Cisco CEO updates Ericsson sales partnership

Seven months into a global partnership, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said the networking company’s partnership with Ericsson is off to a slower than expected start.
The going line from both companies has been that combined sales teams have more than 200 “customer engagements.” Robbins built on that in an investor’s call by specifying that 17 transactions had closed between their sales organizations between when the partnership was announced and April 30. The stated goal is to generate $1 billion in sales for each company by 2018.
Robbins said he’s “pretty pleased” with the results thus far, but the two companies had “wanted to go faster,” according to Mobile World Live.
“I think on the Ericsson front, anytime you do these really large partnerships, they always take a little longer probably than we would all hope but we’re very optimistic,” Robbins said. “So we think that we’d all wanted to go faster, but we’re pretty pleased with where that partnership is right now.”
The two firms were very active during this year’s Mobile World Congress event, with Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg touting “growth, innovation and speed,” as key drivers. Cisco Chief Strategy Officer Hilton Romanski reported “a huge amount of progress in a very short time,” adding engagements came “with customers in every single region around the world,” with “multiple wins … wins in multiple regions where we’re focused on IP, backhaul, data center architecture transformation” and other technologies.