Cisco Partners Chase AI Services Growth as Trust Gap Opens

Nearly 90 per cent of Cisco's global revenue now flows through partners, and in Asia Pacific, Japan and China the figure reaches 94 per cent, Cisco SVP of global partner sales Tim Coogan said. In Australia and New Zealand, the share is close to 100 per cent. Those numbers frame a channel pivot: away from infrastructure refresh cycles and toward AI governance, security controls and modernisation services.

"We have to lead every conversation with AI and security," Coogan said. "They are simply not separate."

How is the Cisco 360 program reshaping partner economics?

Coogan said partners adopting the Cisco 360 partner program are reporting stronger business outcomes and are rethinking investment plans accordingly.

"Partners that lean into 360 are making the same or more," he said. "Partners who have attempted to do things exactly the way they've always done them have found it to be a little bit more of a challenge."

Data#3 chief customer officer John Tan said the program accelerated investment in emerging growth areas such as Splunk, the Cisco-owned observability and security platform.

"The Cisco 360 shift was quite monumental for us," Tan said. "Splunk is an example of that where we didn't have a strong Splunk capability, but we saw the opportunity through the programme, but also through the market and through the whole portfolio."

Tan said the shift drove new investment in certifications, engineering skills and service offerings, and aligned Data#3's strategy with changing customer demand.

What do Cloud Control and Cisco IQ change for MSPs?

Cisco positions its Cisco IQ and Cloud Control platforms as the tools that let managed service providers move from infrastructure monitoring into optimisation, advisory and business-outcome services.

"With Cloud Control and with IQ, you can then use it to optimise what you've already purchased," Coogan said. "It will change what managed services you deliver."

Cisco managing director for the South region, Rodney Hamill, said the strategy reduces MSP operational overhead while creating capacity for higher-value services.

"The more they enable these tools, the more service they can get out, the more customers they can attract, more customers they can reach, and the more efficient they can deliver it," Hamill said.

Logicalis Australia general manager Lisa Fortey cited the company's annual CIO study, which found 94 per cent of CIOs expect to rely on managed service providers over the next three years to manage growing technology complexity.

"By adopting Cloud Control and Cisco IQ, the ability for partners like us to multiply the opportunity with our customers and really add value as a managed service provider is significant," she said.

Where are customers stalling on AI?

The Logicalis CIO report found 94 per cent of CIOs surveyed had an AI ambition, but only 32 per cent had a strategy.

"They're really concerned about governance. There's a lot of shadow AI going on in customers' businesses," Fortey said.

Outcomex CEO Michael van Zoggel compared current conditions to the early days of cloud adoption.

"There doesn't seem to be common good practice or best practice in terms of delivery of service and certainly consumption of service," he said. "Governance control, cost control, and the lack of good practice or best practice in terms of methodology for use is where we're at."

He warned that growing east-west traffic flows and increasingly complex AI architectures mean customers underestimate future network requirements.

"We know that network load is going to increase, we know that control needs to increase, and we know that we can't stop agility," van Zoggel said. "This next transformation of the network will absolutely hold that back."

ArchiTech founder and managing director Rob Russell said organisations are already modernising around zero trust principles, micro segmentation and secure access service edge (SASE) architectures.

"On the AI side, I'm seeing a lot of caution in our client base where people are building their AI practices," Russell said. "Our actual customer base though seems to be experimenting and still grappling with governance and compliance."

What does the Permission to Scale report find?

Cisco's Permission to Scale report, based on interviews and surveys with 25 Australian organisations including AustralianSuper, Flight Centre Travel Group, Culture Amp, Funlab and Lendi Group, found fewer than half of respondents were highly confident their technology, governance and workforce foundations were ready for more autonomous AI deployments.

Respondents identified security and privacy breaches as the biggest threats to trust. More than half said their infrastructure requires upgrades before it can support next-generation AI workloads.

The findings point to partner opportunity in AI governance, security controls, infrastructure modernisation and AI readiness services as customers move from experimentation toward agentic AI (systems that act autonomously toward goals).

"If you're selling them as two separate things, you've kind of already lost the conversation and opportunity," Fortey said of networking and security.

What did Cisco announce?

Cisco unveiled new AI Defense, Splunk and Cisco IQ capabilities aimed at securing, governing and monitoring AI deployments at scale.

The vendor plans to integrate Anthropic's Claude Mythos into Cisco AI Defense, enabling enterprises to run advanced red-teaming exercises (simulated attacks on AI systems) against AI applications and agents before production deployment.

Cisco also expanded Splunk's Agent Observability platform with new Tokenomics capabilities. These connect AI spend directly to business outcomes, letting organisations assess whether AI investments deliver returns.