Outcomex bets 92 per cent of revenue on Cisco specialisation

Eighty-three cents of every dollar Outcomex earns is tied to Cisco — and once the vendor's Solutions Plus catalogue is counted, that figure climbs past 92 per cent. That is the bet the Australian integrator has placed, and its chief revenue officer, Ben Blaschka, is unapologetic about it.

Speaking to ARN at Cisco Partner Summit 2026 in Vancouver, Blaschka set out the logic. Traditional "manage everything" MSPs are struggling as Cisco, AI, security and data centre environments grow more complex. Outcomex has moved the other way: deep expertise on one vendor, with specialised managed services built around it.

"We always say Cisco sneezes and we catch cold," Blaschka said. "But we look at it from a perspective of we are a hyper specialist in what we do."

Why did the specialisation start with ACI?

The mechanism, as Blaschka explains it, is skill scarcity. Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) was the first technology that scared off most integrators. Outcomex invested anyway, simply because it had the engineers to do so.

That decision produced a secondary business. Other MSPs holding managed services agreements began outsourcing their ACI deliverables to Outcomex — a fair amount of it delivered white label.

The complexity has not gone away. Cisco Cloud Control and Cisco IQ soften the front end, but underneath sit technologies such as software-defined access that still demand specific engineering skills.

The proof point is Peninsula Health: a multi-million dollar, 17-storey hospital where Outcomex had to profile every IT device, from printers and lifts to surgery equipment, laptops and phones. "That's really scary for a lot of players," Blaschka said. Traditional MSPs, he argued, will not invest in the engineering fleet needed to run such environments — and generalist managed-services work cannot keep those engineers engaged, so they leave.

Enough customers run these complex Cisco environments to justify keeping highly specialised teams. That scale, in turn, unlocks Cisco funding for customer adoption and builds the loyalty that drives renewals.

How deep does the Cisco relationship go?

Outcomex's focus on Cisco dates to 2019, when it began working with Cisco's then-IoT team on long-range wide area network and other communications technologies. The work began in farming and has since expanded into healthcare and mining.

Alongside systems integration, the firm runs its own research and development arm. Its CareTrack and FarmDeck solutions sit on top of Cisco networks. Over the past four years it has built AI capabilities, including CommuterGuard, which uses edge computing for high-motion or low-bandwidth environments — public transport, for example, "where shipping hundreds and hundreds of megs per second from a train to a data centre is simply not possible".

One showcase is the National Centre for Healthy Ageing, a partnership between Peninsula Health and Monash University, where Outcomex developed a sensor-based IoT platform for patient tracking, operational efficiency and research.

What does the Cisco 360 program demand?

Outcomex was one of 40 partners selected for the co-design of Cisco's 360 partner program, giving it early insight and a longer runway than most. The internal adjustment was substantial.

"We had to change almost our entire reporting stack internally," Blaschka said. The program uses points-based aggregation of certifications, so the company pushed hard on Cisco black belt accreditations — one engineer alone collected around 39 of them.

Next come the audits. Customer experience and managed services certifications each require a three- to four-day external audit, and Outcomex estimates the manpower cost of pursuing all three at roughly one million dollars.

The payoff, Blaschka argues, is entry to a very elite group. He expects a shakeout: the first "hardcore" measurement lands in August 2027, and partners that have not completed the audits for their capabilities will simply see their point totals disappear. Over the next six to nine months, he predicts, quite a number of partners will fall away.

For Outcomex, the million-dollar spend is the price of staying standing when that cull arrives.