The new Cisco 360 Partner Program was designed with value in mind, not transactions, to better align with Cisco’s larger goals to capture more mindshare in security, AI, software and services, Cisco’s Rodney Clark told CRN exclusively. The newly revealed Cisco 360 partner program will go live in February 2026 to give the tech giant’s global partner base time to get up to speed with the new requirements.

Rodney Clark, senior vice president of partnerships and small and medium business for Cisco Systems, has officially been in the channel chief seat for about nine months and, after gathering intel from partners, is ready to enact change.

Cisco, a historically networking hardware giant with a loyal base of channel partners through which the company conducts most of its business, has been going through a transformation with an eye on security, AI, and services. At the same time, the company is working on digesting its massive $28 billion Splunk acquisition. To that end, Cisco at Partner Summit 2024 has unveiled what the company is calling the most significant evolution of its partner program in nearly three decades. The new Cisco 360 Partner Program was designed with value in mind, not transactions. The program seeks to reward MSPs that are modernizing infrastructure and powering AI workloads with an eye on security. It’s such a big shift that Cisco isn’t even launching the program until February 2026. The company said it will be spending the 15-month transition period helping its partners readjust and get up to speed in the meantime.

Clark sat down with CRN ahead of Cisco Partner Summit to learn the details of the new, consequential partner program and how it better aligns with Cisco’s own transformation, the company’s plan to simplify partnering for partners, and what the changes means for solution providers and MSPs.

What follows are excerpts from the conversation.

How have you spent your first year as channel chief and tell us about the path toward the partner program overhaul?

It’s coming up on a year that I actually stepped on stage [at Partner Summit 2023]. It was actually great for me to sit in the audience last year and hear about some of the evolution around our incentive structure and we had committed to partners that we would simplify that by putting a number of our overall investment lines into a single platform and that’s still a big core part of how we will land our overall partner program.

The team has been getting feedback long before I came on board around what makes us great to do business with and ultimately how and where we need to evolve. And so, I spent the better portion of the last ten months on listening tours. Our evolution, as a matter of fact, is based on over a thousand hours of formal input and feedback from partners, customers and analysts, and a good amount of that in one-on-one exchanges with partners and a couple of themes emerged. We were getting feedback on complexity and the complexity of managing multiple programs, multiple incentive platforms and ways to earn. Our partners were saying it was requiring additional manpower and resource to manage the overall Cisco partner program. And so, we took all of those things and said: “Hey, is it time for us to evolve? And how do we go from today where we are primarily transaction-focused to more of a value-based?” And the considerations were, of course, making sure that we didn’t impact partner profitability. In fact, if there was any impact, it would be on the positive side that we show a greater path to accelerated profitability. We have a platform in PXP, our partner portal, which is deemed best in class where partners go and get information, and we wanted to make that the center of our relationship with partners from a systems and tools and data standpoint. So, we wanted to make sure that as we evolve, we wanted to maintain the integrity.

The other area that we wanted to make sure that we captured as we evolved, and this is an area we’re getting feedback in is: Are the goals and outcomes of our partner program aligned with Cisco, and our Cisco sellers specifically? And so a big part and a consideration of our partner program was me listening through the feedback from partners and saying, hey, there are things that we can do with our program design that gets us more closely aligned to how we actually drive our own accountability internally.

And then the last piece, was, if we do push forward, let’s ensure that there’s plenty of time for partners to transition to any new program, and we had an opportunity to be open and transparent and continue to get input and feedback.

Cisco is calling this new partner program the biggest change in three decades. Why now?

We are entering 30 years of our partner program, which is pretty awesome. The foundation of our program was hardware and transaction. That’s who we were as a company at the time and that served us well, when you look at the maturity of VIP, which has changed and morphed a few times over that time, but what it rewarded was, through a rebate mechanism and a number of other discounting mechanisms, a partner who transacts and the way that we do business today is quite different and our customer expectations are quite different and we wanted our program to reflect that. Part of it was honoring that legacy and history of hardware and of networking which continues to be core and central to us, and looking at introducing this value, or notion of value. So, transaction, but also with the ability to build capabilities and how we actually manage lifecycle and overall practice maturity, looking at the investments that partners may make in skilling and training and putting some value on that, looking at the overall performance metrics and adding things the ability to drive the land, expand, adopt, renew, motion, [which is] a big part of our services strategy. It’s the first material shift in how we evaluate partners since the original push into the [partner] ecosystem.

The roles that Cisco introduced in 2021 — Integrator, Provider, Developer and Advisor — are those going away?

Yes. What we see are those designations give way to a value index, and so we had these roles, and we had these different tiers that were based on volume, and that was our way of assessing partners. We placed them in these roles, and now we [will] shift to this value index and assess partners and basically drive partner capability across the foundational areas of measurement, across engagement, across performance and across the technical certifications.

