‘I know this policy has been difficult to work with in a market moving this quickly. The additional week should give you more time with your customers, keep deals moving through their approvals and help you hold momentum through the quarter,’ said Cisco Senior Vice President Tim Coogan in an email to partners.
Cisco has extended compute price protection and price quote validity for its Unified Computing System (UCS) servers to 14 days from its previous validity of seven days.
“I know this [quote validity] policy has been difficult to work with in a market moving this quickly,” said Cisco Senior Vice President Tim Coogan in an email to partners. “The additional week should give you more time with your customers, keep deals moving through their approvals and help you hold momentum through the quarter.”
Cisco executives were unavailable to provide further details as the entire executive team this week was in Las Vegas for the company’s annual sales kickoff meeting.
[Related: Partners Hope Cisco-Supermicro Deal Will Fill ‘Gap’ Left By Cisco UCS Server Shipment Delays]
In an email response to CRN, Coogan wrote: “Cisco’s extension of the price protection and discount expiry for Compute quotes to 14 days reflects our ongoing effort to adapt to market needs and better support our customers’ transaction cycles. Our hope is this additional time provides more agility to partners and supports their efforts to maintain sales momentum and maximize profitability. We remain dedicated to providing our partners and customers with the value and innovation they expect.”
The new price quote validity, which went into effect August 16, comes after server competitors HPE and Dell have moved from 14-day price quote validity to 30-day price quote validity on servers. It also comes after Cisco eliminated compute deal registration effective February 20 and then reinstated it on April 15.
“Cisco has consistently been the most restrictive with terms and conditions for UCS,” said a top channel executive, who did not want to be identified. “Our sellers hate it. As a result, Cisco is becoming less relevant in servers for us.”
Ned Engelke, chief technology officer at Evotek, a San Diego, Calif.-based Cisco partner, said 14 days is certainly an improvement. “Fourteen days is still short but at least there’s some structure around the pricing we can get,” he said.
Engelke said price volatility in the memory market and shipment delays have resulted in dramatic changes in hardware procurement for customers.
“It’s much more volatile than it used to be, so we’ve been coaching a lot of our customers to adjust their procurement process at least for critical projects to be able to move more quickly,” he said.
A CEO for a CRN Solution Provider 500 company, who did not want to be identified, said the 14-day price validity leaves Cisco at a marked disadvantage competing against the likes of Dell, HPE and Supermicro. “It is what it is,” he said of the 14-day quote validity. “Our clients are looking at Dell, HPE and Supermicro.”
The new 14-day price quote validity comes with a new partnership announced this week that allows Cisco to offer Supermicro liquid- and air-cooled systems as part of its AI infrastructure portfolio.
Cisco partners told CRN that the deal provides them with a much-needed alternative in the wake of shipment delays plaguing Cisco’s UCS servers.
“Cisco cannot deliver UCS servers,” said a top executive for a CRN SP500 Cisco partner who did not want to be identified. “Cisco cannot get the memory chips to deliver, and Supermicro has memory availability. This should ease the pressure we have been dealing with on UCS availability.”
The sales executive said it is currently six to nine months to get a UCS server in the hands of a customer depending on the server or configuration.
Cisco said it intends to begin offering Supermicro compute offerings as part of the Secure AI Factory with Nvidia beginning in October 2026.
In a question-and-answer document provided by Cisco on the Supermicro partnership under the heading “How does this architecture address infrastructure supply chain constraints?” the response was: “Cisco’s global supply chain scale for AI networking systems, combined with Supermicro’s manufacturing and global supply chain scale for rack-scale AI systems and dense GPU servers, enables timely delivery of the infrastructure globally. This strength de-risks availability at a time when demand for GPUs, memory, CPUs, and SSDs is putting pressure on how quickly AI rack-scale systems can be built and shipped.”
The deal comes with Supermicro’s worldwide server revenue soaring 129 percent to $9.3 billion, with 7.6 percent market share, in the first calendar quarter of 2026, according to market researcher IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker.
Cisco, meanwhile, which reported double-digit growth for its compute business in the most recent quarter, does not show up in the top five rankings of IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker for the first calendar quarter of 2026.
