Cisco’s latest AI and infrastructure updates could create new opportunities for solution providers to expand recurring revenue through managed services, network modernization, and security operations, according to Presidio Chief Solutions Officer Dan O’Brien.
Speaking with Channel Insider at Cisco Partner Summit in Vancouver, O’Brien said capabilities such as Cisco IQ and Cisco Cloud Control could help partners better understand customer environments, automate IT operations, and address growing demand for technical expertise.
Combined with Cisco’s evolving partner incentives, those capabilities could also help providers like Presidio invest in the skills and services needed to support customers’ increasingly complex IT environments.
Cisco IQ gives partners new visibility into customer needs
Presidio is a global digital services and IT solutions integrator. O’Brien says it’s combining Cisco IQ-provided information with its own internal platforms, customer knowledge, and experience to develop data-driven modernization strategies and lifecycle management plans.
“Cisco IQ does a really good job of surfacing solid information about what the customer has to do. My view then is where we can help a customer,” said O’Brien. “We’ve built our own internal AI platforms that look at the 6,000 customers that we have and 20 years of experience with them to figure out which technology stacks are successful and how to modernize the customers.”
Security analysis is another opportunity that O’Brien identifies, with customer data helping Presidio understand challenges, identify vulnerabilities, and establish a path forward.
“How can we draw an authorization strategy, specifically around having analysis? I think it really allows us to learn what challenges customers have around security by building a path forward that’s data-driven – and how do we flush out vulnerabilities and have a plan in place,” O’Brien notes.
Cisco Cloud Control could simplify IT operations
O’Brien explains that Presidio sees potential for Cisco Cloud Control and agentic capabilities to help customers simplify IT operations, particularly organizations with substantial technical debt but limited technical staff.
Cisco recently expanded the offering to provide partners with new ways to build, secure, and manage AI-ready infrastructure.
O’Brien explains that customers could benefit from better operational insights, the ability to diagnose potential problems, and task automation.
“Anything that drives simplicity is an asset to any one of our customers,” said O’Brien. “The customers that haven’t been able to solve this don’t have a lot of technical staff, so for me, where we have the biggest sweet spot is customers that have heavily-owned technology, but limited staff-side capability.”
Partner incentives support technical investment and growth
O’Brien says Cisco’s partner incentives provide financial benefits for partners that demonstrate capabilities across its portfolio and invest in the associated technical expertise.
While acknowledging that smaller partners may face disadvantages compared with larger organizations, O’Brien says the program rewards broader participation and investment.
“What we found is: it rewards partners. When I say ‘rewards,’ there are financial incentives for us,” said O’Brien. “The broader we can demonstrate the portfolio across the different underlying architectures that they have, the more financial benefit there is for being all in the process.”
Further, Presidio uses Cisco rebate programs to support investments in its workforce and technical capabilities. O’Brien explains that partners often need to develop skills and hire technical staff before customer demand fully materializes, and that Cisco incentives can help make those investments easier to support.
“When I’m working with Cisco, rebate dollars are tied to driving adoption and investing in certain technical resources. It makes it a lot easier for me,” O’Brien says.
AI security and network modernization drive services demand
Before organizations deploy AI, O’Brien says they need to understand their data, establish governance policies, and determine what information can be shared with different models.
“What I’m seeing is a huge increase in customers needing a managed service. It’s the only way to truly help a customer who’s worried about agent-based threats, because you’ve got to have automated services,” said O’Brien. “You need to have an agentic SOC where you’re using agentic AI to quickly react, understand, diagnose, react, and take actions.”
Presidio uses AI across its services, including cybersecurity, networking, and data-related work. O’Brien says customers need to understand where security controls sit, who has access, and what customer data is shared to automate capabilities.
“Our approach to everything we’re helping with – we do a lot more networking – is that we would walk through model selection, training the models, and having an appropriate human in the loop,” said O’Brien. “I think there’s a lot of trust that we have to talk about with a lot of our customers.”
Network modernization also presents a major opportunity for Presidio, O’Brien said. Existing technical debt can create risk and increase costs, and Presidio sees an opportunity to help customers move toward modern networks with the security posture and scalability needed to support emerging AI workloads.
O’Brien also highlights the difficulty customers face finding the talent needed to operate security environments themselves.
“There’s a lot of different technologies that need to work together. Build the strategies for that, pick the right tools, and fundamentally make them all work together. When I say work together, it’s really around the need and the demand customers are asking for,” O’Brien says. “Security operations is massive. They can’t find the talent, they don’t know how to do it themselves, and they don’t have employees to be able to do that.”
For Presidio, Cisco’s updates are an opportunity to turn infrastructure visibility and automation into ongoing customer services.