Enhancements give every partner a path to move first and fast in the AI era

News summary:

• Cisco introduces Ecosystem Deal Registration alongside new incentives and AI-enabled tools for partners to recognize and support our ecosystem at every step of the deal.
• General availability of Cisco IQ for partners provides new profitability avenues and growth opportunities.
• Expanded Cisco Cloud Control offerings provide partners with new ways to build, secure, and manage AI-ready infrastructure.

VANCOUVER, BC, Oct. 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- AI is moving infrastructure to the center of enterprise investment, creating a critical market opportunity to modernize, scale, and secure the networks that power the AI era. To help its partners lead this transformation, today at Cisco Partner Summit, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) unveiled new advancements across its partner program, customer experience offerings and technology portfolio, providing the tools and incentives required to capture this next wave of global connectivity growth.

Expanded incentives within the Cisco 360 Partner Program combined with the general availability of Cisco IQ for Partners address the demand for more agility and intelligence in the current environment. Cisco Cloud Control continues to bring it all together, giving Cisco partners, IT professionals and AI agents a platform where they can work together to connect, protect and run the critical infrastructure for the AI era.

"Our partners are where Cisco meets the customer, and the AI era is asking more of all of us," said Tim Coogan, SVP, Global Partner Sales, Cisco. "Customers need partners with the agility to move first and fast. By combining the strength of the Cisco 360 Partner Program with Cisco IQ and Cisco Cloud Control, we're giving every type of partner new ways to deliver that and be rewarded for it, from the advisor who shapes a decision to the partner who delivers and supports it."

Powering an Agile Partner Ecosystem

Advisors, Developers, and Distributors increasingly shape what customers buy as well as how it's delivered, and as the Cisco 360 Partner Program enters its first full year, the program has added dedicated paths for each of them. Additional enhancements span program experience, profitability and enablement for all partner types, empowering true ecosystem agility in the AI era, and rewarding the contributions of every partner.

• Ecosystem Deal Registration: A new way for Advisors and Developers to be formally recognized for contributions that lead to transactions, validating partner impact across the customer lifecycle.  
• New growth paths: Advisor and Developer Partner Value Indexes (PVIs) are now available and a new unified Distributor PVI will be available by Spring of 2027, underscoring Cisco's commitment to measuring partner contributions based on the unique value their role brings to the customer.
• Evolution of Cisco Partner Incentive (CPI) Rates: A continued investment in partner value exchange, increasing ACV growth reward by 50% as well as a 2x increase on Adopt for all use cases, as well as launching new adopt incentives on Cisco IQ.
• Additional +2% Cross-Sell Bonus: An incremental +2% on top of the existing cross-sell rebate for Preferred and Portfolio partners expanding customer accounts into net-new Cisco architectures, including Splunk.
• Cisco IQ Adopt Incentive: Designed to reward Partner adoption of Cisco IQ to ensure customers are onboarded and integrated with their telemetry.

Additionally, enhanced partner experience resources are now available to help partners differentiate and expand their offerings for customers:

• Deal registration visibility in Partner Experience Platform (PXP): Automated, real-time insights to optimize pipeline health and enable partners to identify growth opportunities.
• Advanced Trend Analysis and Eligibility Tracking: New PVI APIs enable partners to optimize their business outcomes and proactively manage their performance.
• On-demand agentic resource: The One Cisco Content Agent (beta) makes it easy for partner sellers and marketers to quickly access approved Cisco content and customize value propositions for every customer tailored to specific priorities and industry trends, creating relevant co-branded presentations in minutes rather than hours.
• New CPI Deal Estimator: Empowers partners to model deal economics and optimize rebate yield across every opportunity.
• New OT certification: To reflect the growing convergence of IT, OT, and security, Learn with Cisco is launching a new Cisco OT Security Practitioner certification and releasing Cisco Modeling Labs 2.11 with new hands-on lab capabilities.

