Cisco has officially launched the Cisco 360 Partner Program, introducing a new way partners are evaluated, ranked, and surfaced to customers. After 15 months of redesign, the program replaces Cisco’s long-standing tiered partner model with a capability and outcome-focused approach.
Why it matters: This is more than a program refresh. Cisco is moving away from familiar Gold/Silver/Select tiers toward designations based on lifecycle delivery, services, and measured value. For customers, partner status will no longer be a simple proxy for scale or revenue, but instead meant to signal how well a partner can design, deploy, and operate modern networks in areas like AI infrastructure, security, and resilience - all of which are areas Cisco is looking to grow its market share.
What’s happening:
Cisco replaced traditional partner tiers with Registered, Portfolio, and Preferred designations
Partner recognition now emphasizes services, adoption, and ongoing engagement, not just sales volume
A new Partner Locator highlights partners by capability across Cisco portfolios
Partners will receive a PVI measurement or score in each of the core architectures that Cisco has identified: security, networking, collaboration, services, Splunk, cloud, and AI infrastructure.
The primary incentive structure will follow the Cisco Partner Incentive, or CPI, which measures partners across four areas: foundational, capabilities, performance, and engagement.
What’s next: Customers may need to rethink how they evaluate partners. Two partners that once shared the same tier may now look very different depending on services, specialization, and operational maturity. If executed well, this shift could make partner selection more aligned to real deployment needs rather than legacy rankings.—
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