The 10 Biggest Cisco News Stories Of 2025

The tech giant unveiled sweeping changes to its partner strategy, including revealing long-awaited details of the new program, Cisco 360, and a new channel chief, not to mention a headful of executive leadership team additions and departures, massive AI investment and three acquisitions.

It’s never a boring year when you’re Cisco Systems. This year, however, was exceptionally jam-packed as the company made executive leadership team changes, massive AI investments, and slowly rolled out its new partner program in the biggest remodel in the history of the company’s iconic program that’s been beloved by partners for decades.

The executive leadership team underwent a shake-up this year when Cisco President Gary Steele resigned in April after less than a year in the role. However, the seat was quickly filled by a face that’s well-known and loved by the channel community: Oliver Tuszik. But as far as departures were concerned, the change-up wasn’t even the biggest headline for partners. Instead, Cisco late this summer revealed that Rodney Clark, the company’s channel chief of less than two years, was leaving the company. Partners received a new leader in the form of Tim Coogan, Cisco’s former senior vice president of U.S. commercial business, who took over for Clark in August.

And speaking of channel changes, the tech giant over the course of this year began to reveal long-awaited details about Cisco 360, its completely overhauled partner program that’s set to launch early next year with a mission to simplify the complex previous partner structure with a focus on profitability and predictability for partners of all sizes.

While leadership changes were being made and partner program details were ironed out, there was even more happening in the form of aggressive AI investments and acquisitions, as well as innovation and technology product launches. Here are the 10 biggest Cisco stories of 2025.

10. Aggressive AI Investments

Cisco in 2025 continued to significantly increase its investments and strategic initiatives around AI, building on its 2024 promise to place its bets on AI to the tune of $1billion. One way the tech giant is doing that is by investing heavily in AI startups via its Cisco Investments funding arm.

Cisco in April revealed an investment into one-year-old startup Gruve.ai, a Redwood City, Calif.-based startup that the tech giant called an emerging “visionary” in helping enterprises harness outcome-based AI solutions. In February, Cisco revealed it had teamed with one of its investment companies, two-year-old French AI startup Mistral AI, for the creation of an AI agent that the two companies said will cut down on product renewal times for Cisco’s own renewal team.

Later in the fall, Cisco revealed an investment into one-year-old Fleak.ai, a startup that specializes in simplifying complex data workflows using AI. In November, the company announced it was investing in World Labs, a spatial intelligence AI startup that aims to accelerate the development of Large World Models to power AI systems that can perceive, understand and interact with the physical world in 3-D, the company said.

9. Cisco Partner Leader Alexandra Zagury Jumps To Microsoft

In October, partner experience and sales leader Zagury revealed that she was leaving Cisco after close to 11 years of working side-by-side with its channel partners.

Zagury updated her LinkedIn account to show that she joined Redmond, Wash.-based artificial intelligence and cloud tools vendor Microsoft as corporate vice president of global channel sales.

Leaving Cisco “wasn’t an easy decision,” Zagury said in her post that announced her departure from the San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant. “Cisco has been more than a company for me; it’s been a life-changing journey. Over the years I’ve had the privilege to move countries, take on very different roles, learn from incredible leaders and colleagues, and chase bold, transformative ideas, thank you to those who stood by me through it all.”

Zagury left Cisco with the title of vice president of global partner operations and platform experience. She was instrumental in helping to integrate Splunk’s channel sales and ecosystem into Cisco, which helped her be honored as a Power 100 executive on CRN’s 2025 Women of the Channel list and named to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chief list.

8. AI Canvas Revealed

First revealed on the main stage of Cisco Live 2025 in June, the tech giant unveiled AI Canvas, a generative AI user interface for customer dashboards that lets NetOps, SecOps and DevOps teams collaborate and optimize operations while reducing IT strain, according to the company.

Cisco is building out its “AgenticOps” strategy, the company's approach to running modern IT operations that turns real-time telemetry, automation and domain expertise into intelligent actions. The main tool in its toolbelt for that purpose is AI Canvas. AI Canvas uses Cisco’s Deep Network model, one of the most advanced networking LLMs that has been fine-tuned and trained on more than four decades of Cisco expertise, from CCIE-level content to Cisco U. courseware, and the data is always being vetted for accuracy and will continuously learn based on telemetry that Cisco will constantly provide, the company said.

