Recap of Cisco Partner Summit 2025 (with Anurag Agrawal)

Leonard Lee was joined by Anurag Agrawal, Chief Global Analyst of Techaisle, at the Cisco Partner Summit 2025, which took place in San Diego, CA. Leonard and Anurag took a moment at the partner pavilion to recap the event and share their analysis of Cisco’s product announcements and the Cisco 360 partner program.
While AI infrastructure is the talk of the town, enterprise AI is what will matter. Where is Cisco in helping their partners help their customers along their enterprise AI journey? Find out!

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Check out Anurag and his research at Techaisle at www.techaisle.com.

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NOTE: The transcript is AI-generated and will contain errors.

Transcript

Leonard Lee: 0:06

Next curve. Hey everyone, this is Leonard Lee, executive Analyst at Next Curve. And I'm here with my good friend Agarwal from Tech is, yes, and of course this is the Next Curve podcast and it's always great to hang out with my good friend Rag. And we're here at Cisco. Partner Summit 2025 here in my hometown. San Diego. San Diego, yep. Yeah. So this is where all tech conferences should take place. No more Las

Anurag Agrawal: 0:42

Vegas. I agree with that actually. I completely agree. And by the. I think this is the third conference that Cisco is having this year. Yes. In San Diego. Yeah. They had their Cisco Live. Yeah, they had their WebEx one. Yep. And now they're having their Cisco partner Summit here.

Leonard Lee: 0:59

Yeah. And according to, some rumors out there, GTU Patel, who is the chief, the president and chief product officer like San Diego. So. G two thumbs up to that, right? Oh, that's cool. Yes. But, we just heard that next year this event is going to be in Vancouver, but hopefully all, Cisco events will be here in San Diego. San Diego, as they should be. But, uh,

Anurag Agrawal: 1:25

absolutely there is no casinos, no smoke walking through the hotel lobbies. Outside weather is absolutely fantastic.

Leonard Lee: 1:35

Yeah. No ridiculously priced lattes, like$16 lattes. No thank you. But hey, we've been here for two days so far. And so what are your key impressions of the events? I mean, this is your world, right? This is your world partners channels, and it's true.

Anurag Agrawal: 1:52

And I think one of the most important things that has come across in this event is the elevation of, Tim Coogan. To become the chief partner Officer. I mean, he's a global partner, head of sales, and I think he is bringing in a completely new energy to the partner program. Ably being supported by Elizabeth, the the Doubler. and above all, the Cisco Partner 360 program is coming to life.

Leonard Lee: 2:21

Yeah, it

Anurag Agrawal: 2:21

was announced about a year and a half ago. Uhhuh, it has been on a journey. There have been many ups and downs. Right. And I think this year we saw that,, it is about 90 days away from official launch.

Leonard Lee: 2:33

Yeah. Wow. I know. It's a big deal and they've been making a big deal about it here. And they've also, been launching a number of tools, right. Partner enablement tools. that seemed to be based on some of the AI frameworks that they've been developing, I think it's called the AI Assistant for. Partners as far ai, correct? Correct, correct, correct.

Anurag Agrawal: 2:55

Alex Ol has been, tasked with, building certain enablement tools, for the partner community, which includes, partner learning journey, to be able to really understand where the partners are in the lifecycle of the customer and their incentive programs. Understanding. the path to profitability? So there are many different tools I think Cisco is one of the companies which is really trying to take advantage of ai

Leonard Lee: 3:22

Yeah.

Anurag Agrawal: 3:23

And AI agents to really enable their partners and in effect what I call is the empowerment of the partners. Yeah. To really drive business growth and profitability. Well,

Leonard Lee: 3:35

they introduced, AI Canvas Live this year, and it looks like they're. platform using it if that's, well, yeah, platformization, right? That's like a big term that everyone's using. but being able to leverage that across not only the customer products that they're developing, but also leveraging that in their, partner enablement, capability set tool set. Absolutely, and

Anurag Agrawal: 3:59

I think it's both for the customer and the partners, because AI Canvas was announced earlier this year, but when you start to look at it. It is a pretty big deal. Let's talk about an example of a typical customer, right? If the CEO's call goes bad, who is to blame? Is it the collaboration application? Is it the device, it is the net network, is it the firewall or is it some sort of a security incident? In the past, the, and customers or their partners used to take days. To find the root cause of the problem only. And fix it only to find it happen again. Yeah. But with this AI canvas

Leonard Lee: 4:35

Yeah.

Anurag Agrawal: 4:36

It becomes a multiplayer collaboration opportunity. Which is really essential because now there security and the network and the team and everybody else can look at the same data at the same time simultaneously. Identify the issues and fix it. And AI driven answers. Now think about this, that this becomes. A golden opportunity for the partners themselves. Not only to enable their own, partner interaction or partner intimacy with Cisco. But also can they use this AI canvas In a multi-tenant environment.

