Cisco executive outlines rationale of partner programme changes | Microscope

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The spotlight is on Cisco this week, with the vendor holding its annual Partner Summit and announcing a fresh channel programme.

The timing of the Cisco 360 programme, which comes into effect in February 2026, is a recognition that the world is changing. Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a greater impact on infrastructures and workloads, but customers are also struggling to deal with complexity.

As a result, the vendor has announced it will introduce more AI training for its channel, a programme that rewards those that are able to take a lifecycle approach, covering user needs from start to finish, and is encouraging its channel to look to a future where recurring revenues are the mainstay.

Oliver Tusick, EMEA president at Cisco, shared his thoughts about the need for a revised approach and how AI was changing the market.

The customer is key, because a failure to meet their needs will reduce the likelihood of the partner being successful.

“We continue to evaluate capabilities and performance, and we will measure [partners] and pay partners in this one,” he said. “We have an amount of prioritised platforms to focus on. We will, of course, check their capabilities. Are they able to design a firewall, AI infrastructure, a networking platform, SD WAN and so on. But we will also focus on more customer-focus pieces on this one.

“Is the partner capable of supporting managed service, cloud, marketplace, consumption models and others?” said Tusick. “What kind of skill set do they have? How did they train their people? What kind of support function do they have? Capabilities will continue to be essential, and it’s clear we will not allow any partner to go to a customer and claim they are a Cisco Partner without understanding our portfolio.”

The structure of Cisco 360 will reward those that perform and engage with customers and get into a position where they develop the skills and services to support a range of areas, including security, networking, cloud and AI.

“It’s very simple,” said Tusick. “If you’re highly skilled, highly certified and showing great engagement across all routes to market, you will make more money, more money at the front end, deal registration, more money at the back end, like the classical back end rebates.

“Customers are fed up with complexity, complexity created by technology. And there’s a part of technology that is, by definition, greater complexity, more distributed cloud, AI,” he added. “But there’s a part where the customer said, ‘that’s a complexity that I don’t want to deal with because it’s not value-generating’.”

Cisco indicated a few years ago that it wanted to recalibrate its mix and get at least half of its business coming from recurring software revenues, and there has been a shift to reward those partners that drive that type of business.

The traditional networking hardware partner still plays a valuable role for Cisco, but increasingly, the encouragement – with programmes like 360 a key plank of that strategy – is to get partners to sell a wider portfolio of products and services.

“A lot of partners invested or activated, because they already had capabilities in software sales, in renewal,” he added. “We see the same [with] security over the last two years.”

Tusick said that using partner programmes to shape behaviour required a commitment to ensure channel investments were valuable.

“If I’m a partner and invested in a technology because my vendor told me, you will always get 10% back end rebate,” he said. “And then after doing this, investing in people skills infrastructure, the same vendor comes to me and says, ‘Thanks for doing this. We decided now you get only 1%’ there’s a nuisance. [The partner] says, ‘I have a full team, trained and educated, and my model was based on your commitment’. So, that’s what we’re not doing.

“That’s the reason why we have so many so loyal, committed partners,” said Tusick. “We know how important they are for us, and that the trust and loyalty is something we need to work hard on every single day.”

The word “challenging” has featured commonly in channel financial results this year to describe the UK market, but Tusick is looking forward positively, viewing the market dynamics fundamentally leaning in the channel’s direction.

“I’m seeing with whomever I talk to on the customer side a few things,” he said. “The first one is that the role of the IT or CIO leader becomes more important because every company is a tech company. You don’t find any company who’s currently not investing because they need to deal with different requirements and different possibilities.

“The power of IT is growing, and if you sit on technology that’s five or 10 years old, you will just simply fail,” said Tusick. “You can’t serve the business. What I see from all customers, no matter if their budget is exploding or the business growing, or they have a challenge, everybody’s aware that they need to invest in technology.”

Customers are also looking for the channel to help them with AI and compliance, meeting regulations that are continuing to emerge around data protection, as some of the key areas where support is being sought.

“They can’t deal with the complexity,” he said. “They are not more people than before. They have a problem with skills. They need to automate. They need to standardise … that’s why we and our partners have a huge opportunity now coming to the UK.”

Tusick said that uncertainty, wars and economic challenges could not hold back customer spending indefinitely: “Companies start to realise, ‘I can’t wait for a solution. I just need to prepare for a world that is full of surprises, where we have the chance to adapt and react faster’ … so, that’s why I'm positive.”