‘We just have to get it right. I think the balance we have to strike is rewarding those partners who build businesses across our portfolio, who really represent the platform approach to our customers, but also recognizing that you’re going to have partners that are going to go super deep in a certain area, and you need them to be successful as well,’ Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said in an exclusive interview with CRN about Cisco 360 at Partner Summit 2025.
With more than three decades of IT experience, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins is no stranger at all to technology transitions. But the tech giant’s leader of nearly 10 years is not mincing words when he calls AI the biggest technology opportunity of his lifetime, jokingly noting that he also lived through the dot-com boom of the 1990s.
Robbins spent the first half of his tenure as CEO steering the company, known for its networking hardware, toward software and services. Now, it’s all about AI. But because Cisco does about 90 percent of its business through the channel, the company needs partners to come along on the journey.
To that end, Cisco last year revealed that it was revamping its nearly 30-year-old iconic channel program. The resulting new program, Cisco 360, which the company said has been co-designed with the help of partners, will roll out January 25, 2026. The purpose of the new program is to support and reward Cisco partners that are moving toward more durable growth and helping their customers modernize in the age of AI.
The partner-customer relationship, said Robbins, has never been more valuable or important.
Robbins sat down with CRN at Cisco Partner Summit 2025 this week in San Diego to talk about Cisco 360, the massive AI opportunity waiting for partners, and how Cisco’s platform approach to the market has never been more relevant as customers adopt new technologies and overhaul their infrastructures to support the next generation of IT.
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