Cisco Canada leadership on the partner opportunities ahead for Splunk, Cisco IQ, and Cisco 360

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

We’re continuing our coverage of Cisco Partner Summit 2026 in Vancouver, where Cisco has been laying out its vision for a new generation of partner opportunities around artificial intelligence, security, and an increasingly integrated technology platform.

But with so many announcements, new capabilities, and changes to the partner program, there’s an important question for Canadian partners: Where do you start, and how do you turn this into a profitable business?

That’s what we’re exploring in today’s episode, as I’m joined by Raj Juneja and Erin Gertner from Cisco Canada.

We discuss some of the biggest opportunities they’re seeing for Canadian partners, including how existing Cisco networking and security partners can begin building a business around Splunk, and how Cisco IQ could become the foundation of new advisory and lifecycle services.

We also get into the evolution of the Cisco 360 Partner Program, including some of the early feedback from Canadian partners and what they need to be doing now to protect and grow their profitability as the program continues to evolve.

And we look at Cisco’s new Ecosystem Deal Registration initiative, which recognizes that the partners influencing customer decisions aren’t necessarily the same partners ultimately selling the technology.

Finally, we discuss where Canadian customers are spending their technology budgets, and why Cisco sees an opportunity for partners to rethink their traditional network refresh rather than simply replacing what’s already there.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Raj Juneja and Erin Gertner.

Robert Dutt: Erin, Raj, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Erin Gertner: Thank you for having us.

Robert Dutt: I guess let’s start with the obvious, given where we’re sitting right now. What does it mean to the Cisco Canada team and to your partners to have home-ice advantage this week?

And I guess I should add, between Vancouver once before and Montreal, we’re back on home ice.

Erin Gertner: Yeah, I think it’s just such a privilege to have everybody join us in Vancouver.

I think I can speak for myself and probably on behalf of Raj. We’re such proud Canadians, and Cisco Canada had such a fantastic year this year, and we have so much to celebrate.

We’re so grateful for our partners. So I think being back in Canada, and specifically in Vancouver, has been amazing for us.

And it’s been really nice to hear feedback from the partners as they’re walking by, saying how much they love the city and that they’ve gotten to explore.

If you look out the window, it’s so picturesque when you get to look at the mountains. I think our city shows very well, so I’m very happy to be here.

Raj Juneja: Yeah, I think I would echo everything that Erin is saying.

I’ve heard nothing but positive sentiment about coming to Canada and what they’re surrounded by here.

This venue in downtown Vancouver, overlooking the ocean. What can you say?

It’s beautiful, and it brings joy to folks who are visiting for the first time. It’s a good representation of what Canada has to offer.

Robert Dutt: Now, with Vancouver 2010, there was the strategy leading up to it to position the team well for that.

Was there a similar long-term strategy behind getting Cisco Canada to have that great year, with Partner Summit coming here? I ask entirely in jest.

Erin Gertner: And own the podium!

That was great.

I think we just had a great opportunity this year in Cisco Canada, and being able to show off our success here is an even bigger blessing.

I think we’re always intentional around our success, and we’ve been asked to replicate it year on year.

If you hear everybody talk about the notion of durable growth, Raj talks a lot about that, and growth on growth.

We’re proud of the year we had, and I think we wish we had this year again next year so we can demonstrate another growth-on-growth year.

But we’ll be in luck even if we’re doing this in Vegas.

Robert Dutt: Yes, even if we’re doing it in Vegas.

We’ve heard a lot this week about the vision around the next generation of the ecosystem, particularly around AI, security, and services.

When you look at the announcements through a Canadian lens, what stands out as particularly important?

What do you see as the biggest opportunities for Canadian partners in this moment, especially the stuff that’s been talked about here this week?

Erin Gertner: I think that Ecosystem Deal Registration that was announced this week is particularly interesting for our Canadian partners.

Raj and I were actually talking about this on the way here.

That’s something Splunk has always done very well, and it was something that I don’t think Cisco had completely figured out.

But we know as the world evolves, we’re seeing different types of partners spending time advising our customers, helping them figure out how to build AI, how to build out a secure network, and how to drive digital transformation.

And the fact that we can have multiple partners in an opportunity delivering value to a customer, and each of those partners be rewarded in some capacity, I think that’s a really exciting opportunity.

The other feedback we’ve gotten from partners over the last few days has been around Cisco IQ.

I think they see the value of that platform, and they truly understand how to monetize that and drive value for customers.

Specifically, when they’re starting to think about network modernization and understanding what their infrastructure looks like.

For a lot of customers, that’s been a little bit of a black hole over the years.

And now, when we think about the complexity of patching and all the other things that our customers are being tasked with on a daily basis, the fact that our partners can play an important role, I think, is very important.

