With its deep expertise and global reach, Cisco’s partner ecosystem plays a critical role in the company’s success — and that of its customers.

So, the annual Partner Summit event, held this week in San Diego, was an opportunity to celebrate those partnerships — along with breakthrough innovations, and the massive opportunities that lie ahead.

Of course, those opportunities — and the challenges they bring — are linked to AI. And Cisco chair and CEO Chuck Robbins made a compelling case for the company’s unique ability to help customers capture AI value.

“There is no AI without a network, and no AI without a secure network,” Robbins stressed to a crowd of 2,000 partner representatives, industry analysts, and press — plus, thousands more online. “None of our security competitors have networking, and none of our networking competitors have security. This is something that only we can do together."

Add in end-to-end infrastructure, a powerful AI stack, the transformative power of Cisco Splunk, AI-native collaboration, optics, and much more, and Cisco and its partners are well positioned to capture the AI value at stake.

Because in the AI era, customers are navigating one of the greatest technology and market transitions ever — with an opportunity that many estimates measure in the trillions of dollars. But as Robbins cited, the Cisco-led 2025 AI Readiness Index revealed that only 28% of organizations believe their infrastructure can handle AI workloads.

Happily, Cisco and its partners are ready to help.

The next era of AI, and how to thrive in it

Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s president and chief product officer, continued on the theme of today’s technology transition and its profound implications.

“The next era of AI is here,” Patel said. “And it's probably one of the most interesting times in tech that any of us has lived through. Because we're moving from this world of chatbots that intelligently answered our questions — that felt like magic three years ago — to agents that conduct tasks and jobs almost fully autonomously on behalf of humans.”

To meet the challenges to come with agentic AI, Patel added, customers need to excel in three key areas: AI-ready data centers, future-proofed workplaces, and digitally resilient infrastructure. And they need to cut complexity and ensure security and resilience.

Cisco can make it all happen.

“We help customers build out AI ready data centers because that's where the digital workers are going to live. We help them build out future-proofed workplaces because that's where the human workers are going to live. And then we need to make sure that the infrastructure that we provide is resilient so that if you do have an outage, you don't spend time figuring out where the outage is,” said Patel. “We can make sure that the response and remediation happen in a very compressed amount of time. Because the absence of resilience is extinction.”

To that end, Patel outlined key solutions and new innovations that enable organizations to capture the value that comes with solidifying those three key elements.

These include:

• AI-ready data centers with high-performance networking and security tightly integrated into the infrastructure. For instance, innovations like the 8223 router, powered by the latest generation P200 Silicon One, for scale-out networking between geographically distributed data centers, while using less energy.
• Security that’s fused directly into the data center network fabric. This includes the new Cisco Nexus 9300 series smart switches, featuring embedded Data Processing units (DPUs) to steer data traffic with high efficiency, while providing firewall and security services at line-rate performance.
• Integrated AI stacks for enterprises, including Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA.  
• Cisco’s new Unified Edge platform that combines compute, storage, networking, and security into one platform for deploying AI applications at the network edge.
• Digital Resilience solutions that leverage Cisco Splunk to provide deep observability, accelerated incident response, and AI-powered remediation across the entire infrastructure.
• AI Canvas, a generative user interface that manages agentic AI with real-time insights and telemetry to easily troubleshoot issues as they arise.
• Cisco Security Cloud Control allows customers to manage security products and achieve security outcomes from a single integrated interface.

Patel also drilled down on the tremendous impact Splunk is having on the entire Cisco portfolio.

“This is a massive opportunity ahead of us,” Patel said of Cisco and Splunk. “Just as you can think about Cisco as the critical infrastructure for the AI era, Splunk is the machine-data fabric for the AI era.”

Of course, security was also given the critical attention it demands.

“If you don't trust these systems, you're not going to use them,” Patel stressed. "Security is a prerequisite for adoption, and it's a prerequisite for productivity.”

“That’s why we fuse security into the fabric of the network,” he continued. “And the reason this is so important is you can no longer be secure if security is a thing that's an afterthought. It has to be fused into the fabric of the network.”

At the heart of Cisco's success: partners

Of course, Partner Summit is all about partners. And Tim Coogan, Cisco’s SVP of global partner sales, put a spotlight on the critical role that partners play. He cited that 90% of Cisco's revenue comes through partners, and that by 2030, partner-delivered AI services will be a $267 billion market, representing a major growth opportunity.

Coogan also acknowledged the pressure that Cisco partners are under in the AI era.

“We're asking you to sell solutions that might not have existed three months ago,” he said,
“to solve problems our customers didn't even know they had six months ago. That's not hyperbole. That's the pace of innovation in the AI era.”

Coogan then shared Cisco’s commitment to an agile partner ecosystem that can react and adapt quickly, continuously innovate, and scale efficiently through the Cisco partner platform and ecosystem. The Cisco 360 Partner Program, with its new incentive programs, bonuses, and training, is designed to help partners and customers get the most out of Cisco innovations.

“Networking plus security, plus observability, plus collaboration, plus Splunk,” Coogan said, addressing the multitude of partners. “You are the ones that turn that into customer outcomes. The Cisco 360 Partner Program is built for this agility.”

Dave West, SVP for global specialists at Cisco, spelled out the magnitude of the opportunity at stake for Cisco’s partners.

“The opportunity is big; it’s massive” he said, “Campus and branch data -enter refresh is a $40 billion opportunity in the next few years for Cisco. The added value for partners is easily six times that. That's $240 billion of opportunity around the world.”

Gold-standard partners and next-level customer experience

Cisco’s innovative partnership with AMD shows what two giants in their respective areas — networking and compute — can accomplish together. And in a conversation with Robbins, AMD chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su lauded Cisco as a “gold-standard” partner.

She then laid out the challenges that customers face today. And how much they need support from vendors like Cisco and AMD. 

“Being able to really understand what problem the customer's trying to solve and then be able to package solutions such that the adoption curve is easier, I think is the primary thing that we can do as technology providers,” she said. “We need to reduce the friction of new technology adoption.”

Along the lines of reducing friction, Cisco is driving a full-on transformation in how it delivers professional services and support. This includes industry-leading agentic AI that engages with users in highly intuitive ways, offering real-time insights that are predictive, not just proactive.

Cisco’s newest innovation in this area is Cisco IQ, a unified AI-powered interface that brings together real-time insights, on-demand assessments, troubleshooting, personalized learning, automation and agents. The result? A single, simplified source for real-time help in planning, deploying, managing, securing, and optimizing technology investments.

Liz Centoni, Cisco’s EVP and chief customer experience officer, called Cisco IQ "our boldest step yet in reimagining how customers interact with Cisco.” And she took the stage at Partner Summit to further extol its transformative capabilities.

“Cisco IQ,” Centoni explained, “saves customers time and effort by consolidating insights and automating routine tasks. Second, it reduces their risk exposure. They're no longer reacting to issues but anticipating and preventing them right away. You land on a single dynamic intuitive interface that is AI powered, giving you real actionable insights across every layer of our customers' Cisco environment.”

“It's a command center,” she added, “that’s designed to catch problems before they grow and uncover optimization opportunities you never knew existed.”

From networking and security to observability and customer experience, Cisco showed that great innovation needs great partners — to keep that direct customer connection, empower users, and provide real-world feedback.

“One of the smartest decisions we've ever made as a company,” Patel concluded, “is to bet on our partners. And my commitment to all of you is that one of the smartest decisions you'll ever have made is to bet on Cisco.”