Top Gun 51 Profile: Cisco’s Oliver Tuszik Wins with Partner Insight

Top Gun 51 award winner Oliver Tuszik, senior vice president of the Cisco global partner organization, is approaching the two-year mark as head of Cisco’s worldwide channel team. In those short two years, he’s been in the trenches dealing with big challenges.

First, there was Cisco’s shift from hardware to software; then, more recently, the pandemic. Perhaps Tuszik’s channel savvy and appeal to partners is from his history of being one himself.

Cisco’s Oliver Tuszik

Before the past seven years at Cisco – two years as global channel chief and five years as vice president and general manager of Cisco Germany – he spent almost 11 years as CEO, managing director, and board member of Computacenter, also in Germany.

In his first onstage appearance as channel chief at the 2018 Cisco Partner Summit in Las Vegas, Tuszik laid out Cisco’s partner road map for the next evolution of the company’s business.

At that time, he called what partners should be doing for the first 12 months of that journey, “perform and transform.” Or, managing daily business while building new opportunities. That equates to protecting the partner’s daily business with an eye on getting ready for the future.

More recently, the pandemic axed everyone’s best laid plans. In June, at a post-Cisco Live 2020 partner roundtable, Tuszik said Cisco’s partner strategy was still on target to help partners traverse the “new normal.”

We solicited input from distributors, master agents and industry analysts to compile our Top Gun 51 for 2020. Introduced last year, the Top Gun 51 recognizes premier leaders in the indirect IT and telecom channel. The criteria includes advocacy for the channel, commitment to partners’ business success and dedication to earning the channel’s trust.

Let’s take a closer look at what makes Tuszik tick.

Channel Futures: Partners like you. What’s your secret sauce?

Oliver Tuszik: I don’t believe I have a secret sauce. It’s more like having pretty simple principles. It’s about being focused — and we love this, especially at this time. You’re not able to do 100 good things; you’re only able to do a handful with the passion and dedication to have an impact.

Also, in this job, having been a partner, thinking like a partner is a great advantage. Whenever you’re in a job you’re trying to think like a customer — and, my customer is the partner, no doubt. It’s helpful if you understand the basics, the logic, what’s important.

Then, one piece is not me, but Cisco, and I’m doubling down on this one. It’s being predictable, reliable and open, honest and direct. Sometimes you see companies dealing with change and feel like they should be careful about telling the partner, which I believe is wrong. I think that you have to be open and honest. These are professional companies with very senior managers, very experienced people. Having a very clear message which is sent out as early as possible is important.

That’s what we did a few years ago. Telling partners that change is coming, and we don’t know exactly how it will look. We don’t know how fast we need to implement it, but it will happen without a doubt, and we want to do it together with you.

It’s all about perform and transform. There’s a tendency for big vendors to focus on all the new stuff, what’s coming next and what the analysts like to hear. But the way we look at it at Cisco – and it’s become a mantra even within Cisco – is not to forget performing while thinking about the transformation.

And, in the time of COVID-19, there was a shift on perform, and helping customers to survive. And with partners, we did an amazing thing focusing on the daily business. But on the other side, nothing has …