“[What] Cisco is building toward in the Cisco 360 era is partners with the technical depth to lead complex customer conversations, the scale to operate across segments and geographies, and the investment posture to grow alongside Cisco’s innovation roadmap,” Cisco’s Tim Coogan tells CRN.
Cisco’s global partner sales leader, Tim Coogan, said the $63 billion tech giant is seeking a specific type of partner in Cisco’s new 360 AI era—a solution provider that is ready to scale AI yet also cater to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
“Cisco is putting renewed focus on Select accounts,” Coogan, senior vice president of global partner sales, told CRN. Cisco Select partners demonstrate expertise in deploying Cisco solutions for SMBs.
This year, Cisco launched its next-generation partner framework designed for the AI era: the Cisco 360 Partner Program. Coogan said Cisco 360 gives its channel ecosystem a blueprint of the type of partner the San Jose, Calif.-based company is seeking in the AI world.
“[What] Cisco is building toward in the Cisco 360 era is partners with the technical depth to lead complex customer conversations, the scale to operate across segments and geographies, and the investment posture to grow alongside Cisco’s innovation roadmap,” Coogan said.
“The broader signal is that the strongest partners in Cisco’s ecosystem are investing in the capabilities customers need in the AI era,” Coogan said.
“And World Wide Technology’s acquisition of Softchoice is one of the most significant examples of that pattern,” he added.
World Wide Technology ‘Represents The Kind Of Partner’ Cisco Wants
Coogan pointed towards World Wide Technology (WWT) as an ideal partner for Cisco’s 360 AI era.
Not only does WWT have the enterprise expertise to scale AI on a global basis, but thanks to its blockbuster $1.3 billion acquisition of Softchoice, WWT’s Cisco expertise now spans from Fortune 50 clients all the way down to SMBs.
Softchoice’s 5,000 customers, which are mostly SMB clients, now have access to WWT’s vast portfolio of Cisco offerings.
“We didn’t really have much of a presence in the SMB and low-end of the commercial market before Softchoice,” said WWT CEO Jim Kavanaugh. “There’s a big opportunity to supercharge [our] Cisco business for [SMBs].”
Kavanaugh said WWT and Softchoice teams are working together to offer Cisco networking hardware as well as AI and cybersecurity solutions to its SMB customer base.
“The combined WWT and Softchoice gives Cisco customers access to a partner with end-to-end depth across enterprise, mid-market, and SMB,” said Cisco’s Coogan. “WWT and Softchoice together represent the kind of partner ecosystem Cisco is building toward in the Cisco 360 era.”
Cisco New SMB And Mid-Market Practice Competency
In January, Cisco launched its fully reimagined Cisco 360 Partner Program.
Designed for the AI era, Cisco’s new program aims to bring incentives and easier ways for customers to find the right expertise across security, networking, collaboration, services, Splunk, cloud, and AI infrastructure. Cisco 360 came complete with updated partner designations, an enhanced Partner Locator tool, and a focus on AI-ready data centers, future‑proofed workplaces, and digital resilience to help partners deliver predictable customer outcomes.
As part of Cisco 360, the company launched a new SMB and Mid-Market Business Practice competency.
“The SMB and Mid-Market segments represent one of the largest, fastest-growing opportunities for Cisco partners worldwide,” said Cisco’s Kunal Kaul, managing director of Small & Medium Business, in a blog post last month. “This partner competency was designed to elevate partner performance across every stage of the customer lifecycle.”
WWT said it plans to take Cisco’s lead and attack the SMB market unlike ever before.
“What we’re doing is we’re scaling World Wide’s model into the mid-market and SMB right now to provide what I think is an unmatched level of capabilities,” said Softchoice’s CEO Andrew Caprara.
“In World Wide’s model, when they’re serving Fortune 10 companies, they have a number of people dedicated to each customer across different specialties and areas. We said, ‘Hey, we can’t do that in SMB and even mid-market, because that’s an expensive model. It wouldn’t scale.’ But what we learned is how they’ve structured those roles and what kinds of capabilities customers need,” Caprara said. “So we’ve come out with a model that allows us to bring those specific roles into the mid-market and SMB space.”
Cisco generated record revenue of $15.8 billion during its recent third fiscal quarter 2026, representing 12 percent growth year over year.