Cisco IQ: New Partner Opportunities for Profitable Services

Customers crave the ability to better understand their IT environments, intuitively identify risk, and quickly act before issues impact business outcomes. Partners need that same level of visibility so they can deliver more relevant, higher-value services to customers and propose modernization opportunities. Today, Cisco is announcing the general availability of Cisco IQ for Partners, empowering its global partner ecosystem to drive repeatable, high-margin growth across both managed services and reseller models. With more than 16,000 customers, and with visibility across close to 20 million devices since April 2026, the extension of Cisco IQ to partners provides new opportunities for growth after deal closure:

• Deliver differentiated managed services: With Cisco IQ MCP Server and expanded API access, partners can seamlessly integrate intelligence into their own professional services, workflows, and AI agents. This enables partners to instantly query customer estates so they can address short term risks like emerging AI-powered threats, while helping customers plan for infrastructure modernization.
• Secure, automated capabilities for Resellers: Through new Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in Cisco IQ, customers can grant partners direct, secure visibility into their installed base. This transforms resellers into intelligence-led partners who can leverage real-time data and APIs to operate at machine scale—spotting hidden network risks, eliminating manual exports, and proactively driving customer modernization.

Cisco is also introducing new Cisco IQ capabilities for customers and partners:

• New AI-Powered Quantum Safe and Software End of Vulnerability Support (EoVS) playbooks to help identify risks beyond routine patching.
• Priority Bugs & Software Conformance Assessments to spot outage risks, prioritize remediation, and scope upgrades or hardening services.
• Frictionless Cisco Cloud Control integration surfacing real-time risk intelligence, including quantum-readiness status, and enabling one-click action on at-risk, controller-managed devices directly within Cloud Control.
• Cisco IQ AI Assistant enhancements based on rich contextual real-time data with troubleshooting now informed by device diagnostics and Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) knowledge. Simplified TAC case management means you can create, close, and escalate a TAC case from within the AI Assistant.

"For too long, partners walked into customer conversations without the same view Cisco had. That changes today," said Liz Centoni, EVP and Chief Customer Experience Officer, Cisco.

"With Cisco IQ Partner Support Standard, partners get that same intelligence under their own brand, delivered through their own experts. It's their name. Their customer relationship. Their services practice. Cisco IQ is the engine. Partners are the business."

Resilient, Secure, and AI-Ready Infrastructure Innovations

As enterprises scale AI agents across wired and wireless networks, they face mounting risks from downtime, visibility gaps, and identity-based threats. Cisco Cloud Control addresses these challenges by providing a shared, unified operations platform for teams and AI agents to secure and manage critical infrastructure across IT domains. To further enable machine-speed collaboration and automation, we are introducing new AgenticOps capabilities to Cloud Control, including:

• Model Foundry: A new platform service in Cisco Cloud Control for putting Cisco's purpose-built models to work — discovering, evaluating, fine-tuning, and running them on your own data, all in one place. Model Foundry is also the exclusive home of Cisco's newest model versions and weights before broader release. Controlled Availability begins with Cisco partners.
• ThousandEyes intelligence for trusted autonomous operations: Cisco is integrating ThousandEyes natively into Wi-Fi 6E and 7 access points, included with eligible Cisco Networking Essentials and Advantage licenses. With nothing additional to buy, deploy, or configure, always-on ThousandEyes enables automated background testing that is designed to validate application and network performance around the clock even when no users are online and strengthens customer trust in agentic actions.
• Agentic integration: Cisco is introducing Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for its networking platforms, which act as a standardized bridge that allows AI tools to easily access live network data. This removes the need for partners to build and maintain complex custom connections, making it simpler to create automated workflows for tasks like troubleshooting and reporting, while helping IT teams identify and resolve issues faster by linking deep telemetry directly to actionable experience metrics.

