AI, security tailwinds signal promising 2026 for Cisco

Opinion by Zeus Kerravala, Network World

In many ways, 2025 was the year Cisco got its product strategy right under the leadership of its chief product officer, Jeetu Patel. Splunk assimilation took hold, and we saw integrations with security, observability, networking and more. In addition, the core of Cisco's product line—campus networking—underwent a major refresh with new Catalyst Smart Switches and Wi-Fi 7 access points. And after having made bold predictions about how AI would create a significant lift for the company, Cisco blew by its original target of $1 billion for AI infrastructure and ultimately rallied to more than $2 billion. All of this led to its stock price reaching levels not seen since the dot-com boom.

As the new year kicks off, continued execution is critical. Here's what customers, partners, and the rest of the industry should expect from Cisco in 2026.

AI infrastructure: Edge and physical AI

Cisco expects its AI infrastructure business to generate roughly $3 billion in revenue in 2026. However, the opportunity for Cisco could be much larger than that as AI will create significant traffic pattern changes. Agentic AI agents generate up to 25x more network traffic than simple chatbots. Also, physical AI is coming, and it will drive increased inferencing traffic at the edge of networks.

Partner evolution: Cisco 360 program

Partners are in Cisco's DNA, with that audience driving more than 90% of Cisco's business. This month marks the official launch of the Cisco 360 Partner Program, which is the most significant overhaul of Cisco's channel strategy in nearly three decades. The traditional "gold, silver, premier" hierarchy is being replaced by a flatter, more inclusive structure: Cisco Partner and Cisco Preferred Partner.

This evolution moves away from rewarding purely transactional volume and instead focuses on:

• Partner Value Index (PVI): A new metric that measures partner success across four dimensions: foundational elements, capabilities, performance, and engagement.
• Specialization over architecture: Partners will no longer be certified just in routing or switching, for example. Instead, they will earn specializations in outcomes such as "secure AI infrastructure" or "digital resilience."
• Co-selling and ecosystems: The program incentivizes partners to work together, recognizing that an AI deployment might require a consultant, a managed service provider, and an ISV working in tandem.

The Cisco 360 Partner Program has been in the making for the better part of 18 months and is an excellent example of the attention Cisco pays to its channel. When the program first launched, it was met with strong pushback, but under the leadership of Tim Coogan, Cisco worked closely with its partners to get feedback and modified the program accordingly.

Recently, I asked Brian Ortbals, senior vice president at World Wide Technology (WWT), one of Cisco's largest partners, about the program, he told me: 

Services transformation: From reactive to predictive

At the NRF show, I was talking with Mario Castro, vice president, Americas, for cloud and AI infrastructure at Cisco, and he mentioned how the event has transitioned from being a technology show to one based on business outcomes. If that's true, and I believe it is, why are the services that companies offer to support their technology still reactive in nature?