Cisco : 6 Things Partners Can Do Now to Prepare for 5G Tomorrow

5G holds the promise of enabling a massive transformation for consumers, operators, enterprises and industries, providing high throughput and low latency connectivity while supporting large device densities connected in the field. Today, 5G is largely focused on consumer applications, but over the next few years it's expected to become much more prevalent by enabling enterprise- and IOT-driven use cases.

This shift means tremendous opportunity for those who deliver 5G-enabled solutions that meet the needs of these use cases, such as in manufacturing, logistics, transportation and hospitality. For those who build solutions for businesses to be well positioned to deliver 5G-enabled outcomes to their customers, here are six actions that you and your company can start working on today.

#1: Talk to folks in operations

Although many companies delivering enterprise solutions have historically engaged in conversations almost exclusively with IT, 5G networks-especially private 5G networks-will create new opportunities to sell to the operations side of a company. This includes talking to people running manufacturing plants, logistics and warehousing. Simply put, get comfortable talking to your customers' operations teams. Learn their objectives and, most importantly, understand their mission-critical use cases that might benefit from the innovation and capabilities that 5G will enable.

#2: Understand the solutions to your customers' operational challenges

As you become more familiar with the use cases important to your customers' operations teams, you should identify fitting solutions that you can bring to market. This can be done by leveraging Cisco's Portfolio Explorer tool. Here you'll find a wide range of purpose-built solutions organized by industry and use case available from Cisco and Cisco's ecosystem partners.

#3: Learn how IOT solutions can benefit

Many customer outcomes that rely on bringing a network out to connected IOT devices will benefit from the availability of private 5G networks. Cisco is a market leader in delivering networks out to where operations happen-like along a roadway, next to a furnace in a steel plant, or on a car-painting manufacturing line. This means you can lean on Cisco expertise to learn how IOT solutions can benefit from 5G. In fact, Cisco's IOT solutions, from industrial wireless to cybersecurity, could become the bedrock for the 5G-enabled solutions you bring to your customers.

#4: Help your customer assess their cybersecurity strategy

Speaking of cybersecurity, be sure to understand how to secure the 5G-enabled IOT network that you'll be designing and deploying for your customer. After all, as your customer increases its digital footprint, the attack landscape also increases. This means helping ensure that your customer's full stack-from device end points and applications to the underlying infrastructure-remains secured. Here again, lean on Cisco expertise and technology to empower you to help your customers implement their security strategies.

#5: Work with your customer's IT contacts to validate their WAN and LAN resources

When delivering a 5G-enabled solution, one of your primary objectives will be to extend the customer's existing network into the operational field. You'll need to connect various device types with varying bandwidth requirements and create a robust platform ready to adopt 5G technology. To do this, look to networking products that support LAN and WAN deployments, such as Cisco Catalyst 9000 and DNA Center.

#6: Understand your customer's application, infrastructure and data strategy

5G will enable a new suite of applications that will create large amounts of data that need to be moved and analyzed. To help your customer manage, secure and gain valuable insights from this data, it's imperative to understand their infrastructure deployment strategies, including public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Learn how Cisco Cloud Solutions could be used to strengthen your customer's cloud strategy.

Deploying the whole digital platform

The availability of 5G-enabled solutions will empower you to better help your customers derive their desired outcomes by leveraging whole digital platforms, ultimately connecting and gaining insights from an abundance of devices operating in the field. And with its broad portfolio of networking, security, compute, IOT and performance-monitoring products, Cisco is uniquely positioned to help you help your customers take advantage of 5G and the growing opportunities it brings.

To learn more about Cisco's 5G strategy and roadmap:

Register for Cisco Partner Summit and watch the BIS09 on-demand session.

And if you're not yet a Cisco Partner, learn more about how you can partner alongside Cisco.

Finally, keep a look out for my next post, where I will take a closer, more detailed look at the six ways you can prepare for 5G.

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