A host of new channel partner initiatives have been launched at the Cisco Global Partner Summit being held in San Francisco this week.

Collaboration, video, virtualised data centers and the cloud, combined with an effort to make Cisco easier to engage with and remove the perception of competition with its partners are the focus of the Cisco summit this year.

Edison Peres, Senior Vice President of the Worldwide Partnering Organisation’s Go-to-market Group, told the press that, “partnering is much more relevant today than in the past.” With this in mind, Cisco has launched a number of channel incentive programs to help.

Today, in partnership with VMware, Cisco launched a “comprehensive channel partner acceleration initiative” for the virtualised data center, which includes training, special bundled offerings, demo equipments, demand generation, online demo labs and capital financing form Cisco. The company says the initiative will “help channel partners accelerate the adoption of data center virtualisation for customers” in an $US85 billion market opportunity.

The acquisition of Tandberg data, last week, will also see the gradual development of a best-of-breed channel program. This will play into the video space, filling out the Cisco telepresence portfolio in a US$33 billion video market opportunity for partners.

Other channel announcements include a new partner programme, the Teaming Incentive Program (TIP), which complements the existing VIP, OIP and SIP program. This encourages early sales engagement from partners and rewards them for their investment in consulting and professional services capabilities. Cisco is also introducing the Global Partner Network, a program that enables channel partners to collaborate to better serve multinational customers.

Pictured: Keith Goodwin, SVP of Cisco's Worldwide Partner Organisation keynotes at the general session.