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Cisco Launches New Cisco 360 Partner Program

Cisco announced the launch of the Cisco 360 Partner Program after fifteen months of co-design with partners. 

Cisco is boosting how it supports partners while making it easier for them to help customers. The new program, built for developers, consultants, managed services providers, resellers, and other partner business models, better equips Cisco partners to deliver customer outcomes in the areas of AI-ready data centers, future-proofed workplaces, and digital resilience.

The Cisco 360 Partner Program is designed to provide clarity and empower partners to drive more predictable profitability. At the same time, with the new Cisco Partner Locator tool, customers can now search for the right partner across key Cisco portfolios like Security, Networking, Collaboration, Services, Splunk, and Cloud and AI Infrastructure.

“With our partners, we’ve strengthened what is already a world-class ecosystem to deliver even greater value and help our mutual customers connect, protect and thrive,” said Tim Coogan, Senior Vice President of Global Partner Sales at Cisco.

The Cisco 360 Partner Program recognizes partner expertise and rewards value creation across the customer lifecycle—empowering partners to provide secure, agile solutions that support customers through transformation.

The Cisco 360 Partner Program evolves Cisco’s program to align with partner and customer priorities:

  • Clearer, more predictable earnings for partners with the Cisco Partner Incentive: Now live, the Cisco Partner Incentive (CPI) streamlines past program elements; offers partners clearer, more predictable earnings across Cisco’s portfolio; and helps partners plan for growth by aligning sales focus and go-to-market strategies with Cisco’s roadmap.
  • Helping customers find the right expertise: Cisco’s new partner designations help customers easily identify partners with the right capabilities. All participants are recognized as registered Cisco Partners. Cisco Portfolio Partners demonstrate proven sales and technical expertise, practice maturity, and a strong commitment to customer engagement. Cisco Preferred Partners go even further, offering advanced technical skills, robust lifecycle and adoption practices, and the capability to deliver comprehensive end-to-end solutions.

Partners have access to new resources to help differentiate and grow their offerings for customers:

  • Cisco Partner Incentive (CPI) - Cisco is introducing CPI bonuses to increase partner earning potential, focusing on One Cisco including the new Secure Networking and Secure AI Infrastructure specializations. These temporary bonuses will expire at the end of July 2026.
  • Partner Value Indexes (PVI) - Cisco’s main measurement framework will soon add dedicated indexes for Developers/Advisors, Mass-Scale Infrastructure and Distributors with tailored learning paths and opportunities for these different types of partners to boost value and profitability.
  • Distributor Development Fund - This new fund is designed to drive stronger alignment and success between Cisco and distributor, focusing on partner growth and enablement.
  • Enhanced Cisco AI Assistant - A more intuitive Cisco AI Assistant for the Partner Experience Platform (PXP) helps partners work smarter and focus on delivering value to customers.

The Latest

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Cisco Launches New Cisco 360 Partner Program

Cisco announced the launch of the Cisco 360 Partner Program after fifteen months of co-design with partners. 

Cisco is boosting how it supports partners while making it easier for them to help customers. The new program, built for developers, consultants, managed services providers, resellers, and other partner business models, better equips Cisco partners to deliver customer outcomes in the areas of AI-ready data centers, future-proofed workplaces, and digital resilience.

The Cisco 360 Partner Program is designed to provide clarity and empower partners to drive more predictable profitability. At the same time, with the new Cisco Partner Locator tool, customers can now search for the right partner across key Cisco portfolios like Security, Networking, Collaboration, Services, Splunk, and Cloud and AI Infrastructure.

“With our partners, we’ve strengthened what is already a world-class ecosystem to deliver even greater value and help our mutual customers connect, protect and thrive,” said Tim Coogan, Senior Vice President of Global Partner Sales at Cisco.

The Cisco 360 Partner Program recognizes partner expertise and rewards value creation across the customer lifecycle—empowering partners to provide secure, agile solutions that support customers through transformation.

The Cisco 360 Partner Program evolves Cisco’s program to align with partner and customer priorities:

  • Clearer, more predictable earnings for partners with the Cisco Partner Incentive: Now live, the Cisco Partner Incentive (CPI) streamlines past program elements; offers partners clearer, more predictable earnings across Cisco’s portfolio; and helps partners plan for growth by aligning sales focus and go-to-market strategies with Cisco’s roadmap.
  • Helping customers find the right expertise: Cisco’s new partner designations help customers easily identify partners with the right capabilities. All participants are recognized as registered Cisco Partners. Cisco Portfolio Partners demonstrate proven sales and technical expertise, practice maturity, and a strong commitment to customer engagement. Cisco Preferred Partners go even further, offering advanced technical skills, robust lifecycle and adoption practices, and the capability to deliver comprehensive end-to-end solutions.

Partners have access to new resources to help differentiate and grow their offerings for customers:

  • Cisco Partner Incentive (CPI) - Cisco is introducing CPI bonuses to increase partner earning potential, focusing on One Cisco including the new Secure Networking and Secure AI Infrastructure specializations. These temporary bonuses will expire at the end of July 2026.
  • Partner Value Indexes (PVI) - Cisco’s main measurement framework will soon add dedicated indexes for Developers/Advisors, Mass-Scale Infrastructure and Distributors with tailored learning paths and opportunities for these different types of partners to boost value and profitability.
  • Distributor Development Fund - This new fund is designed to drive stronger alignment and success between Cisco and distributor, focusing on partner growth and enablement.
  • Enhanced Cisco AI Assistant - A more intuitive Cisco AI Assistant for the Partner Experience Platform (PXP) helps partners work smarter and focus on delivering value to customers.

The Latest

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...