You Asked for More Money and More Time. Here’s Both.

The Partner Payload at Partner Summit 2026

Every year before Partner Summit, I ask partners the same question: what would make the biggest difference to your business? This year, the answers came down to two things. Help us make more money. And give us back our time.

That’s what we built this year’s announcements around. Here’s what’s new, and what it means for you.

Every partner gets credit for the value they create

Customers rarely buy from just one partner. An advisor shapes the decision. A developer builds the solution. A reseller delivers it, and a distributor makes it all possible at scale. Until now, our program mostly saw the partner who closed the deal.

That changes with Ecosystem Deal Registration. Advisors and developers can now be formally recognized for the work that leads to a transaction, even when they don’t transact it themselves. Advisor and Developer Partner Value Indexes are available now, and a unified Distributor PVI follows in early 2027. Every partner type now has its own path to grow with Cisco.

More ways to earn across the customer lifecycle

The biggest profit opportunity isn’t a single richer transaction. It’s the full customer relationship: land, adopt, expand and renew. So we’re putting more money behind every stage of it.

• Growth pays more. We’re increasing the ACV growth reward by 50%.
• Adoption pays double. Adopt rewards are nearly doubling across all use cases, with new Adopt incentives on Cisco IQ and Enterprise Agreement activation.
• Expansion pays extra. Preferred and Portfolio partners earn an additional 2% on top of the existing Cross Sell Bonus when they take a customer into a new Cisco architecture. That includes the Splunk portfolio.

Your services business, powered by Cisco IQ

Cisco IQ for Partners is now generally available. This is about what you can earn after the sale.

If you run managed services, the new Cisco IQ MCP server and expanded APIs let you build Cisco intelligence into your own services, workflows and AI agents. You can query a customer’s entire estate in seconds, spot emerging risks, and plan their modernization.

If you’re a reseller, customers can now give you secure, direct visibility into their installed base. No more waiting for exported reports. You walk into every conversation already knowing where the risks and the refresh opportunities are.

New Cisco IQ playbooks for quantum-safe readiness and software end of vulnerability support, along with priority bug and software conformance assessments, give you more reasons to start those conversations.

Less time on admin, more time with customers

We know complexity costs you money. This year we’ve invested in tools that give you hours back.

• Deal registration visibility in PXP shows your pipeline health in real time.
• New Partner Value Index APIs let you track eligibility and performance in your own systems.
• The new Cisco Partner Incentive (CPI) Deal Estimator lets you model the economics of a deal before you close it.
• A new AI Content Agent (in beta) helps your sellers and marketers build customized, co-branded presentations in minutes.

New technology to sell

AI is pushing networks to their limits, and every customer needs help keeping up. Cisco Cloud Control brings people and AI agents together on one platform to manage and secure their infrastructure. Partners get first access to several new capabilities:

• Model Foundry starts its controlled availability with Cloud Control partners.
• MCP servers for our networking platforms let you build automated troubleshooting and reporting without custom integrations.
• The industry’s first quantum-safe Wi-Fi 7 access point opens the door to quantum-readiness assessments.
• Live Protect now covers more platforms, so you can help customers shield vulnerabilities before they can patch, with zero downtime.

For your teams, the new Cisco OT Security Practitioner certification helps you build skills where IT, OT and security come together.

What to do next

Here’s where I’d start this week:

• Register your first ecosystem deal if you advise or build on Cisco.
• Model your next big deal in the CPI Deal Estimator.
• Get your customers connected to Cisco IQ so you can see what they need before they ask.

Partners told us what would help them most, and we listened. Now let’s go build something together.

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