For managed service providers, the next opportunity in AI-driven infrastructure management may be less about deploying new tools and more about automating the work required to maintain, secure, and modernize customers’ existing environments.
Cisco is positioning its Cisco IQ platform, APIs and Model Context Protocol (MCP) capabilities as building blocks for those services, giving partners new ways to identify infrastructure risks, automate remediation and support customers whose IT environments are becoming increasingly difficult to manage.
In an interview with Channel Insider at Cisco Partner Summit, Vikas Butaney, Cisco’s senior vice president of Customer Experience Product Management and Marketing, outlined how partners can turn infrastructure visibility into operational services, from software lifecycle management and vulnerability remediation to AI-assisted troubleshooting and quantum-readiness assessments.
Cisco IQ turns infrastructure visibility into managed services
Cisco rolled out several new offerings around Cisco IQ and agentic capabilities at the partner summit at the end of October, including an integration with Cisco Cloud Control. It also announced new incentives and other enhancements to the partner program.
“We want to make sure that our partners are profitable. Whether it’s our IQ adoption incentive or our capabilities around what we call DSA, which is deal protection for our partners, we want to make sure that we can provide support,” said Butaney. “All of this technology and innovation would be great, but if our partners can’t use it or aren’t trained, it won’t quite advance the ball.”
Butaney explains that some customers lack a complete inventory of their devices, visibility into software versions, or awareness of whether their environments follow recommended practices.
Cisco IQ can surface this information, while partners can apply professional services and technical expertise to help mitigate risks.
“Many of our customers don’t really have a good inventory of all the devices that they have,” Butaney says. “They don’t necessarily know what versions of software they’re running, and they might not be following our best practices. What we want to do is bring this visibility that IQ is creating, and then have our partners work with our enterprise and commercial customers to mitigate and remove the risk that exists in their environment.”
AI Canvas introduces new troubleshooting capabilities
Butaney says that AI is changing both the opportunities available to organizations and the risks they face.
He contrasts the roughly 45-day window that existed several years ago between announcing a vulnerability and its exploitation with the only hours it takes today.
Partners can help customers respond by making configuration changes, implementing software upgrades, implementing compensating controls, or using Live Protect.
“The power of the agentic era is real, and there are lots of benefits, but at the same point in time, the AI threat landscape is allowing these models to chain together risks in our customers’ environments and exploit them,” said Butaney. “Where traditionally – three or four years ago – we would announce a vulnerability and you’d have 45 days before it was getting exploited, not the time to compromise can be hours.”
Cisco Cloud Control’s AI Canvas is a capability that allows customers and partners to troubleshoot environments. Its capabilities can help surface recommendations, while third-party partners and enterprise customers can also build agents that integrate with Cloud Control.
“Within Cloud Control, we have the capability of AI Canvas, which allows our customers and our partners to troubleshoot their environment,” said Butaney. “We can troubleshoot the customer’s environment, surface the recommendation, and help them with it. You can also have third parties build or enterprise customers build their own agents and integrate them and leverage the capability of Cloud Control.
APIs and MCP enable automated remediation at scale
APIs and MCP interfaces enable partners to build modernization services, infrastructure-as-code capabilities, and agentic operations that can operate at machine scale, rather than relying on people to navigate individual interfaces.
“IQ will continue to monitor your environment and provide this visibility,” said Butaney. “Our partners can spring into action, and then they can use our APIs and our MCP capabilities and build their modernization or infrastructure-as-code services to help modernize and protect these customers.”
“Any user interface we develop – or any point-and-click interface we build – is insufficient at the machine scale that we need to move at this point in time,” said Butaney.
Quantum readiness creates an infrastructure assessment opportunity
Butaney identifies several areas where partners can help customers prepare for quantum-related security risks: assessing whether hardware supports quantum key management, reviewing encryption algorithms, and evaluating key-exchange methods and configurations.
Partners can use these assessments to understand customers’ environments and help them prepare for the transition to quantum-resistant cryptography.
“Where our partners can really jump in and help our customers is first getting good landscape visibility into what is in their environment,” said Butaney. “You might find that the hardware you have is not capable of quantum key management. There are protocols that are quantum resistant, so how do you move from traditional IPSec to more quantum-resistant cryptography?”
Butaney also notes that quantum-related deadlines differ across countries and that some industries, including financial services, critical infrastructure, and defense, face particularly significant concerns.
“When we travel around the world, every country has a different quantum deadline that they’re pursuing. All of us are concerned in the industry that if our traditional IPSec security algorithms are broken, then whether it’s your financial data or critical infrastructure data that would be compromised,” said Butaney.
“So our partners can come in, do an assessment, understand the hardware, the encryption environment, and then the key management and configuration, and help our end customers prepare for the quantum era,” Butaney said.
Where MSPs should build their own AI agents
For MSPs and solution providers, the immediate opportunity is to identify where greater infrastructure visibility and automation can improve services they already deliver, rather than attempting to build entirely new AI-driven offerings from scratch.
That could mean using Cisco IQ to identify outdated software and configuration risks, integrating APIs and MCP capabilities into remediation workflows, or helping customers assess infrastructure readiness for emerging security requirements.
But moving toward agentic operations also requires partners to evaluate their own technical capabilities, particularly when automated systems could make changes to critical customer infrastructure.
“We need to move toward this agentic operational model, with the ability to detect at machine speed and come up with recommendations, initially with a human in the loop,” Butaney said.
The challenge for partners will be turning those capabilities into repeatable, commercially viable services while maintaining the technical expertise and oversight customers depend on.
WATCH MORE: How are MSPs and MSSPs evolving to meet the needs of their customers? Optiv takes us behind the scenes in this episode of Channel Insider: Partner POV.