The corporate venture capital space has continued to become more and more competitive over the last few years. For this reason, it is important that the investments arm of any large organization differentiates itself from its peers/competitors. Cisco Investments is no exception, and our team have been working hard to make sure our portfolio companies get the benefits that only Cisco can bring.
Specifically around go-to-market activities, three of the key benefits that Cisco Investments bring to the table are:
Access and warm introductions to global partner organizations
Direct access to major global customers
Access to our global sales force
But how do we unlock this value? In this blog, we’ll be giving an example about how we work specifically with partner organizations, using Dimension Data as an example.
We started the discussion with Dimension Data some months ago, and the relationship has been evolving ever since. Dimension Data is a global partner organization that brings a global sales, distribution and support network to the table – and hence can bring tremendous value to our portfolio companies. From Dimension Data’s perspective, working with Cisco Investments gives them insight into some of the early technologies that we see coming to market. This allows them to expand the ecosystem of disruptive technology companies they work with.
During the latest round of interactions, in the form of a pitch day, we introduced four of our portfolio companies with a specific focus on datacenter solutions to Dimension Data.
Beyond just presenting their technology and key aspects of their business, the portfolio companies discussed how each of these companies can work with Dimension Data, whether it be joint go-to-market opportunities, or becoming part of Dimension Data’s internal innovation days. The follow-on from this meeting will be to ensure that those companies with a good overlap with Dimension Data’s interest are further investigated and potentially on-boarded as solutions.
Both Cisco and our portfolio companies got better insight into how we can leverage the partner engine that Dimension Data brings to the table. This truly was a three-way conversation focused on unlocking value for all our teams.
We’ll continue to bring these amazing opportunities to our portfolio companies. These events bring value to not only to Cisco, Dimension Data and our portfolio companies, but also to our customers, as they will be the ultimate beneficiaries of the new innovations we accelerate to market.