Meeting the Moment in a Rapidly Changing Market
The communications services industry is undergoing rapid transformation, fueled by AI, digitization, and the convergence of cloud and on-prem technologies. With these changes come heightened expectations from both customers and markets.
Service providers have a unique opportunity to offer differentiated, outcome-based solutions tailored to specific industries. Customers now demand flexible consumption models and seamless service delivery—and service providers are well-positioned to lead. With the right tools and partnerships, service providers can become trusted advisors, helping customers navigate complexity and achieve better outcomes.
Cisco’s Commitment to Partner Growth
At Cisco, we are focused on helping our service provider partners meet this moment and seize new opportunities. Our approach centers on three key goals:
- Helping partners expand their market reach
- Making it easier to do business with Cisco
- Enabling flexibility to support cloud migration and AI adoption
This focus represents more than just an expansion of offerings—it’s a strategic shift.
Cisco is deliberately evolving how we package, commercialize, and support our portfolio to better align with the hybrid nature of today’s deployments for both service providers and their customers. We recognize that partners and customers are balancing cloud migration with existing asset optimization, and our strategy is designed to support them—whether they’re running services on-prem, in the cloud, or across both environments.
Why Webex Wholesale?
A cornerstone of this strategy is the Webex Wholesale model—an offering designed to bring together Cisco’s industry-leading BroadWorks platform with the innovation and agility of Webex cloud services. This unified go-to-market model gives partners the ability to deliver advanced collaboration experiences with speed and simplicity.
Webex Wholesale makes it easier for service providers to integrate, scale, and differentiate their offerings. Key benefits include:
- Consumption-Based Billing: A predictable, per-user/per-month pricing model that allows partners to manage costs and scale services efficiently.
- API-First Architecture: Enables seamless integration with partner systems, streamlining operations, enabling automation, and supporting differentiated service creation.
- Co-Branded Offers: Combine the SP brand with Cisco’s trusted Webex portfolio to enhance customer perception and accelerate market entry.
- Simplified Management: A unified partner portal and automation tools reduce provisioning and operational overhead while improving customer care.
- Webex Innovations: Access the latest powerful AI and cloud-powered services from Webex, designed for rapid partner commercialization and time-to-value.
With Webex Wholesale, partners can leverage their existing infrastructure—such as BroadWorks—while adding modern cloud services, improving time-to-market, and lowering operational lift.
Flexibility to Deploy Across Platforms
Cisco supports a flexible portfolio deployment strategy across three key platforms:
- Partner-hosted (e.g., Cisco BroadWorks)
- Cisco-hosted (e.g., Webex in the Cisco cloud)
- Customer-owned (e.g., CUCM)
Partners can deploy or resell any of these platforms individually or in combination. Webex Wholesale acts as a unifier, simplifying how these platforms work together—both technically and commercially. This flexibility is a unique Cisco differentiator, enabling partners to deliver best-in-class collaboration solutions that scale with customer needs and align with their current infrastructure and cloud strategy.
New Services: Customer Assist and AI Receptionist for BroadWorks
As part of our ongoing commitment to deliver fast-to-market, high-value innovations, we’re excited to share that Customer Assist and AI Receptionist, originally launched for Webex Calling, will also soon be available to Cisco BroadWorks via the Wholesale model.
- Customer Assist is a lightweight, intelligent contact center solution built into the Webex App. It adds features like queue management, analytics, screen-pop, and AI-powered insights such as call summaries and sentiment analysis—without requiring a full CCaaS deployment.
- AI Receptionist uses natural language understanding and voice recognition to automatically greet and route callers, eliminating the need for live operators and enhancing the caller experience.
These services exemplify the value of Webex Wholesale: high-impact innovations that are easy for BroadWorks operators to deploy, commercialize, and control—while delivering superior customer experiences.
Making It Easier to Do Business with Cisco
With the evolution of the Wholesale model, we are reducing complexity and friction for our partners by bringing consistency to how we deliver and support the combination of partner-hosted, Cisco-hosted, and customer-owned products. Key benefits include:
- Simplified Procurement: Work with one Cisco team across multiple segments, with spend flexibility that allows you to shift between infrastructure and cloud
- Unified Platform Experience: Consistent devices, software, and management tools across customer segments
- Streamlined Engagement: A single contract structure for Cisco communications software, hardware, peripherals, and cloud services
Innovation at Every Layer
At Cisco, we embed AI and cloud innovation into every layer of the collaboration experience—from devices to applications to infrastructure. This depth and breadth allow our service provider partners to stand out in the market, offering smart, differentiated services that meet today’s evolving customer expectations.
Let’s Grow—Together
This blog builds on our earlier vision for BroadWorks and the service provider opportunity,
Today, that vision is becoming reality through the Webex Wholesale model.
Whether your goals are to grow ARPU, expand into new verticals, or scale services across regions, Cisco is here to help you succeed. Let’s shape the future of communications—together. For more information, visit the Webex Wholesale page on SalesConnect (login required) or contact your account representative.
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