Leonard Lee: 5:11

Yeah.

Anurag Agrawal: 5:11

To really manage a bunch of customers in a managed service environment.

Leonard Lee: 5:17

Yeah. So a lot of interesting applications that they're building on top of. AI Canvas or what looks like it. They didn't quite call it out, but based on some of the demos that they showed, it has similarities to what we're seeing across the product portfolio. How AI Canvas is expressing itself. But I have a one-on-one with, DJ Sampa tomorrow, so. Okay. That would be nice. Look out buddy. Yeah. I'm coming after you.

Anurag Agrawal: 5:44

Absolutely. he is one of the great guys, and I think you should talk about this unified edge, you know? I think it is, a pretty big deal, right? Yeah. What they announced.

Leonard Lee: 5:53

Yeah. It is. And it's interesting because this is Cisco kind of getting into compute. Yeah. But what. They announced is a hyper-converged appliance. Yep. Right. It's modular, it combines compute, storage, networking. Yep. And security embedded and yeah, really interesting and it's totally geared toward. campus branch type applications. Yeah. Enterprise and industrial applications. Yeah. And they just announced it, edge ai, it's a nascent, domain. Yep. enterprise ai. And it's something that I talked to GG two about last night at the reception. This is largely a can being kicked down the road. And this is an interesting timing for, this unified, edge solution, because this can place Cisco in the middle of that discussion, or at least it's a seed that they've planted.

Anurag Agrawal: 6:51

we just met with every angle. Yeah. Both you and I met with one of, Cisco's partners. They're very excited about this unified edge opportunity.

Leonard Lee: 6:59

I told the G two, I'm a AI pragmatist, he probably thinks I'm a AI pessimist, right? Based on a lot of the stuff that I write and how I, talk about some of what's going on, LinkedIn and social channels, but, we have to be practical about all of this stuff I think there's some definite grounding when you start to talk to some of the product, leads in G Two's group. there's a lot of substantial thinking. they're really thinking through some of the problems, and that doesn't necessarily always surface in the marketing rhetoric, they have to, at some point be able to deliver all of this stuff. In a way that is a consumable by the customer that's truly demanded by the customer. You're not pushing on the string. You're actually seeing some pull through from the customer based on actual value realized through the application of a generative AI in particular. Right?

Anurag Agrawal: 7:56

Yeah. there are other three things we should also talk about, right? the one Cisco story. This is a great structural advantage that Cisco has. because they have got the networking, they have got the security and so on and so forth. And that story is extremely powerful. Yeah. And it is coming to life. and Oliver is pretty excited about that, right? Yeah. Oliver is the new, global sales head. Yeah. He's pretty excited. He's got his sales force completely fired up. Is Cisco declined? Zero. Of its own AI solution, right? It is.

Leonard Lee: 8:33

Yeah.

Anurag Agrawal: 8:33

You see that in their customer success organization, which is led by Liz and Tony,

Leonard Lee: 8:38

Yeah.

Anurag Agrawal: 8:39

She has put together a fantastic engineering team. Which is delivering almost real time information.

Leonard Lee: 8:47

Yeah.

Anurag Agrawal: 8:48

And what they rolled out was iq, iq,

Leonard Lee: 8:51

Yeah. That was a big announcement.

Anurag Agrawal: 8:53

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a big thing.

Leonard Lee: 8:55

Yeah. So Cisco iq. that is really that embodiment of Yeah. A lot of the AI tools that they're Bringing to bear based on AI canvas. So I think probably more, we don't know the details of it, but it's definitely something that they're looking to roll out and make available to the partners. The other thing, to your point about one, Cisco, everybody seems to be doing a one XY, Z, right? But it is a tough journey. Way back in my early days of consulting, I was actually working with Cisco on some of these initiatives, going from a hardware to a software company. Because that was the thing that was in vogue at the time. But now making these transitions toward becoming a solutions company or more of a solutions or systems oriented company where you're bringing the hardware business model. and the software business model and service business models together, that's really challenging. And this 360 initiative from a partner's perspective, that's even more challenging, right? And so it's not a trivial transformation that they're going through. And as you and I have seen a lot of their peers are going through similar kind of reinvention yeah, it's a tough journey,

Anurag Agrawal: 10:05

it is a tough journey and I think a lot of peers or competitors are going through it as well. Cisco is further along in terms of partner program. G two calls it Cisco is the AI infrastructure company. That's an important point to really talk about, right? The Cisco 360 is a step in that direction because it's not only impacting Cisco's transformation, it'll impact partner's transformation, right?

Leonard Lee: 10:37

Yeah.

