Cisco is dramatically revamping its 30-year-old global partner program with an $80 million investment that aims to provide broad new training, sales, and educational services to help its partners expand their sales and services using AI and other modern enterprise-ready technologies. The new Cisco 360 Partner Program will be launched by Cisco in February 2026 after a 15-month ramp up period that will help partners ready their operations for the new program offerings, according to the company.
Developed in collaboration with Cisco partners, the expanded and rebuilt new program is slated to help partners better serve the complex needs of customers who want to explore and use new products and services in fast-moving market segments, including AI, infrastructure modernization, and cybersecurity.
One of Cisco’s first moves is an investment of $80 million, which will be used to boost skills and provide the tools needed to help partners compete in the market, according to Cisco. About $60 million will provide partners benefits, including all-access Cisco U. subscriptions for skill development and certification. Another $20 million will pay for quarterly self-paced learning, hands-on labs, and continuing education credits for all partners, focusing on AI, security, and networking.
“With 90% of sales coming through its partner ecosystem, this move by Cisco makes a lot of sense,” Shelly Kramer, principal analyst with theCUBE Research & Advisory, told ChannelE2E. “In today's rapidly moving tech-driven world, especially in the age of AI, to be successful, partners need to uplevel their skill sets. This investment by Cisco is intended to help drive that.”
Updated Partner Programs Can Bolster Expertise
Many organizations are challenged by a lack of internal AI literacy, said Kramer, so programs like Cisco’s will help to equalize the marketplace and provide needed expertise. “While big tech vendors are catching the AI wave and seeking to capitalize on the many benefits AI can deliver, MSPs are moving a little more slowly,” said Kramer.
And because the company does as much as 90% of its business through partners, “it is imperative that Cisco have a vibrant, experienced, knowledgeable partner ecosystem,” said Kramer. “Investing to make that a reality is to be expected. And this is not an anomaly — we are seeing similar investments into partner ecosystems across the board from many other vendors.”
Cisco says the revised partner program will provide a strategic shift for its partners by measuring value over transactions, elevating partners' stature with customers, and upgrading the partner experience with simplified processes and new planning and performance tracking tools.
The Rush to AI is Driving Partner Program Updates
Another analyst, Dan Olds, the CEO of Olds Research, said the rush to AI is unprecedented in terms of speed, spending, and hype, which means that it is “new territory for many, if not most resellers who have been busy enough handling typical customer needs.”
AI is a “new thing that everyone is embracing and clamoring for, but it is complex and requires new approaches, along with different software and hardware needs,” said Olds. “Every customer situation is different, which means what they can potentially get out of AI is unique to them. Figuring this out is where resellers can play a vital role. Cisco’s new program looks like it is geared to address these issues and will invest significant money and resources into helping their partners get to the next level of technology sophistication.”
Olds said he likes Cisco’s approach “because it is measured and they are rolling it out over more than a year, which shows that a lot of thought and planning has gone into the program. It also gives them time to make course corrections and changes to make it better as it rolls out.”
The new Cisco partner program “will also give the partners the confidence they need to go after deals they might not have approached previously for fear that they could not handle the complexity,” said Olds. “This is extremely valuable in such a competitive environment.”
Cisco Unveils New AI PODS Infrastructure Stacks for Enterprises
In a separate announcement, Cisco also unveiled new plug-and-play industry-specific AI PODS, which are tailored infrastructure stacks that aim to make it easier to sell and deploy AI infrastructure to accelerate AI adoption by enterprises. Cisco also announced the expansion of its Unified Computing System (UCS) portfolio with a new AI server family built for GPU-intensive AI workloads.