The last piece is SCI. Chuck announced that on stage, so sovereign critical infrastructure.

That is a big part of Cisco Canada’s strategy this year, just given what’s going on in the world and what we’re hearing from customers.

We’re really excited about the opportunity to be able to deliver applications and some of our core infrastructure in a sovereign fashion.

And I think our partners are very interested in that as well because they’re hearing it from customers and from the government.

Anything to add on your side?

Raj Juneja: No, I think you’ve hit all the top points.

I think the capabilities around the integration with Cloud Control and Cisco IQ coming together, that’s a great opportunity.

Not only for our customers to take advantage of something that they’ve been asking for over a long period through Cloud Control, but then the IQ capabilities for our partners.

Going back to what Erin said, I think we have a couple of capabilities, and the fact that everything is going to be built within Cloud Control speaks to the opportunities that lie ahead for both our customers and partners.

Robert Dutt: A couple of follow-ups there.

One, on the non-transacting partners: How realized is that opportunity in terms of identifying the folks who are going to be that base today?

Obviously, the incentives are now in place to activate.

I’m curious how much of it you think is from folks who you already know, and how much of it is from folks who have yet to be surfaced in the Cisco partner ecosystem.

Erin Gertner: I think that’s an interesting question.

I think we have a lot to learn about who is truly influencing our customers.

Again, I think Splunk always did a great job of truly understanding what the landscape looked like in their customers and who was helping to influence a decision or a strategy.

For our account teams, they’ve always focused on the transacting partner and maybe didn’t have as broad of a view around who is behind the scenes.

We know of the GSIs, and we see a lot of them doing advisory work on behalf of our customers.

But then if you look at all the various architectures, security being one where there’s often somebody in there doing consultative work for customers.

Now that we have an incentive in place, I think that gives us the opportunity to broaden our ecosystem and start developing conversations and relationships with companies that we haven’t historically done a lot with.

So I think it’s going to be a big learning opportunity for us and our teams, but we have something to talk to them about now, which we didn’t have in the past.

Robert Dutt: And on the other side, on IQ, clearly Jeetu was talking about this as someplace where he wants partners to build a practice around it.

Not just a product in the lineup, but a foundational part.

Obviously, early innings of that particular game, but I’m curious if you have any thoughts on what you see as the most likely or most obvious first step for partners to start down that road.

Erin Gertner: I think they need to get comfortable with IQ themselves and really understand the power of it, and develop a unique offering around it.

Now that we have role-based access and they can play a role in a customer actually going through the adoption of IQ, I think it’s going to present an opportunity for them to figure that out.

There’s an obvious play in helping customers take an inventory of their network and get a good handle on what the totality of their environment looks like.

For many customers, even going and doing a renewal is a very complicated value proposition for them, because maybe they don’t understand what their topology looks like, or maybe they don’t understand where they have vulnerabilities or where they’re behind in security patching.

And IQ gives them that peripheral view of it.

But I think our partners can build a really interesting service around what the advisory looks like.

What’s the next generation? How do we go build a net-new network? Or how do we get ahead of any vulnerabilities and patches when they haven’t historically been able to do that?

Robert Dutt: I wanted to spend some time on Splunk because that’s another area that got a lot of main-stage attention and a lot of “pay attention to this” kind of love from the leadership team.

I think it’s an interesting opportunity for a lot of Cisco’s existing partner base.

A lot of partners have built successful businesses around networking, infrastructure, and security, but may not have that experience with Splunk today.

Why should those partners be looking seriously at the opportunity?

What’s the potential they’re leaving on the table if they aren’t integrating Splunk into what they’re doing today?

Raj Juneja: I mean, if you think about what’s going on in the market right now, and what the underlying most valuable asset is right now, it’s data.

And ultimately, whether it’s securing it, whether it’s enabling AI, being able to provide customers the governance, visibility, and security capabilities through a common platform is a competitive advantage that they now have if they take advantage of it.

As you just mentioned, the investments that we’ve made to incorporate the capabilities of Splunk, even within our own portfolio, speak to the strong capabilities that they themselves can take advantage of in building practices.

Going back to customers who don’t want to build it themselves, that’s where they’ve built their revenues for many years, around managed services and professional services.

And I think that Splunk is a great data platform to enable that.

The thing with Splunk that’s so powerful is that traditionally, people who have leveraged Splunk may have leveraged log aggregation or log collection and may not understand the full value proposition.

Or they may leverage it from a security standpoint or a security use case.

Knowing that the same data you harness can actually give you the opportunity to have a business-level conversation around things like tokenomics and things around your whole estate that will give you visibility and allow you to make business decisions, that itself speaks to opportunities for partners to take advantage of.

Robert Dutt: How much of the opportunity is around selling Splunk itself versus making Splunk a way to create additional value around the Cisco solutions that they’re already selling?