Anurag Agrawal: 10:38

For many years, one has been talking about that the partner has to go through a business transformation because no longer they have to be selling. Seats and endpoints, they have to be moving on from transactional to service oriented. And with the CX organization, they talked about the premier services, right? There are a lot of incentives and things like that. So the way I see it is that this partner 360 or Cisco 360 program is an economic blueprint And a call to the partners to actually go through that transformation and find that path to profitability that they so desire.

Leonard Lee: 11:24

Yeah. I think it's going to

Anurag Agrawal: 11:25

be important for the partners

Leonard Lee: 11:26

and this is my first time at the event, so I can really appreciate a lot of the nuanced challenges that, the partners face that Cisco faces. And it's all good stuff. This stuff is not. Easy and it's interesting to see how they're, managing and leading through this, journey because it's not a trivial one. You mentioned the AI infrastructure, that's fine dandy, but not everything is going to be AI infrastructure. A lot of what we're talking about with AI infrastructure is a lot of that hyperscale, massive compute up in the, these. Massive data centers everyone's investing in, but there's all the enterprise stuff and I think that's really where, if Cisco's not careful, they lose their identity and lose the focus because there's more brownfield out there. The big question is something that I teed up with, G two is where's the enterprise AI bit?

Anurag Agrawal: 12:22

Yeah.

Leonard Lee: 12:22

Because nobody likes to talk about that anymore. Yeah. It's the on-prem, but it's more nuanced than that, right? Because when you look at the enterprise environments, the infrastructures, it's very different. And when we talk about enterprise, there's this conflation to say, edge Enterprise, but it's all about enterprise rate ai, but bringing it into the organization and how do you secure it, how do you make it trustworthy? How do you make it reliable and safe?

Anurag Agrawal: 12:50

I think there is one more area which I would've loved Cisco to really talk about is before enterprises really start to adopt ai, they really need to understand, how do I start, where do I start, right? Yeah. So I wish Cisco had talked about some sort of a services or advisory services as to how they're enabling Their partners or themselves. As to what that start line looks like for that end customer. Yeah, because they talked a lot about product, they talked about a lot about, wholesale services. They talked a lot about security and so on and so forth. But before you actually get there, what's the facts to that start line? Yeah. I think it's important, which many of the other. large scale infrastructure vendors are talking about, right?

Leonard Lee: 13:44

Yeah. They're talking about, but I don't think anyone's really doing a great job. Quite honestly, I think they're still largely trying to figure it out. And so that's where I've been challenging them on the thought leadership front in terms of bringing out some of the learnings that they have, drinking their own champagne with this stuff. And then, packaging that into, viable and consumable AI solution patterns. It's tough. And I think what's happening is, the industry is starting to, find that it has to unlearn a lot of the things that it learned about ai, which were fundamentally wrong. And so that ends up taking time. It's going to take time because the reason why we have all these. Initiatives and POCs is because people started off with the wrong assumptions. That's what happens. Yeah. It's not a new thing. we've seen it through all these hype cycles and we're seeing it again with generative ai and it's probably at a scale, beyond what we've seen before. Just because the level of misconception about the technologies, pervasive and dramatic quite honestly. It's not an easy technology, but everyone thought it was magic.

Anurag Agrawal: 14:52

Yeah.

Leonard Lee: 14:52

And you're now learning that it's not magic. And that could be a really sobering action.

Anurag Agrawal: 14:58

It is true. I think everybody is still. Trying to find that elusive. RROI.

Leonard Lee: 15:04

Yeah.

Anurag Agrawal: 15:05

Right. How do you achieve that? And when do you achieve that? I think That's important too.

Leonard Lee: 15:09

I think, Cisco has some important bits and pieces. It'll be good to see how they bring all, this stuff together into a fabric of value that actually starts to gel into a solution. Yes. And I think, you

Anurag Agrawal: 15:21

know, having watched Cisco for a number of years, I think they have invested a lot in the speed of innovation. We can see that now. Both on the product and the solutions roadmap, and now the world is entering into an outcomes first era and Cisco is actually trying to position itself to deliver those outcomes. Both the business outcomes and the technical outcomes. the technical outcomes for the IT dms. The business outcomes for the BDMs. I think the new Cisco's transformation, or the test, or the metric, or the measurement that I will watch is how quickly it is able to move into that outcomes first era.

Leonard Lee: 16:09

Yeah. Really well put. And on that note, hey, it's really great to be here with you in San Diego. hopefully there will be many more occasions where you're here in San Diego and we're hanging out Absolutely. And more vendors that decide to hold their tech conferences here. Wonderful. to have you.

Anurag Agrawal: 16:26

Happy to be here. Great to be with you, man.

Leonard Lee: 16:28

Yeah. And everyone make sure, to reach out to og connect with his company, tech, they're like at the forefront of SMB, research. And, of course, follow next curve@www.next curve.com. And, check out our substack and, we're reporting live here from, Cisco Partner Summit 2025. And we'll see you next time. Wonderful.

Anurag Agrawal: 16:54

Thank you man.