Whatfix and Cisco: Progressing from Customer to Portfolio Investment to Strategic Business Relationship

The Whatfix team just got back from CiscoLive 2019 in San Diego. We enjoyed the amazing week and left San Diego filled with inspiration, new learnings and great memories! The event was appropriately themed “You Make Possible”, empowering Cisco customers and partners to make everything from networking, security, multi-cloud, customer experience, collaboration to the power of data possible. The scale of the event with 27,000 enterprise attendees was enormous compared to other business and networking events.
Whatfix was privileged to be part of a select group of 16 strategic portfolio companies (out of 120) that were invited to showcase their solution as part of the Cisco Investments Village – a key part of Cisco’s World of Solutions. We had a premier booth and got the opportunity to present to the audience. We met hundreds of Cisco executives, business unit product and technical documentation managers and customers who had expressed interest in Whatfix. Our team also recorded a video broadcast that was streamed live at the event. We gathered over 200 prospective customers who expressed interest in Whatfix. Thank you Cisco!!!
I could not help but reminisce about how our relationship with CISCO has evolved from 1 Cisco application to multiple Cisco applications across Business Units. A couple of years back, the technical documentation team in one Cisco Business Unit was looking to embed and ship a Digital Adoption Solution with its core software to facilitate quick installation. Whatfix was selected and embedded within Cisco’s software that is delivered to customers. Whatfix provides a transparent overlay powering user adoption flows on Cisco’s software. Overtime, the use cases have broadened to provide guidance for user migration, demo guidance to pre-sales teams and internal employee productivity tools.
This wide adoption and success eventually led to Whatfix getting on the radar of Cisco Investments, who made a strategic investment in March 2019. Cisco Investments helps Cisco tap category-leading innovative companies and marries them with Cisco’s products, customers and partners. I believe that the Whatfix-Cisco relationship has lessons that any Independent Software Vendor can follow: focus on building world-class core products, embed a digital adoption solution into their product, and achieve easy installation, quick and wide adoption, more usage based wallet-share and higher new conversions.
Few technology companies are fortunate to be category leaders and have that leadership recognized by large strategic partners who use, invest and take joint solutions to market. With Cisco, Whatfix has certainly found this rare combination. We will continue to accelerate adoption of Cisco products and do our part in making Cisco documentation and product managers, employees, customers and partners make anything possible!

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