Key takeaways from Cisco Partner Summit

Cisco’s annual reseller conclave, Partner Summit, is arguably its second-most-important event, behind only its customer-centric Cisco Live show.

In fiscal year 2025, $55 billion of Cisco’s bookings went through its channel, which equates to about 90% of its revenue. And there have been some big – make that seismic – changes at Cisco in recent years, including its acquisition of Splunk and pivot to becoming a platform company. Also, earlier this year, the company named Tim Coogan as senior vice president of global partner sales.

Given all these changes and the importance of the channel, the 2025 edition of Partner Summit, held in San Diego earlier this month, was an important one. Overall, I thought it was a solid event with Cisco showing good momentum in many areas. Here are some of my key takeaways from the event.

Cisco affirms commitment to the channel

I’m not sure why, but for years many industry watchers have questioned Cisco’s commitment to its partner community. I’ve heard rumors that Cisco wants a larger share of the services business, and an analyst once told me the company was building a secret services organization and would eventually cut most of its partners out of the loop. Nothing could be further from the truth.

One example of its commitment is related to the upcoming Cisco 360 Partner Program. Cisco announced it at the 2024 Partner Summit, and it’s slated to go live in the spring of 2026. The reason for the long lead time is so Cisco can co-design it with the partners.

Reaction to the initial release of the program was tepid, to say the least, but over the past year, Cisco has taken feedback from thousands of partners and tweaked the program. The new program is centered on cross-architecture, outcome selling, and keys to partner success in the AI era. It includes two new specializations: secure AI infrastructure and secure networking.

Brian Ortbals, senior vice president from World Wide Technology, which is one of Cisco’s biggest and most important partners stated: “Cisco engaged partners early in the process and took our feedback along the way. We believe now is the right time for these changes as it will enable us to capitalize on the changes in the market.”

The reality is, the more successful its more-than-half-a-million partners are, the more successful Cisco will be.

Platform approach is coming together

When Jeetu Patel took the reigns as chief product officer, one of his goals was to make the Cisco portfolio a “force multiple.”

Patel has stated repeatedly that, historically, Cisco acted more as a technology holding company with good products in networking, security, collaboration, data center and other areas. In this case, product breadth was not an advantage, as everything must be sold as “best of breed,” which is a tough ask of the salesforce and partner community.

Since then, there have been many examples of the coming together of the portfolio to create products that leverage the breadth of the platform. The latest is the Unified Edge appliance, an all-in-one solution that brings together compute, networking, storage and security.

Cisco has been aggressive with AI products in the data center, and Cisco Unified Edge compliments that work with a device designed to bring AI to edge locations. This is ideally suited for retail, manufacturing, healthcare, factories and other industries where it’s more cost effecting and performative to run AI where the data lives.

Other recent platform examples include AI Canvas, AI Defense, Catalyst-Meraki integration, and a tremendous amount of Splunk integration.

AI transform services

The second day of the summit highlighted Cisco IQ, which infuses AI into Cisco’s Customer Experience (CX) group. For those not familiar with Cisco CX, the organization offers a portfolio of services that provide customers with expertise, insight and support to help accelerate deployments and get the most out of Cisco technology. The organization is highly successful and accounts for about 25% of Cisco’s revenue. With all that success, one might wonder why Cisco would change it?

At Partner Summit, I sat down with Liz Centoni, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco CX, and she gave me the simple answer: “It’s what our customers are asking for.”

“Infrastructure continues to grow in importance, and yet so does complexity,” she elaborated. “IT organizations live in reactive, firefighting mode, so we are using our data and AI to shift IT from being reactive to proactive.” This trend of reactive to proactive is something IT pros have wanted for a long time, but vendors never had the insights to be predictive, which enables proactivity. AI closes that gap.

Cisco IQ is built on an agentic AI foundation, meaning it doesn’t just react but rather uses intelligence to anticipate, personalize, and transform how users interact with the platform. This enables Cisco to provide personalized support rather than having to cater to the masses, as was the norm in the past.

Cisco offers both AI infrastructure and data

One of the points made in almost every presentation I saw is that Cisco is positioning itself as “critical infrastructure for the AI era.” While that’s true, it doesn’t cover the full scope of the company’s value when it comes to AI. Cisco also offers the data, perhaps more than any other infrastructure provider, to fuel insights. Cisco has a veritable cornucopia of data from many sources, including Splunk, ThousandEyes, AppD, network telemetry, and security systems, and it has years of it.

The most obvious use case for the data is to help customers shift to autonomous operations for the Cisco infrastructure. This historical data combined with agentic operations and Cisco’s experience should allow it to predict most causes of outages and breaches and then automatically adjust things before they can happen. More broadly, the data could be ingested by other IT management platforms to manage infrastructure beyond Cisco, since products like ThousandEyes and Splunk are vendor agnostic.

The most interesting use case is to tie infrastructure data to business operations, which has many possibilities. A basic use case would be to tie network traffic to worker and customer activities. Cisco does some level of this today with retailers, stadiums and factories.

Thinking way outside the box, infrastructure data could look at multi-step business processes that identify where the gaps are in moving from one step to another. That data could then be used to determine whether the latency in the process is from people or is technical and suggest a way to fix it.

Purpose can be both good for the world and good for business

Few companies are as purpose driven as Cisco. Early in Chuck Robbins’ tenure, Cisco’s mission statement evolved from being the company that “Changes the way we work, live, learn and play,” to “Powering an Inclusive Future for all.”

This isn’t just a tag line, it’s engrained in the culture. Cisco is the lead sponsor for Global Citizen, is actively involved in organizations like Covenant House, had a goal of positively impacting 1 billion people in five years and hit that number early, and has Networking Academies all over the world to help individuals in developed and impoverished nations create a career path in networking.

However, skeptics have questioned the value of this and wondered if a business should be so active with purpose-driven initiatives. First of all, from a humanity level, if companies the size of Cisco won’t help people less fortunate, who will?

I think the bigger question is why aren’t all big companies keeping pace? I’ve talked about this at length with Francine Katsoudas, Cisco executive vice president and chief people, policy and purpose officer, about how the work Cisco does can be both good for the world and good for Cisco.

One example is the Cisco Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) program, which partners with governments to accelerate a nation’s digital transformation agenda through co-invested projects. At first glance, one might wonder why Cisco would give a country millions of dollars of networking equipment. But as that country grows its digital footprint, the government and businesses in that country will likely turn to Cisco for future investments. The CDA program has proven to offer great returns and brings digital technologies to countries that could not have initially made the investment.

Katsoudas and I have talked about the investments Cisco has made in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). Cisco gave the schools infrastructure to modernize, and as the technology expanded and refreshed, that led to future investments. There are countless examples of how Cisco’s commitment to purpose is good for business.

It’s worth noting that Cisco actively encourages its partners to add purpose to their activities.

At Partner Summit, I met with Jose Pla, co-founder and CEO of KIW, which won the Partnering for Purpose-Sustainability Award at the Cisco Partner Innovation Challenge for 2025.

KIW’s SPLID.AI platform intelligently aligns AI workloads with periods of renewable energy surplus, allowing AI data centers built on Cisco AI Pod and Nvidia technologies to operate more efficiently with a reduced carbon footprint. Rewarding partners goes a long way toward highlighting what’s possible, which creates a multiplier effect for Cisco.

Customers should make purpose part of their buying criteria. If the vendor you are using isn’t trying to help make the world a better place, is that a company you want to do business with?