Cisco 360 Gets An Incentive Boost As Cisco Pushes Partners Toward AI, Cross-Architecture Sales

Nine months into Cisco 360, Cisco is increasing incentives and adding new capabilities aimed at rewarding partner growth, Cisco IQ adoption and cross-architecture selling, underscoring the networking giant’s promise to continually adjust the program as the market changes.

The evolving nine-month-old Cisco 360 partner program now has more incentives and features to help partners go after AI opportunities, Cisco revealed this week.

True to the partner team’s word, Cisco 360 wasn’t a one-time overhaul that resulted in a fixed program, but rather a platform designed to adjust as quickly as the market, including where and how Cisco incentivizes partners.

“The beauty of Cisco 360 is that it’s a platform, and it’s built for agility and speed,” Elisabeth De Dobbeleer, senior vice president, Cisco global partner program go-to-market, told CRN at Cisco Partner Summit 2026 in Vancouver. “It’s like a mutual exchange of, [partners] are moving, and because they’re moving now, we have to move.”

Cisco 360’s new incentives are aimed at rewarding the contributions of every partner type, while promoting the adoption of Cisco IQ. To that end, Cisco is creating dedicated paths for Advisors and Developer partners through new Partner Value Indexes (PVI) for those partner types, as well as plans for a unified distributor PVI by spring 2027, according to Cisco.

[Related: NTT Data Expands AI Factories With Cisco To Take Enterprise AI From Pilot To Production: Exclusive]

The tech giant is also increasing several Cisco Partner Incentive (CPI) rates, including a 50 percent increase in the ACV growth reward and doubling Adopt incentives across all use cases. The company is adding a 2 percent cross-sell bonus for Preferred and Portfolio partners expanding accounts into new Cisco architectures, including Splunk, while launching a new Cisco IQ Adopt incentive aimed at rewarding partners for onboarding customers and connecting their telemetry.

The all-important Partner Experience Platform, or PXP, is getting a flurry of new capabilities, including real-time deal registration visibility and new PVI APIs for tracking trends and eligibility. A new CPI Deal Estimator will let partners model deal economics and potential rebate yield for each opportunity.

Cisco is also rolling out the beta version of One Cisco Content Agent, an agentic AI resource that helps partner sellers and marketers find approved Cisco content and create customized, co-branded customer presentations. On the security front, Learn with Cisco is adding a new OT Security Practitioner certification and releasing Cisco Modeling Labs 2.11 with hands-on lab capabilities, the company said.

The expanded partner program, alongside the general availability of Cisco IQ for Partners, is so far living up to the hype, said Mark Graham, senior vice president of partner business development for Irvine, Calif.-based Cisco Partner Trace3.

“We analyzed and overanalyzed what we thought it was going to do, and in terms of profitability for the partner ecosystem, it’s been really good for us … The cross-sell opportunity is a motion we’re working on anyways, and now Cisco is going to reward us for that,” he said.

Cisco recognizes that its partners’ priorities, including profitability, should also be priorities for the company, but not every vendor has the maturity to deliver on that promise, Graham said.

“Cisco probably as well as better than any other partner aligns our financial incentives with their financial incentives, which is brilliant,” he said.

For World Wide Technology (WWT), one of Cisco’s largest partners, adapting to Cisco 360 required changes on both sides. WWT invested in the cross-architecture specializations Cisco was pushing, while Cisco made adjustments after the solution provider raised concerns about areas where the new program could hurt its profitability, said Neil Anderson, vice president and CTO of cloud, infrastructure, and AI solutions for WWT.

“We’ve done everything Cisco’s asked, including the specializations … Those specializations were critical for our profitability. They’re already now adding millions to our bottom line because of the incentives to go get those.”

Cisco 360 is doing what the company said it wanted to do from the start of the new program, and that’s to push partners toward cross-architecture capabilities, he said.

“With the specializations, you can’t just be a networking partner or a cyber partner... If you’re going to be a Cisco partner at the top tier, you’ve got to understand the whole architecture,” he said. “We had to bring together our network practice, our data center practice, our cyber practice, our observability and AI practices. All had to work jointly on [the specialization]. So, in a way, it was a little bit of a forcing function for our teams to start talking more,” he said.

While things like the PVI and the portfolios will remain stable inside Cisco 360, there’s room to continually adjust incentives as the market demands, as evidenced by Cisco’s partner program updates announced this week, said De Dobbeleer (pictured).

“I don’t want to ever be done with Cisco 360,” she said.