AI Canvas is currently part of Cisco’s unified management platform that now brings together management of Meraki and Catalyst devices in one platform that supports any cloud, on-premises or hybrid deployment that a business chooses. In October, Cisco announced that AI Canvas will be brought into Webex Control Hub, Cisco’s central interface for collaboration management. The company also said in November when it announced plans to buy NeuralFabric that the company’s technology will work with AI Canvas.

7. Three Acquisitions In 2025

Cisco in the second half of the year—and entirely within the company’s fiscal 2026 year— announced three different acquisitions, two with one thing in common: AI.

First, Cisco in August revealed that it was the new owner of Aura Asset Intelligence, an Asset and Risk Intelligence offering purpose-built as a Splunk app and developed by Discovered Intelligence, a privately held Ontario, Canada-based data observability and security specialist.

In November, the company announced its intention to buy enterprise AI platform company NeuralFabric Corp. as Cisco continues to grow its generative AI prowess. Seattle-based NeuralFabric, which was founded in 2023 by former Microsoft engineers, has “cracked” the code on data sovereignty as a challenge to AI adoption, said DJ Sampath, vice president of product, AI software and platform for Cisco, in a blog post about the acquisition.

The very next day, Cisco revealed its intent to acquire EzDubs, a specialist in real-time, AI-driven speech-to-speech translation. The company’s offering instantly translates conversations across 31 languages—not just words, but tone, intent and other speech characteristics, before the sentence is even completed, the companies said. Cisco plans on integrating EzDubs’ team and technology into the Cisco Collaboration business unit once the deal closes, the company said.

Financial terms of the three deals were not disclosed.

6. Cisco Layoffs To Total More Than 200 In Bay Area

The tech giant at the start of its fiscal 2026 in August announced that it was cutting 221 workers from its Milpitas, Calif., campus and at its site in San Francisco.

Cisco revealed in two August Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filings in the state of California that its latest job cuts would include 157 employees in Milpitas and 64 roles being eliminated in San Francisco. The cuts, which included a variety of roles ranging from junior to vice president titles, would be complete by Oct. 13, according to the WARN notices.

The news of the job cuts came on the heels of former channel chief Clark’s announced departure from the company.

Job cuts for Cisco have typically come at the start of the company’s new fiscal year. The company in August 2024 cited AI among the reasons it was cutting 7 percent of its workforce at the time.

5. Surpassing $1B in AI Infrastructure Deals

Cisco saw record-breaking AI infrastructure orders placed during its 2025 fiscal year, which set the stage for the tech giant’s strong start to its fiscal 2026 that began at the end of July.

The AI infrastructure orders Cisco received from web-scale customers exceeded $800 million during the company’s final quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, bringing the total to over $2 billion in Fiscal Year 2025, which was more than double the company’s original $1 billion target it originally announced at the end of 2024.

The record ordering, according to Cisco Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins (pictured), demonstrated “the undeniable capability and relevance of our technology for multiple back-end use cases with some of the most technologically advanced customers.” Enterprise demand, he said, is steadily increasing.

The AI infrastructure orders Cisco received from web-scale customers totaled $1.3 billion during the company’s first quarter of its fiscal 2026 year, which ended Oct. 25. Robbins said that Cisco expects to recognize roughly $3 billion in AI infrastructure revenue from hyperscalers in Fiscal Year 2026.

4. Tuszik Named Chief Sales Officer

It’s safe to say that Cisco’s executive leadership team is now stacked with former channel leaders. The tech giant in April announced that Tuszik, Cisco’s beloved former global channel chief and EMEA president, would join the top ranks of Cisco as executive vice president of global sales and chief sales officer. Tuszik took over for Steele.

Tuszik served as Cisco’s Europe, Middle East and Africa region president since August 2023. The channel veteran spent the previous five years as senior vice president of global partner sales and routes to market for Cisco. Before that, Tuszik served as vice president and general manager of Cisco Germany for five years. Tuszik joined Cisco in 2013 after nearly 10 years at Computacenter Germany, with five of those years as CEO. U.K.-based Computacenter is one of Cisco’s largest channel partners. He headed Computacenter’s networking business before becoming CEO.

