Cisco Expands 360 Partner Program and Opens Cisco IQ to Partners

New paths and incentives in the Cisco 360 Partner Program

According to Cisco, the Cisco 360 Partner Program is entering its first full year and now has dedicated paths for Advisors, Developers and Distributors. The company says these groups increasingly shape both what customers buy and how it is delivered.

The central addition is Ecosystem Deal Registration, which lets Advisors and Developers be formally recognized for contributions that lead to transactions. Advisor and Developer Partner Value Indexes (PVIs) are available now, and a unified Distributor PVI is due by Spring of 2027.

Cisco also changed its Cisco Partner Incentive (CPI) rates:

• The ACV growth reward increases by 50%.
• Adopt incentives double (2x) for all use cases, and new adopt incentives launch on Cisco IQ.
• An extra +2% cross-sell bonus applies on top of the existing rebate for Preferred and Portfolio partners who expand customers into net-new Cisco architectures, including Splunk.
• A Cisco IQ Adopt Incentive rewards partners for onboarding customers and integrating their telemetry.

Tools, agents and certification for partners

Cisco listed several resources aimed at partner experience. Deal registration visibility in the Partner Experience Platform (PXP) offers automated, real-time insights into pipeline health. New PVI APIs support trend analysis and eligibility tracking.

The One Cisco Content Agent, currently in beta, helps partner sellers and marketers find approved Cisco content and customize value propositions. Cisco says it can produce co-branded presentations in minutes rather than hours. A new CPI Deal Estimator lets partners model deal economics and optimize rebate yield.

On training, Learn with Cisco is launching a Cisco OT Security Practitioner certification, which Cisco links to the growing convergence of IT, OT and security. Cisco Modeling Labs 2.11 adds new hands-on lab capabilities.

Cisco IQ becomes available to partners

Cisco announced general availability of Cisco IQ for Partners. The company says Cisco IQ has more than 16,000 customers and has had visibility across close to 20 million devices since April 2026. The goal is to help partners build repeatable, high-margin business in both managed services and reseller models.

For managed service providers, the Cisco IQ MCP Server and expanded API access let partners bring intelligence into their own services, workflows and AI agents, and query customer estates directly. For resellers, new Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) lets customers give partners secure visibility into their installed base, which Cisco says helps them spot hidden network risks and avoid manual exports.

Cisco also introduced new capabilities for customers and partners:

• AI-powered Quantum Safe and Software End of Vulnerability Support (EoVS) playbooks.
• Priority Bugs and Software Conformance Assessments to spot outage risks.
• Integration with Cisco Cloud Control, including quantum-readiness status and one-click action on at-risk, controller-managed devices.
• Cisco IQ AI Assistant improvements, with troubleshooting informed by device diagnostics and Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) knowledge, and the ability to create, close and escalate TAC cases.

Liz Centoni, EVP and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Cisco, said: "Cisco IQ is the engine. Partners are the business."

AgenticOps additions in Cisco Cloud Control

Cisco describes Cloud Control as a shared operations platform for teams and AI agents to secure and manage infrastructure across IT domains. It is adding new AgenticOps capabilities.

Model Foundry is a new platform service for discovering, evaluating, fine-tuning and running Cisco's purpose-built models on a customer's own data. Cisco says it is the exclusive home of the newest model versions and weights before broader release, and that Controlled Availability begins with Cisco partners.

Cisco is also integrating ThousandEyes natively into Wi-Fi 6E and 7 access points, included with eligible Cisco Networking Essentials and Advantage licenses. According to Cisco, nothing additional needs to be bought, deployed or configured, and the always-on testing is designed to validate application and network performance around the clock, even when no users are online. The source text also mentions new Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers as part of agentic integration, but the available text is cut off before details.

What it means for partners

Tim Coogan, SVP, Global Partner Sales at Cisco, said customers need partners "with the agility to move first and fast." The changes give advisors, developers, distributors, resellers and managed service providers more ways to be recognized and rewarded, and give those selling services access to the same device and risk data Cisco has. Cisco says partners can offer this intelligence under their own brand.