Cisco’s Centoni: Cisco IQ Will Turn ‘One-And-Done’ Deals Into Recurring Partner Business

Cisco IQ has been extended to partners with a new white-label option and AI and risk intelligence capabilities aimed at helping them build differentiated managed services and create revenue opportunities beyond the initial sale, according to the company and its partners.

Cisco Systems is positioning Cisco IQ for Partners, now generally available, as a platform that solution providers can use to identify customer risk, uncover refresh opportunities, sell support contracts, build managed services and generate recurring revenue, the tech giant revealed Monday.

Now, Cisco is putting Cisco IQ directly in partners’ hands by allowing partners to white-label it under their own brands to supercharge their recurring services revenue, the company announced at Partner Summit 2026 in Vancouver, Canada.

“With Cisco IQ, we are changing the approach of one-and-done deals into a recurring business [for] partners,” the company’s executive vice president and chief customer experience officer, Liz Centoni, told CRN.

[Related: Cisco Wants To Be The 'Switzerland' Of Enterprise AI]

By extending Cisco IQ to partners, the company aims to help solution providers build managed services and pursue new opportunities after the initial sale. It’s doing so through APIs and role-based access providing direct insight into customer risks and modernization needs.

Cisco’s primary support portfolio includes three tiers—Basic, Standard and Signature—which are delivered digitally through Cisco IQ. While Cisco’s Basic service tier provides visibility, or the “map,” said Centoni, the Standard and Signature tiers add AI-powered actions, vulnerability prioritization and proactive risk intelligence to help customers identify and address risks more effectively—the “GPS”—she added.

Centoni said the visibility offered through its Standard and Signature service tiers helps partners uncover weak points within a customer environment and creates opportunities to deliver high-margin remediation services.

“They can now build their managed services using the same deep insights that Cisco sees with IQ,” she said.

Partners Eye Cisco IQ For Deeper Insight, Managed Services

By extending Cisco IQ to partners, the door will be open to new opportunities after a deal closes. And that’s by design. Cisco wants partners using Cisco IQ to drive services-led engagements rather than simply selling hardware, said Cisco channel chief Tim Coogan.

“Cisco IQ will become a really, really powerful tool in the bag of our partners,” Coogan said. “[Think of it] not as a product, but as a platform that our partners can use to deliver new services revenues, new capabilities, and a different kind of buying and use experience for our clients.”

In the six months since Cisco IQ became generally available, the company has about 16,000 customers, from small businesses to the largest hyperscalers, using the platform on a global basis, said Vikas Butaney, Cisco senior vice president of customer experience product management

“Partners are the centerpiece of our strategy, and we are going to take all of these insights and capabilities of IQ and put [them] at their fingertips,” he said.

While Cisco is positioning Cisco IQ as a key pillar of its AI-driven services strategy, partners are looking for the platform to deliver deeper customer insight and managed services capabilities that can help drive recurring revenue.

Cisco IQ could give partners better visibility into customer environments and stronger security intelligence and support for managed services, said Lane Irvine, director of strategic alliances for Calgary, Alberta-based Long View Systems, a longtime Cisco partner.

“The important IQ news is [around] how are we going to get better insights for our customers? How are we going to give them more security information and security insights? ... And multitenancy, [which is] a big one for managed services partners," Irvine said.

Cisco IQ and Cloud Control, the company’s unified platform for agentic AI that spans its networking, security, collaboration and observability portfolios, will go hand in hand, he added.

Cisco, for its part, on Monday introduced a handful of new Cisco IQ capabilities for customers and partners, including frictionless integration with Cisco Cloud Control. Other features include AI-powered quantum safe and software end of vulnerability support playbooks to help identify risks beyond routine patching, priority bugs and software conformance assessments, and Cisco IQ AI Assistant enhancements that are based on contextual, real-time data with troubleshooting that’s powered by Cisco Technical Assistance Center knowledge, according to the tech giant.

Cisco IQ’s extension to the partner community is a boon to solution providers that already see the platform addressing customers’ AI needs, said Mark Graham, senior vice president of partner business development for Irvine, Calif.-based Cisco partner Trace3.

“The value prop Cisco demonstrated with Cisco IQ is real for our clients. It’s real for today’s environment, especially with all the frontier AI going on. I think the partner community is going to adopt it really well,” he said.