Cisco prepares partners for its 360 partner programme

In October 2024, Cisco announced plans to introduce its 360 partner programme, giving its channel base 25 months to prepare for its launch.

By giving partners a long runway to taxi down before the February 2026 take-off, the plan was to use that time to prepare and align the channel with the framework that defines partner value, focusing on how skills, services models and business investments support and expand customers.

In the UK, that process is being led by managing director for Cisco’s UK&I partner team and business Joachim Mason, who, along with his team, has spent the past seven months talking to partners.

“We’ve launched probably the most significant evolution of our partnering programme and approach,” he said. “We did that at our global partners Summit [at the end of 2024], and that [programme is called] 360.

“It’s a very important change [that will make] sure the partner community can come with us around it and still deliver on the important elements of any partnership – profitability, growth, relationship, skills, and so on. We are halfway through a 15-month transition towards it going live...and it is one of the things that I spend part of everyday talking about.

“It’s a 15-month timeline, but also a very collaborative element. We talk about, ‘Built by partners, for partners’…but what underpins that is the thousands of hours of meetings, dialogues and feedback from our partners as we co-create and continue to develop the programme. We launch the direction and intent and then spend and invest an awful lot of time with our partners, and that’s the phase we’re in at the minute.”

In his position as UK channel lead, Mason recognises there is a need to educate and reassure partners around the changes and underline that the change is positive.

“The partner sentiment around that is both supportive and strong in that they can see it’s the right way to go, but candidly, there’s also a degree of change. When you change something that’s been in place for many years, there’s always some hesitancy,” he added. “But the reason we’re doing it is to stay as relevant as possible [regarding] what our customers are looking for.

“We’re so reliant on our partnerships. We’re shoulder to shoulder with them – there’s no point in us being measured differently to our partners. So, we have to bring them with us, [and ensure we] emphasise customer success as a key tenant of what we’re focusing on and asking them to invest in, and that we’ll reward them or that we recognise the importance of technical specialism…because these are complex environments our customers are managing, running and trying to optimise.

“Our responsibility is to make sure that the relationship on both sides of the partnership is profitable, and that’s what 360 is about. It’s about making sure that you can drive the same or more profitability, but that you’re not necessarily rewarding things that customers no longer value – you’re [rewarding things] that they do,” he added.

Mason has been in the UK channel role at Cisco for 18 months, and he has stated that it is a job where he can make a difference, adding: “The thing that has always appealed to me is the really very strong sense of community.

“I don’t want to get overly sentimental, but there’s a strong sense of community among our UK and Ireland partners – we feel connected and bonded by relationships that have been built over many years.”

He added that there’s a sense of optimism across Cisco’s partner base about the prospects for the rest of this year and the next, which is when 360 will be launched.

“There’s an opportunity in our partnerships to drive that profitable growth,” said Mason. “We’ve got answers to the problems our customers have got today and in the future, when we start to think about security or AI, so that provides confidence.”