‘One Cisco’ Platform Approach Tackles Portfolio Complexity

Cisco’s platform approach to unify its portfolio isn’t lost on channel partners, and it’s starting to resonate with customers as well, says David Harper, CRO of Cisco partner iT1.

Sometimes being the giant of your market with a portfolio sized to match carries its own set of pitfalls.

Cisco Systems for years has struggled under the weight of its own broad portfolio, according to Jeetu Patel, the company’s president and chief product officer.

The complexity of the offering, even just three years ago, was very hard for people to digest, he said.

“The breadth of the portfolio, which should have been our biggest asset, had actually become a liability. Why was it a liability? Because it was too complicated to understand. We were looking at this in a very siloed manner. We were like a holding company with a bunch of acquisitions,” Patel told CRN.

Even internally, those within Cisco were focused on their own silos. But after going through a complex business and executive leadership transformation in recent years, the San Jose, Calif.-based company’s largest advantage now is the breadth of the portfolio it brings to the table, he said.

“There’s no one else who can bring the network completely together with security and the data platform tied together and have observability around it, where we make our own silicon. Everything from silicon to the applications, from the physics to the semantics, we’ve actually built out everything, and everything integrates well together. It’s done in one unified platform, a common management plane,” he said. “In my mind, that’s a meaningful differentiation, but I think it [was] a hard one for people to fully grasp until it got done.”

It's what the company refers to as the “One Cisco” story.

Cisco in 2025 unveiled some major leadership changes. To start, former Splunk CEO and Cisco President of Go To Market Gary Steele left the company about a year after the close of the $28 billion Splunk acquisition to join drone and defense technology upstart Shield AI in April. Filling his shoes was Oliver Tuszik, Cisco’s beloved former global channel chief and EMEA president, who stepped into the executive leadership team as executive vice president of global sales and chief sales officer that same month. Patel, for his part, was promoted to chief product officer in August 2024 after leading the company’s security and collaboration businesses for four years prior. In May, the executive added the role of president to his title, further cementing Cisco’s commitment to a unified platform approach to the market.

The “One Cisco” story and the company’s platform approach to unify its portfolio under Patel’s leadership isn’t lost on channel partners, and it’s starting to resonate with customers as well, said David Harper, CRO of Tempe, Ariz.-based solution provider and Cisco partner iT1.

“From a Cisco perspective, really trying to wrap everything underneath an umbrella with an enterprise agreement to be able to manage the entire Cisco stack in the organization, [customers] are seeing that as well from not only what Cisco is presenting, but the value-add that iT1 and our Cisco practice that we can bring to the table,” he said.

The soon-to-launch Cisco 360 program, partners told CRN, will further fuel Cisco’s newfound platform approach.

Cisco’s partner program has served the company well for more than two decades, but the competitive landscape has changed with Network-as-a-Service startups entering the fray that are offering more margin to partners, said Steve Wylie, vice president and general manager, Northeast, for Irvine, Calif.-based Cisco partner Trace3.

“The reality is that partners need to accept change, but also these smaller companies are not the platform player that Cisco is,” Wylie said. “Cisco needs this new program in part to counteract what these smaller [companies] are doing.”

Some of the most successful Cisco partners follow the same pattern: They sell a solution that brings together their unique capabilities with the strength of the Cisco portfolio rather than selling point products, said Cisco’s Tuszik during a keynote address at Cisco Partner Summit 2025.

To support future IT and AI requirements, enterprises need to modernize their infrastructure. It’s creating “huge” opportunities that Cisco and its partners can’t afford to leave on the table, Tuszik said.

Cisco 360, Tuszik said, has been designed with the tech giant’s platform in mind to help its partners capture these opportunities.

“Let’s be clear. Our focus is not on selling products. It’s on delivering outcomes and value. When we show up as One Cisco, we bring together the full power of our portfolio and services [and] ensure it all performs from the first day,” he said at the event. “That’s where your partnership is critical.”