"The future of infrastructure operations is agentic, and it requires a platform that combines shared context, purpose-built models, and clear guardrails. Cisco Cloud Control is that platform," said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. "With the new Model Foundry, we're advancing the state of the art in AgenticOps further. Enabling partners to fine-tune and customize Cisco's models for their customers' environments will make them integral to how their customers connect, protect, and run their infrastructure."

To deliver the hardened physical and digital foundation required to connect, power, and protect mission-critical workloads for the long term, Cisco is introducing new resilient and quantum-safe innovations, including:

• Extending quantum readiness across wireless networks: Cisco is launching the industry's first Wi-Fi 7 access point with quantum-resilient capabilities. This is the latest addition to the most comprehensive quantum-resilient networking portfolio, spanning wireless, switching, and routing, enabling partners to deliver quantum-readiness assessments and future-proof customer infrastructure investments well into the next decade. For quantum-safe communications with Post Quantum Cryptography over the air, Cisco provides Qualcomm Technologies-powered access points while the complete client-side solution is supported by an Intel Wi-Fi chipset and driver and Microsoft for Windows software.
• Expanded support for Live Protect: Live Protect reduces the gap between vulnerability disclosure and patch completion on supported Cisco platforms and releases. Live Protect is now supported on N9000 Series Switches, N9300 Smart Switches, Catalyst SD-WAN, C9000 Series Smart Switches, and CW9800 Wireless Controllers. Support on Cisco 8000 Secure Routers and Cisco Firewalls is intended to be available by the end of 2026.
• Privileged infrastructure access: Being developed in collaboration with Teleport, Cisco Privileged Infrastructure Access gives network teams and AI agents fast, governed, task-specific access to Cisco routers and switches, with short-lived, identity-bound certificates. Sessions are recorded, and privilege expires when the session ends.

Supporting Quotes

• "Ecosystem Deal Registration is an important step forward in recognizing the value partners like Deloitte create throughout the customer lifecycle, from shaping opportunities and defining solutions to helping customers realize value. By making these contributions more visible, Cisco is creating stronger foundations for collaboration and shared growth." -- Filipe Gomes Leonardo, Associate Partner - Cyber and Telecom Networks, Deloitte
• "We are excited about Cisco's continued innovation and look forward to Cisco Partner Summit. With expanded partner access to Cisco IQ, we can build lifecycle integrations and professional services that turn reactive analysis into proactive insight. Together, we help clients manage risk, plan upgrades and get more value from every dollar they spend," said Kevin Corace, Senior Vice President, Software and Services Lifecycle, Presidio.
• "As our enterprise customers scale AI workloads and high-density wireless environments, the network must evolve from simple connectivity into an active, self-defending platform. Cisco's innovations embed industry-leading security and continuous visibility directly into the physical infrastructure our customers need. Combined with NTT DATA's Agentic Operations, this creates an intelligent operating environment that can sense, predict and act, proactively addressing experience degradation and securing mission-critical operations before disruption occurs." – Dilip Kumar, President and Global Head Infrastructure Solutions, NTT DATA, Inc.

Read more in our executive blogs:

• Cisco IQ is the Engine. Partners are the Business (Liz Centoni)
• Empowering Our Partners to Win in the Agentic AI Era (Steve Clayton)
• You Asked for More Money and More Time. Here's Both. (Tim Coogan)

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era. For more than 40 years, Cisco has securely connected the world. With its industry leading AI-powered solutions and services, Cisco enables its customers, partners and communities to unlock innovation, enhance productivity and strengthen digital resilience. With purpose at its core, Cisco remains committed to creating a more connected and inclusive future for all. Discover more on The Newsroom and follow us on X at @Cisco.

Disclaimer: Some products or features described may be in various stages of development and offered on a when-and-if available basis.

