Cisco is expanding its Cisco 360 Partner Program with new financial incentives, deal registration options and AI-powered tools, while making Cisco IQ generally available to partners to support managed services and recurring revenue growth.
“In this day and age, the threat pace has collapsed – and collapsed is the kindest word,” said Tim Coogan, SVP, Global Partner Sales, Cisco. “It has changed at its core. Legacy infrastructure and support motions simply cannot support what our clients need in this AI-fueled threat era. And that’s why partners, becoming that conduit to swift and efficient actions in this market, is even more important than before.”
Cisco 360 adds new incentives and partner growth paths
The Cisco 360 Partner Program, which went into effect earlier this year, now includes dedicated paths for Advisors, Developers, and Distributors. Additional enhancements span program experience, profitability, and enablement for all partner types, fostering ecosystem agility in the AI era and rewarding partner contributions.
Other additions to program capabilities and features include:
- Influence Deal Registration: A new way for Advisors and Developers to be formally recognized for contributions that lead to transactions, validating partner impact across the customer lifecycle.
- New growth paths: Advisor and Developer Partner Value Indexes (PVIs) are now available, and a new unified Distributor PVI will be available by Spring 2027.
- Evolving Cisco Partner Incentive (CPI) rates: A continued investment in partner value exchange, increasing the ACV growth reward by 50%, a 2x increase on Adopt for all use cases, and launching new Adopt incentives on Cisco IQ.
- Additional +2% cross-sell bonus: An incremental +2% on top of the existing cross-sell rebate for Preferred and Portfolio partners expanding customer accounts into net-new Cisco architectures, including Splunk.
- Cisco IQ Adopt incentive: Designed to reward Partner adoption of Cisco IQ to ensure customers are onboarded and integrated with their telemetry.
“Our partners don’t owe us anything, and they don’t work for us,” said Coogan. “We earn the right to work with them every single day. And partner experience is one of the ways that they invest in their time with us is by making that experience as positive and productive as possible.”
New AI tools aim to simplify partner operations
Enhanced partner experience resources are also now available to help partners differentiate and expand offerings for customers, including:
- Deal registration visibility in Partner Experience Platform (PXP): Automated, real-time insights to optimize pipeline health and enable partners to identify growth opportunities.
- Advanced Trend Analysis and Eligibility Tracking: New PVI APIs enable partners to optimize their business outcomes and proactively manage their performance.
- On-demand agentic resource: The One Cisco Content Agent (beta) makes it easy for partner sellers and marketers to quickly assess approved Cisco content and customize value propositions for every customer tailored to specific priorities and industry trends, creating relevant co-branded presentations in minutes rather than hours.
- New CPI Deal Estimator: Empowers partners to model deal economics and optimize rebate yield across every opportunity.
- New OT certification: A new Cisco OT Security Practitioner certification is being offered, along with the release of Cisco Modeling Labs 2.11, which includes new hands-on lab capabilities.
“I’m incredibly proud of the portfolio that we’ve built the size and strength of Cisco on a global basis, but we cannot and will not sacrifice speed in the marketplace because our ability to react is directly related to our partner’s ability to deliver value at speed for our customers,” said Coogan.
“We must scale efficiently. To be big without being efficient is a miss. We are deeply committed to leveraging our size to the benefit of our partners and our customers because, fundamentally, we believe that our size, our depth of portfolio, our depth of resources, the depth of our relationships, is directly related to our ability to deliver customer value with our partners,” Coogan continued.
Cisco IQ expands managed services opportunities
The general availability of Cisco IQ, an AI-powered digital interface and “one front door” platform to centralize Cisco CX, is designed to empower more of Cisco’s global partner ecosystem to drive repeatable, high-margin growth across both managed services and reseller models.
More than 16,000 customers and over 19 million devices have been onboarded since April 2026, and the new Cisco IQ extension for partners provides new opportunities for growth after deal closure.
The extension includes:
- Delivery of differentiated managed services: The Cisco IQ MCP Server and expanded API access enable partners to integrate intelligence into their own professional services, workflows, and AI agents. It enables partners to instantly query customer estates to address short-term risks, such as emerging AI-powered threats, while helping customers plan for infrastructure modernization.
- Secure, automated capabilities for Resellers: New Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in Cisco IQ allows customers to grant partners direct, secure visibility into their installed base, making resellers intelligence-led partners who can leverage real-time data and APIs to operate at machine scale. It helps spot hidden network risks, eliminate manual exports, and proactively drive customer modernization.
“As Tim said, partners are the centerpiece of our strategy and we are going to take all of these insights and capabilities of IQ and put it at the fingertips,” said Vikas Butaney, SVP, Customer Experience, Product Management.
“Whether they operate in a system integration mode, we can give them role-based access to these insights that we have around IQ or if they operate in what we call ‘partner-branded mode,’ they can take all of this goodness of IQ and put it under their logo and their brand to the end customers,” Butaney added.
New Cisco IQ capabilities for customers and partners include:
- AI-powered Quantum-Safe and Software End-of-Vulnerability Support (EoVS) playbooks: This capability helps identify risks beyond routine patching.
- Priority bugs and software conformance assessments: Spot outage risks, prioritize remediation, and scope upgrades or harden services.
- Frictionless Cisco Cloud Control integration: Surfaces real-time risk intelligence, including quantum-readiness status, and enables one-click action on at-risk, controller-managed devices directly within Cloud Control.
- Cisco IQ AI Assistant enhancements: Contextual real-time data with troubleshooting is now informed by device diagnostics and Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) knowledge. Simplified TAC case management means one can create, close, and escalate a TAC case from within the AI Assistant.
Cisco outlines five-step playbook for recurring revenue
Butaney spoke about Cisco IQ’s five-step partner playbook, designed to help partners use visibility into a customer’s IT infrastructure to identify risks, uncover service needs, and develop ongoing revenue opportunities.
The steps, as outlined by Butaney, include:
- Asset inventory and baselining: Deploy Cisco IQ to gain visibility into the customer’s network assets, device topology, device roles, and overall security posture.
- Resilient infrastructure assessment: Run Cisco’s resilient infrastructure playbook to identify customer risks, assess zero-trust posture, and uncover topology challenges.
- Professional services and support coverage: Help customers address software conformance, implement Cisco best practices, and obtain support convergence for previously uncovered devices.
- Infrastructure modernization and lifecycle management: Identify lifecycle risks that can lead to product refreshes and infrastructure modernization projects. Partners can also expand into operational technology and post-quantum readiness opportunities.
- Recurring services revenue: Establish ongoing services and annual recurring revenue opportunities that support partner profitability and long-term customer relationships.