Cisco’s message to partners is to sell resilience. The tech giant is pairing that push with new Cloud Control AgenticOps features, Model Foundry, a quantum-resilient Wi-Fi 7 access point and broader Live Protect support to help partners find risk and modernize customer environments.
For partners, it’s a three-step play: uncover the risk, modernize operations, and deploy AI agents that act instead of just alerting, according to Liz Centoni, Cisco’s executive vice president and chief customer experience officer.
“This is your professional services, by the way, high value, high margin, and in the post-Mythos world, our customers cannot afford to wait. But here’s where the shift really happens to your business because once you’ve helped that customer identify and remediate that risk, you’ve earned the right to have the bigger conversation on modernizing their environment,” Centoni told partners on stage at Cisco Partner Summit 2026 last week.
To that end, the tech giant has revealed a handful of new AgenticOps features for Cisco Cloud Control, the company’s unified platform for agentic AI that spans its networking, security, collaboration and observability portfolios. The new capabilities will automate more tasks and help teams work together faster, according to the San Jose, Calif.-based company.
[Related: Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins: ‘The Partners Who Can Represent The Entire Architecture’ Will Stand Out]
Model Foundry is a new service within Cloud Control that lets partners and enterprises test out Cisco’s AI models. According to Cisco, users can evaluate, fine-tune and run the models on their own data, all in one place. Model Foundry is the exclusive home of Cisco’s newest model versions.
Cisco is now rolling out Model Foundry in controlled availability, starting with its partners.
Cisco also is building ThousandEyes natively into its Wi-Fi 6E and 7 access points at no extra cost for customers with eligible Networking Essentials and Advantage licenses, which will give enterprises around-the-clock automated testing of app and network performance. The company is also introducing Model Context Protocol servers for its networking platforms, giving AI tools a standard way to access live network data. It means that partners won’t have to build custom connections, and automated troubleshooting and reporting workflows become easier to create.
On the quantum front, Cisco is launching a quantum-resilient Wi-Fi 7 access point. The device is built with Qualcomm for quantum-safe communications with Post Quantum Cryptography over the air, along with an Intel Wi-Fi chipset and Microsoft for Windows software. The access point is the latest addition to Cisco’s quantum-resilient networking portfolio, which spans wireless, switching and routing, and it will help partners deliver quantum-readiness assessments, according to the tech giant.
The company is also expanding Live Protect, which narrows the gap between vulnerability disclosure and patching, to N9000 and N9300 switches, Catalyst SD-WAN, C9000 switches and CW9800 wireless controllers, with support for Cisco 8000 Secure Routers and firewalls due by the end of 2026. In addition, Cisco is developing Privileged Infrastructure Access with Teleport, giving network teams and AI agents governed, short-lived access to routers and switches, the company said.
“I think for our business, especially in the energy space, it is true that customers don’t have the luxury to do patches and upgrades as fast as possible. With the malicious activity that’s happening, threat actors are acting so fast now,” said Faisal Bhutto, president and CEO of Alykas, a Houston-based MSP and Cisco partner.
Resilient infrastructure, especially with the tools Cisco is providing such as Cloud Control and Live Protect, will help solution providers mitigate the impact to customers, without doing costly rip-and-replace upgrades, Bhutto said.
“You can’t go out there and say, ‘OK, I’m going to shut down the whole plant because we have to apply a new patch.’ But that’s where something like Live Protect comes in from our resilient infrastructure,” he said.
Many customers have already been working to ensure resiliency is baked into their infrastructure, Bhutto said.
“The question is, how can we as Cisco partners now help clients because Cisco can play a role?” he added.
Resilient Infrastructure: Cisco’s Pitch, The MSP Wish List
The biggest opportunity for partners is around ensuring that customers’ infrastructure is scalable, reliable and dependable because that’s “directly proportionate” to the strength of their business, said Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s president and chief product officer.
“What we want to do is provide all the apparatus for that happening: If you do have an outage, can we predict that outage before it happens? Can we make sure that the time to investigate and detect an outage gets compressed, and the response and remediation happens as quickly as possible? If it is a breach, can we ensure that that breach gets proactively intercepted so that there’s no lateral movement? It is going to get harder and harder for organizations to distinguish between a security breach or an agent just misbehaving because they thought it was the right thing to do because they took your instructions very literally and tried to follow them.”
Cisco is combining security and observability telemetry for partners and customers instead of treating them separately so that customers can spot an AI agent acting suspiciously, even when it isn’t a breach, Patel said. Cisco IQ and Cloud Control are how partners can use that visibility to build resilient infrastructure. Cisco IQ and Cloud Control are the on-ramps for partners building resilient infrastructure because Cisco IQ can surface what customers have in their environments and what’s outdated, while Cloud Control pulls that telemetry into a single view.
“The way I think about this is very simple … we just want to make sure that customers have the telemetry and the data so that they understand what they have within their estate, how the patching is happening within that estate, and what needs to get upgraded, and the combination of Cloud Control and Cisco IQ is what gives customers the full visibility that’s needed,” he said.
While the messaging from Cisco around resilient infrastructure is important, there are still some things that partners need from the tech giant to turn it into a repeatable practice, said Lane Irvine, director of strategic alliances for Calgary, Alberta-based Cisco partner Long View Systems.
Cisco’s multitenant MSP tooling isn’t there yet, he added.
“We need to see runbooks. We need to see specific tools that allow us the multitenancy [option]. As a managed service provider, we should be able to click a button, and everybody with that specific version is upgraded. And there’s no downtime,” Irvine said.
Resilient infrastructure with automation makes customers stickier, both to Cisco and to the MSP, Irvine said.
“That will be a huge benefit for customers to stay with Cisco, and a huge benefit for customers to go managed services, which creates a sticky connection. When we have a customer on managed services, they’re not looking to flip their vendor,” he said.