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Der hessische Ministerpräsident Boris Rhein (CDU) hat eine Neujustierung des Umgangs mit der AfD im Bundestag gefordert und damit eine innerparteiliche wie parlamentarische Grundsatzdebatte angestoßen. In einem Interview mit dem Magazin „Stern“ plädierte der CDU-Politiker dafür, der AfD die ihr nach dem üblichen Verteilungsschlüssel zustehenden Vorsitzendenposten in den Fachausschüssen des Bundestags nicht länger zu verwehren. „Die Partei ist gewählt, und so sollte man mit ihr auch umgehen“, sagte Rhein und verwies darauf, dass die AfD im hessischen Landtag und in anderen Länderparlamenten bereits Ausschussvorsitze innehat.

Im Bundestag verfügt die AfD wie die anderen Fraktionen über ein Vorschlagsrecht für bestimmte Ausschussvorsitze. Bisher scheiterte sie jedoch regelmäßig daran, dass ihre Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten bei den Wahlen in den Ausschüssen nicht die Unterstützung der Abgeordneten der übrigen Parteien erhielten und damit die nötigen Mehrheiten verfehlten. Eine Klage der AfD-Bundestagsfraktion vor dem Bundesverfassungsgericht blieb im September 2024 ohne Erfolg; Karlsruhe sah keinen Anlass, in das Verfahren der Ausschussbesetzungen einzugreifen. Politisch aber gewinnt die Frage durch Rheins Vorstoß neue Brisanz.

Rhein grenzt sich zugleich von einer inhaltlichen Annäherung an die AfD ab und lehnt ein Verbotsverfahren gegen die Partei ab. Er halte das vielzitierte Bild einer „Brandmauer“ für falsch, betonte der CDU-Landeschef. Für die Union gelte: „Wir grenzen uns klar von der AfD ab, aber wir grenzen die Partei nicht aus.“ Das müsse sich auch in der Parlamentsarbeit widerspiegeln. Anstelle juristischer Schritte warb Rhein dafür, die AfD politisch zu stellen: Die CDU müsse den Wählerinnen und Wählern „ein besseres Angebot machen“ und die „Deutungshoheit über die Alltagsfragen“ zurückgewinnen. Eine Zusammenarbeit mit der AfD setze aus seiner Sicht eine „Politik der klaren roten Linien“ voraus.

Die AfD bewertet die Äußerungen des hessischen Regierungschefs als Signal eines sich abzeichnenden Kurswechsels in der Union. Der Parlamentarische Geschäftsführer der AfD-Bundestagsfraktion, Bernd Baumann, sprach gegenüber der Nachrichtenagentur AFP von einem „überfälligen“ Schritt und einem Zeichen für ein „generelles Umdenken in der CDU“. Die Forderung nach Ausschussvorsitzen sei „nur der erste Schritt – weitere werden folgen“, prognostizierte Baumann. Angesichts jüngster Wahlergebnisse sehe er die Union unter Druck, ihre bisherige Ausgrenzungsstrategie zu überdenken. Koalitionsfraktionen im Bundestag wiesen einen von Rhein geforderten Kurswechsel allerdings zurück und halten bislang an der Linie fest, AfD-Kandidaten für Ausschussvorsitze nicht zu unterstützen.

In den Fachausschüssen des Bundestags wird ein Großteil der inhaltlichen Gesetzgebungsarbeit vorbereitet. Die Vorsitzenden spielen eine zentrale Rolle bei der Organisation der Beratungen und der Tagesordnungsgestaltung. Die Verteilung dieser Schlüsselpositionen erfolgt nach einem festgelegten Schlüssel zwischen den Fraktionen, doch bleibt die tatsächliche Besetzung an die Wahl durch die Ausschussmitglieder gebunden. Vor diesem Hintergrund berührt die von Rhein angestoßene Debatte nicht nur die Machtbalance zwischen den Fraktionen, sondern auch die Frage, wie das Parlament mit Parteien umgeht, die zwar demokratisch gewählt sind, von großen Teilen des Hauses aber weiterhin klar abgelehnt werden.