services, technical support, productivity tools, online training, marketing resources, and sales promotions.

Cisco Specialization

Cisco specializations reflect a partner's skills depth in a particular technology. There are four levels of specialization: Entry, Express, Advanced, and Master, each representing greater capabilities in sales, technical, and lifecycle services. Specializations concentrate on specific technology areas and offer key differentiation in the marketplace.

By achieving specializations, partners have proven they have the sales, technical, and lifecycle services expertise specific to a technology and are able to plan, design, implement, and operate business solutions in customer environments. Specializations are earned by meeting requirements in two key areas: training and exam requirements and role requirements within the company.  Be sure to review the specific requirements for each specialization.

Program Rewards

Cisco is commited to reward partners for your loyalty to Cisco and for your value-add to customers—through economic incentives, new ways to capitalize on the Cisco brand, preference with the Cisco sales organization, co-marketing opportunities and funding, and a variety of service enablement programs.

As you continue to invest in certifications and specializations, economic incentive programs such as the Value Incentive Program (VIP), Opportunity Incentive Program (OIP), Solutions Incentive Program (SIP), as well as our Technology Migration Program (TMP) and Trade-In Accelerator Promotion (TAP) become key tools in driving profitabile growth. > Learn more.

Partner Benefits

Developing broader, integrated technology skills enables partners to deliver the integrated networking solutions customers are demanding, to expand their roles with customers, and to enter new markets. Developing deeper technology skills enables partners to further differentiate themselves by offering more sophisticated advanced technology solutions. Finally, using the Cisco Lifecycle Services approach helps partners define the activities they need to successfully deploy and operate Cisco solutions. By implementing and integrating these proven, repeatable processes into their services business, partners can strengthen customer relationships and enhance profitability.