Cisco is expanding incentives for its 10-month-old 360 Partner Program and making its Cisco IQ for Partners generally available this week at the Cisco Partner Summit in Vancouver.
Cisco 360 additions include influence deal registration that lets advisors and developers gain formal recognition for contributing to transactions. It also added Advisor and Developer Partner Value Indexes (PVIs) and plans to make a unified Distributor PVI available in 2027.
It is also increasing Cisco Application Visibility and Control (AVC) growth rewards; giving an incremental 2% cross-sell bonus for Preferred and Portfolio partners; and adding a Cisco IQ Adopt Incentive to reward partner adoption of the Cisco IQ CX platform.
The moves come, however, days after Cisco notified partners it will raise list prices on software and some hardware productsl
Tim Coogan, Cisco SVP of global sales, called 360 “an investment-based incentive system, and we're building in the things partners need to do to receive maximum benefits, because growth and profitability are fundamental to our company and to our partners.”
He summed up the goals of the Cisco enhancements as “finding an easier way to do business with Cisco, improving tools, and leveraging AI are fundamental. I've said this in numerous environments: our partners don't owe us anything, and they don't work for us. We earn the right to work with them every single day.”
Tim Coogan
Putting Cisco IQ at ‘Partners Fingertips’
Cisco claims more than 16,000 customers and more than 19 million devices have onboarded to Cisco IQ since April. Extending IQ to partners allows them to integrate intelligence into their own professional services and AI agents. New Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in Cisco IQ lets customers grant partners direct, secure visibility into their installed base.
Cisco is also introducing new AI-Powered Quantum Safe and Software End of Vulnerability Support (EoVS) playbooks, Priority Bugs & Software Conformance Assessments to spot outage risks, prioritize remediation, and scope upgrades or hardening services, and Cisco Cloud Control integration surfacing real-time risk intelligence, including quantum-readiness status, and enabling one-click action on at-risk, controller-managed devices directly within Cloud Control.
“We're taking the insights and capabilities of Cisco IQ and putting them at partners' fingertips, via APIs, for their end customers,” said Vikas Butaney, Cisco’s SVP of CX product management. “We'll provide MCP capabilities and API interfaces so that partners can build Cisco IQ into their own operating models and serve end customers.”
Vikas Butaney
Cisco also introduced new AgenticOps capabilities to its Cisco Cloud Control unified operations and management platform.
“A key Cloud Control capability is the inventory page, and the visibility from IQ is now integrated into it,” Butaney said. “Quarter in and quarter out, you'll see us build tighter integration between IQ and Cloud Control.”
Coogan said Cisco partners are more important than ever because of the rapid changes caused by AI.
“Ultimately, what we build and what we buy falls short of customer expectations if we don't have the partner ecosystem to support it,” Coogan said. “That ecosystem, whether strategic, technological, or commercial, is the enabler of the whole build, buy, and partner strategy. In this day and age, the threat pace has collapsed, and ‘collapsed’ is the kindest word. Legacy infrastructure and support motions simply cannot support what clients need in this AI-fueled threat era. Partners are the conduit to swift and efficient action.”
One partner, NTT Data president Dilip Kumar, praised Cisco for addressing modern security challenges.
“As our enterprise customers scale AI workloads and high-density wireless environments, the network must evolve from simple connectivity into an active, self-defending platform,” Kumar said. “Cisco’s innovations embed industry-leading security and continuous visibility directly into the physical infrastructure our customers need. Combined with NTT DATA’s Agentic Operations, this creates an intelligent operating environment that can sense, predict and act, proactively addressing experience degradation and securing mission-critical operations before disruption occurs.”