Small businesses are constantly under pressure to increase efficiency wherever possible. And failing to do so can have disastrous consequences. If 2020 has shown us anything it's that when the environment takes surprising turns, agility can make the difference between success and failure. To meet this need, businesses have turned to cloud technology in droves.

By transforming digitally and embracing cloud technology, small businesses can streamline processes, increase agility, reduce costs, and improve customer experiences. But many small business owners are overwhelmed with everything related to growing and running their business, and they often don't have the time or ability to manage new technology. IT managers and administrators are often consumed with administering networks, fixing problems, staying on top of cybersecurity risks, and keeping employee systems functioning.

Why Cisco for Managed Services

Because of all of these challenges, managed services providers are in a unique position to help small businesses digitally transform. But today's MSPs face challenges of their own. They need to find ways to remain profitable in the face of strong headwinds. To adapt to market transitions, they need to invest in new capabilities and manage disruptive shifts in business models. Here are a few examples:

• The increased demand for managed services and as-a-service consumption
• The realization that recurring revenue models and lifecycle management are long-term imperatives

To deliver for customers, MSPs are increasing:

• Cross-architecture and multi-vendor solutions
• Differentiated managed services and as-a-service offers
• Application programming and DevOps practices
• Customer lifecycle management

Cisco helps MSPs deliver profitable services to their small and midsized customers by reducing the need for time-consuming vendor management. Instead, MSPs can focus on growing their practices through integrated managed service solutions.

We offer a wealth of resources to help our MSP partners develop unique services, attract new customers, and improve operations so they can build healthy, scalable businesses.

To address agility issues, Cisco works with MSPs to:

• Deliver value immediately and consistently with IT solutions that solve the challenges customers face today and potential issues they'll need to address tomorrow
• Empower buyer preferences for rapidly deployable technology with as-a-service solutions
• Take advantage of managed services so customers have more time to focus on new strategic initiatives

Get to market faster with Cisco

Building a proven, profitable, and scalable managed solution can be expensive, complicated, and time-consuming. Cisco helps our partners balance the risk of solution development and get to market faster. We're focusing investments in improving the delivery of managed services and as-a-service solutions.

By delivering our portfolio in a simpler and more agile way, we can help our partners continue to deliver profitable, valuable services to customers. We're preintegrating our technology and commercial components into turnkey business solutions. Partners can choose how they want to deliver and manage the solutions and build on top of these platforms for specific business and vertical applications.

Simplifying IT with Meraki

The Meraki Marketplace is an example of how we're working with technology partners. Using the Meraki APIs, developers can build programmable applications that address customer needs. Meraki has a clean, straightforward collection of data that makes it easy to build and expand on features and capabilities. The Meraki APIs make it possible to rapidly deploy and manage networks at scale and build on a platform of intelligent, cloud-connected IT products.

The Meraki Marketplace hosts an exclusive catalog from technology partners that have developed an application or solution on top of the Meraki platform to solve business challenges. These challenges may lie within IT or with other business units, such as marketing, sales, operations, or research and development.

Learn more at our webinar with SolarWinds

On November 23, at 12 noon ET, SolarWinds is partnering with Cisco Meraki^? to help provide MSPs with easier monitoring and alerting for their Meraki devices using plug-and-play monitoring services.

In this webcast, Senior Product Manager Chris Reid will demonstrate how to use the new Meraki monitoring bundle to monitor the status of all networks and devices in the SolarWinds^? N-central^? dashboard. We'll also share details about the Cisco Meraki and SolarWinds MSP partnership and wrap things up with a brief Q&A session.

Register for the webcast, to find out how you can

Monitor your Cisco Meraki Devices with N-central