Cisco 360 Partner Program - the channel strategy quietly determining Cisco’s fate.

A few weeks ago, Cisco launched its new Cisco 360 Partner Program program to deliver durable growth for both Cisco and its partners. The new program aims to provide consistent, predictable, profitable growth. 

It is informed by two main ideas: firstly, to drive growth of One Cisco, the company’s new platform approach that brings together multiple Cisco products and architectures; and secondly, to unlock customer value by paying more attention to delivering customer value and outcomes, not just to winning the deal. 

Tim Coogan leads Cisco’s global partner ecosystem and describes the Cisco 360 Partner Program reset as a charter to innovate continuously rather than in spurts, and to react faster to market changes. A partner’s value is measured via new incentives with the new Cisco architectures. The Cisco 360 Partner Program platform is designed to align investment, capabilities and compensation. Coogan clarifies:

The coveted gold partner status (awarded in the partner program before the reset) was assigned for breadth of capabilities across the Cisco portfolio. Now partners are measured based on their capabilities for different Cisco architectures.  For example, previously partners could not get gold accreditation if they only sold one thing. Now if a partner only specialises in collaboration and security, they compete on an equal footing in terms of price with bigger partners that work across the portfolio.

Partners are now measured using the Partner Value Index (PVI) with 90% of incentivization for landing the deal; 5% for customer adoption and 5% for renewal. Coogan comments:

Over time we will balance the incentives as the market dictates. Landing deals will continue to earn the bulk of compensation, but we expect the adopt proportion to change.

To help prepare partners for  Cisco 360 Partner Program, Cisco has been offering Ladder Up training. Coogan explains:

The first certification that was up and running was security, which is why it has had the biggest growth across all the platforms. A lot of this training is free because we will make money together with the deployment of skills. We want Cisco to be the easiest company to understand and work with, which is why we are reducing payment cycles and the time to train. I never forget that our partners owe us nothing and do not work for us. We have to earn their contribution.

To market

Jose Van Dijk, VP EMEA Partner Sales & Routes to Market, is pleased with the way Cisco 360 Partner Program has launched:

Achieving predictability was challenging initially, but we set up strong communication mechanisms. We delivered lots of partner engagements, so in all we had pretty strong change management in full swing for eighteen months with feedback filtering down and back up the channel. The number of partners with robust PVI measures is testimony to this work. Next year extra incentives will be added for new architectures and new value indexes will be created and this will generate new rankings.

Our bread and butter is security and networks and so these PVI values were taken up quickly. The Cisco CX PVI scores were adopted faster than I expected, while collaboration took more time because of the growth numbers. The partner landscape is pretty balanced. We are just getting started with Splunk and the first numbers in are good. For incentives we will increasingly focus on adoption but we need to understand the predictability implications by knowing where revenue will come from in the new world. AI is moving so fast that there will be more new partners in the ecosystem and new opportunities.

New Cloud and AI partners

The majority of Cisco partners are focused on networking, with security growing strongly as a channel capability. For the AI-Ready Infrastructure that Cisco is providing to actually land in the enterprise market, the company needs a strong partner capability in cloud and AI infrastructure. Cassie Roach, GVP Cloud and AI Infrastructure Partner Sales says that following the Cisco 360 Partner Program launch there has been a rise in competencies around Cloud and AI in order to take advantage of incentives and rebates:

We also have more niche partners and new partners coming into the partner landscape because of the AI capability area.Over the past six months, we have seen a 13% rise in new partners under Cloud and AI. This is partly driven by the Neocloud providers [clouds built for AI delivery by using modern GPUs for training and inference at far lower cost than hyperscalers and include companies such as CoreWeave, Lambda and Nebius Group] because Cisco secures what they need for their infrastructure build. You don’t need a massive AI practice to do that. They have come in as partners and see that they can do other things with the Cisco portfolio. Amongst the Cloud and AI partners only five percent also have Cisco security and Splunk practices, so there is room for them to grow with the Cisco platform.  Cisco 360 Partner Program helps with this scalability and the ability to do this faster

We use Cisco 360 Partner Program to deliver verticalization benefits to customers in healthcare, government and retail and this is AI use case driven. There is now a lot more opportunity for partners to differentiate and pull away from the pack. We are also seeing partner specialisation for oil and gas, and gambling niches. Our AI blackbelt center was refreshed prior to Partner Summit. It is also significant that NVIDIA, Red Hat and AMD are OEM alliances as this will help the whole ecosystem move faster. If partners have NVIDIA certification, we will give them credit for this in Cisco 360 Partner Program as part of the support to build specialist capabilities.”

My take

I was surprised, given how integral Cisco partners are to the company’s success, that the launch of Cisco 360 Partner Program, which took place only a week before the recent Cisco Live in Amsterdam, was not given more airtime at the event. After all, if Cisco 360 Partner Program does not execute effectively Patel’s One Cisco platform vision will founder in the market. In response, Coogan reassures me that:

At board level we are top of everyone’s mind, we are silently powerful.

In particular, Roach’s Cloud and AI Infrastructure Partner Sales area must grow at a cracking pace amongst enterprises for the new Cisco vision to become operational reality. Time to turn the volume up.