Cisco Partner Summit 2023: Cisco Unveils New AI, Security Products

CISCO PARTNER SUMMIT — Without the right IT infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) cannot exist, according to IT giant Cisco.

But according to the forthcoming Cisco AI Index Readiness Survey, 70% of IT infrastructure is not scalable, thus not AI ready.

“This means that already stretched thin IT teams will struggle to securely manage their infrastructure,” said Jason Gallo, VP, global partner GTM acceleration, Cisco.

Gallo also noted that AI use cases increasingly require data to be analyzed at the source in the data center and at the edge.

Cisco's Jason Gallo

“To address this, customers might be tempted to stand up islands of standalone AI servers. That will lead to an enormous management burden, security, and skills challenges,” he said.

AI: New Validated Designs

As such, the vendor is kicking off Cisco Partner Summit 2023 Tuesday in Miami Beach by announcing new Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) for AI.

Cisco already provides CVDs to our partners free of charge. But if partners implement converged infrastructure hyperconverged solutions with the CVDs, the Cisco TAC support organization will also support the solution at the customer.

The availability of the CVDs is just one product launch scheduled for Cisco Partner Summit this week.

Cisco Partner Summit: New FSO Partner Modules

Cisco has also announced new partner modules for its full stack observability (FSO) platform.

“We’ve continued to add and enhance the capabilities of our FSO platform over the past year by adding application security, business risk observability customer digital experience monitoring, and many more use cases to the platform itself. This has opened up an opportunity for our partners to now access those capabilities via open APIs and the structure of the platform and give them a chance to develop integrations and their own intellectual capital,” said Gallo.

All of the partner modules focus on specific customer use cases that Cisco has built alongside partners, said Gallo.

“This is an incredible realization of the growing platform economics opportunity that Cisco offers with our partners. And it’s a new revenue stream that we think many of them will take advantage of, as we are now a true software platform company," he said.

New Security Suites

Cisco is as security company, maintained Gallo. He said the vendor’s end-to-end security approach “has been a clear differentiation for us.”

The vendor’s third product launch aligns to this strategy. At Cisco Partner Summit, the firm unveiled three new security suites: user protection, cloud protection and breach protection.

Similar to other software suites at Cisco, these will be sold in individual units, but organized into a three-tier structure with the Essentials and Advantage licenses. Launching initially, each tier will have a single price point and a common meter.

With the suites, partners can now earn up to 30% blended margins based on upfront deal registration based incentives. Cisco is also doubling the VIP rebate in those security areas.