3. Cisco President Steele Departs; Executive Leadership Team Shake-Up

The start of Cisco's executive leadership shake-up began with Steele, the former CEO of Splunk before the mammoth acquisition, resigned as of April 25 after less than a year in the role.

Following the close of the $28 billion Splunk acquisition in March 2024, Steele (pictured) joined the ranks as Cisco’s president of go-to-market in May 2024. Prior to his time as Splunk’s leader for two years, Steele also founded and served as CEO of Proofpoint, taking the company to IPO and eventually achieving an enterprise value of $12 billion. Steele in May joined drone and defense technology startup Shield AI as the company’s CEO, taking over for Shield AI’s co-founder and CEO Ryan Tseng, who transitioned into the president role to focus on driving senior-level engagement with the U.S. and foreign policy and defense leaders, as well as with aerospace and defense companies, according to the San Diego-based upstart.

A month later, Cisco announced that its CFO of about five years, Scott Herren, would retire at the end of the company’s 2025 fiscal year in July and Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President Mark Patterson would step in as CFO. Along with the CFO transition, Cisco announced that then-executive vice president and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel would be promoted to president and chief product officer.

2. Cisco 360 Details Revealed

The tech giant took to Cisco Partner Summit 2025 in November to reveal long-awaited details about Cisco 360.

The mission of Cisco 360 is to simplify the complex previous partner structure with a focus on profitability and predictability for partners of all sizes. New features, such as the Partner Value Index (PVI) and the Cisco Partner Incentive (CPI), will measure and reward the investments that partners are making in Cisco’s broad portfolio. The program has been a work in progress since Cisco 360 was first announcedat Partner Summit 2024. Since then, the program has gone through many changes based on “thousands” of hours spent with partners collecting feedback on the new program, channel chief Coogan said.

The CPI will include an Eligible Offers list and rebate rates designed to incentivize adoption in several innovation areas—campus refresh, AI, security and premium services, and adopt and renew. The Cisco Partner Incentive Estimator, a way for partners to model their earnings, was launched later in November after Partner Summit. Partners can use the Estimator to unlock two additional bonuses—the Cross Sell Bonus, which rewards portfolio breadth, and a Next Generation Specialization Bonus, which rewards deep expertise or greater value and predictable growth, according to Cisco.

In the spring, Cisco revealed that it would adjust the Cisco Services Partner Program payouts and retire the Monthly Value Rebate for Cisco Success Tracks on July 27. The company also said that it would introduce the CPI in February 2026, which will replace multiple siloed partner programs and incentives such as VIP, Perform Plus and the Cisco Services Partner Program. Then on July 1, the tech giant released some highly anticipated details into how partners will be evaluated and compensated in Cisco 360 exclusively to CRN.

One of the missions of Cisco 360 is simplifying the company’s existing partner program structure down from 22 specializations and 15 business units to now focusing on six portfolios: networking; security; cloud and AI infrastructure; Splunk; collaboration; and services. Cisco in June released updated Value Index positions across all six portfolios.

Cisco partners, for their part, were initially critical of some of the program's changes. Namely, many Cisco partners are leery of the illustrious Cisco Gold partner designation being eliminated in the new program. In its place will be two new designations: Cisco Partner and Cisco Preferred Partner.

Cisco 360 is slated to go live on Jan. 25, 2026, coinciding with the end of the company’s second fiscal quarter 2026.

1. A New Channel Chief For Cisco

In perhaps the biggest executive shake-up for partners from Cisco this year, the company in August revealed that Clark was leaving the company. Effective at the same time, Coogan picked up the channel mantle.

Coogan, who was named senior vice president of global partner sales at the end of the summer, is a Cisco veteran who has held a number of positions at the company over the last 25 years. News of Coogan’s appointment had partners energized about the future of the tech giant’s channel strategy. Cisco partners at the time told CRN that Coogan “gets it” and that he was “outstanding” and a “great choice” to lead the company's channel efforts.

Coogan told CRN in October that he has been leveraging his extensive experience with the company to craft his own go-to-market strategy “shoulder to shoulder” with partners, an effort that will continue into 2026 with the rollout of the completely reimagined Cisco 360 partner program.