Brands…powerful, memorable, signs of trust? However you view brands, good and bad, they have a lasting impression, and I would argue that when you partner with a large brand, the halo effect comes into play. And if you partner with a brand that is aligned to your business, that halo effect can help you punch way above your weight. With the pace of innovation accelerating faster and faster, having a bond with a brand such as Cisco can bring mutual benefit, particularly when you want to take your shiny new product to market.
For this very reason, everyone at Cisco’s British Innovation Gateway wants to ensure that our innovators have some serious help in going to market, and we approach this in two ways – an obvious, traditional way, and one that is more subtle and more integrated. Naturally, our relationship with some of the leading business around the world allow us to connect our innovators to senior customer contacts that would traditionally be difficult to reach, but I would argue that this halo effect, whilst valuable, is almost secondary to a much more powerful proposition. One that has integration at its heart. Cisco has built its Solution Partner Program to help our innovators maximise their chances of success in the marketplace. But we took that program one step further by helping our innovators test their solutions against a rigorous verification program, and on completion, award them the Cisco Compatible designation. 
And we have had some stand out examples – Sparkl’s innovative Sequencing Engine technology secured the Cisco Compatible designation, highlighting to every customer and partner that not only are they supported by Cisco’s brand – halo effect #1 – but this is amplified by their technology undergoing extensive testing that proves beyond doubt their robustness when used with Cisco’s solution – halo effect #2. I like brands, but I like it when we can help an innovator practice advanced mathematics; 1+1 = 3! Learn more about the work we are doing to promote the next generation of innovators at IDEA London and Cisco CREATE.
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