With that as well, there were the three branding elements or designations, which were: Select, Gold and Premiere and we’re moving to this new architecture-based framework that allows us to establish two types of partners: a Cisco Partner and a Cisco Preferred Partner. And so yes, the roles and the tiering go away for the value index, and then the overall branding gives way to “Preferred” in the future.

What will happen to existing Gold partners? Will they have to prove their value again?

It’s a great question. What we are ensuring that we do is to protect the investments of all our partners, and so if you’re a Gold partner today, you get to continue driving on the investments that you’ve made and we protect that investment all the way through to our program in 2026. The reason that we’re giving so much time is so that we can be open and transparent with partners around the requirements across the new value index and ultimately what that means in this new Cisco 360 partner program. And so, we’ll be working with all our partners to ensure that they are playing as high up that value index as possible, and we will be recognizing all the investments that they’ve made.

The other thing that we start doing is investing in a broader set of enablement that will help our partners get there. A big part of the announcement [is] $80 million in investment and enablement. An additional $20 million of that is in what’s called Ladder Up, [which is] investment across AI, across security, observability and a few other areas that will help bridge partners from where they are today, to building those technical capabilities that they need into that Feb 26 timeframe. So, we’re really making an effort to make sure that, again, all investments are protected and we’re giving enough runway and lead time for partners to establish themselves in the new designations.

What are the new incentives that will be in place as of February 2026?

In Feb 2026, and this was discussed and announced last year, we have something called the Cisco Partner incentive (CPI). And what we’re doing is we’re taking things like VIP, Perform Plus, [Cisco Services Partner Program] CSPP and a number of other key investment areas that are each their own program and their own incentive structure, and we’re pulling that into a single structure that’s more value based. So, the CPI investment will mirror the overall index. What the index does is it measures a partner across the four areas: the foundational, capabilities, performance and engagement, and as [partners] move up that value index, they are able to participate in a higher level of investment and incentive, in essence, what this CPI will facilitate.

Will there be AI-specific incentives for partners that are selling Splunk technology?

Yeah, as partners move up this value index in each of the architectures, there will be incentives that basically allow them to drive deeper into networking, security and observability. We’ll be building capability in things like Splunk and as part of this announcement, we’ll integrate the [Splunk] Partnerverse program into the Cisco 360 program. The two will merge together in that same timeframe, and we have specializations in security as well as observability that will be honored — back to protecting the investments — that will allow those Splunk partners who’ve invested in their journey to be able to bring that investment over into the Cisco partner program, as well as those Cisco partners who, who’ve started to cross invest in Splunk, allowing them to bridge that investment into the Cisco 360 partner program.

Will incentives be higher for partners that are selling security and AI as opposed to the partners that are selling large capex deals, such as network infrastructure deals?

The way that we designed this is that because we’re pivoting from transaction and across the value index, what it actually gives way to [are] those partners who are specialty partners in things like security and networking. It gives way to those boutique partners who maybe are very highly specialized but important to us from an ecosystem standpoint. It also allows us to engage with partners who haven’t traditionally been those transacting partners, but SI partners for instance and ISVs, and so the program designed just by virtue of having this index is, is actually allowing for us to go deeper with those partners who are uniquely networking or uniquely security or uniquely collaboration and basically brand them as a Preferred Partner in observability, for instance, and they get to participate in the same way that a partner who maybe deep only in networking, which has been the primary driver of a lot of our ecosystem. But we’re also rewarding those partners who can sell across our architectures as well.

Would it be fair to say that this new program is the channel program for the AI era?

Yeah, it’s definitely a modern program for us that puts AI at the center. What it really is, is it’s a program that’s based on partners building capability and delivering value across five areas for us: networking, security, observability, collaboration, cloud, and across that is this thread of AI. What the program does is it allows us to establish value in each of the architectures, and then also reward partners who cut across our architectures and deliver on AI-specific outcomes.

Is Cisco trying to recruit more MSSPs?

Yes, absolutely. Services are a big part of our engagement process and of our lifecycle, and for the last three years, we’ve had a fairly significant push into the MSP and that services partner. We had a team that was built as an incubation team three years ago and have driven over $3.5 billion dollars’ worth of services through MSP, MSSP-type partners over the last three years. Over 350 unique Cisco-branded services that those partners have taken on and now today close to 1,200 specific services that have been deployed as a result of that. So, it’s fairly significant business that that we continue to validate in this new partner program.

What’s your message to partners right now?

I think what we’re talking about is accelerating the value that partners bring to customers. At the end of the day, customers are at the center of everything that we do. We talk about this through the lens of customer modernizing infrastructure, customers powering AI. We talk about security, resilience, and we talk about the management of data and in AI generally. Our role as Cisco is to help prepare and ready our partners for this next phase of growth and opportunity. And so, the program is really aimed at that. And again, we use that term modernizing our program, but it really just shifts how our partners deliver on those customer outcomes.

The key message will be that we will continue to simplify. We’re going to continue to increase flexibility on how partners can participate in profitability and overall shared success, and we’re going to protect their investments, which is why we’re giving them the amount of time that we are to implement the program.