Raj Juneja: I don’t know if I’d quantify it.

It’s going to be basically no different than the traditional Cisco team, or people who make investments in Cisco.

They’ll understand the opportunity in terms of the capabilities that Splunk provides to what they already have.

From a Splunk perspective, I think what’s interesting is that bringing in that data from the Cisco estate that they own provides them the ability to advise and leverage the capabilities of things like IQ and things like defence, and look at everything from a Cloud Control perspective.

And give them a broader value proposition back to those customers, as opposed to something that they’ve traditionally only been looking at in a siloed fashion, if that makes sense.

Robert Dutt: Yeah, no, it does.

So if I’m a Canadian Cisco partner with a solid networking and security business, but I haven’t really engaged with Splunk, what’s the first step?

Where do I start building that business without having to make a giant upfront investment into it?

Raj Juneja: I think first is understanding the capabilities of the platform.

Taking advantage and demonstrating to yourselves that you can leverage the data that you’re collecting already from your customers, your pre-existing customers, and how you take that data and turn it into business intelligence that you can then provide back to them in terms of an offering.

So that could come from traditional IT, come from OT, and be able to then turn that around and give them an opportunity to look at offering security practices, offering observability practices, looking at the data and leveraging it as a whole.

But I would say the first thing is understanding the power that you have with Splunk.

So if you wanted to get started, I think it’s bringing our team in to give them a demonstration around the simplicity of first collecting that log data with Splunk and the power that you can get from the data once you’ve collected it.

Robert Dutt: One of the messages we’ve heard repeatedly here is that AI is creating opportunities for partners that go beyond selling the infrastructure, selling AI itself.

You’re talking about how partners can help customers rethink workflows, build solutions, and deliver services.

How ready is the average Canadian partner to take advantage of that?

And what are you doing to help partners level up their game and meet that opportunity?

Erin Gertner: From the conversations I’ve had, every partner seems to be in a different state of readiness or is taking a very different approach, which I love because I think it creates a lot of unique differentiation for each.

We were actually just in a meeting with a partner, and we were talking about use cases as an example.

We do a great job of building the underlying technology, but the role of a partner with many of our customers is helping them really understand where they can optimize, where they can drive use cases, or where they can help customers realize true value from AI.

We’ve got teams in there doing enablement from a technology perspective and helping them understand how we can create a resilient network, how we can secure AI workloads, how we can help them build.

But our best partners are the ones who are really thinking about how they deliver unique value and how they take the power of their entire ecosystem and their portfolio and bring it to customers.

We’re also seeing service providers really thinking about sovereignty with AI.

And they’re thinking about all kinds of different models to help customers be successful, depending on how they want to consume technology.

Whether it’s GPU as a service, whether it’s inferencing at the edge, whether it’s building out a sovereign cloud or building out sovereign applications.

Everybody’s taken a very different approach, and we’ve had a lot of ideation sessions with customers, helping them think about: Who is your customer base? What do you want to deliver to the market? What are you good at? And how do you build a profitable practice around that?

So customers are looking to you as a thought leader versus just another technology provider.

Robert Dutt: It feels like at the same time that some of these things are becoming more concrete and more clear in terms of building a business, it’s going off in so many directions at once.

When I was chatting with Glenn Kaul a few minutes ago in here and asked about AI as well, it depends what you mean by AI.

Because there’s AI, what my customers are doing with AI, what I’m doing internally with AI for my business, what I’m doing internally with my customers with AI, there’s what I’m doing with my vendor partners.

There are so many different aspects to it.

I think your point is well received about there being so many different paths, and there’s not one easy answer in terms of what it looks like for a partner.

Erin Gertner: For sure.

AI means something different to everybody, just like sovereignty means something different to everybody.

Every company is on its own journey to realize value, whether that’s for its own internal use or whether it’s for helping customers be successful with their goals and ambitions as well.

Robert Dutt: We’ve heard, obviously, a lot about the evolution of Cisco 360, the changes to the incentives, and the growing importance of different types of partner contributions.

When Canadian partners go home from Vancouver, or cross town if that happens to be the case for those in the Lower Mainland, and start looking at those changes, what should they be paying particular attention to?

Where are the opportunities to do things differently as a result of where you guys are going programmatically?

Erin Gertner: I think continuing to build out those adoption practices and managed practices.

As we rolled out Cisco 360, we wanted to make it a very manageable transition for our partners.

So we’re still paying the majority of our rebate structure on the land motion to make sure our partners are still highly profitable with us, and to give them time to start to build out some of the other motions and practices within their organizations.

So I would say continuing to build that out and getting good at that.

We’re seeing it especially as we’re selling more and more software. The importance of adoption and doing that well becomes increasingly more valuable for customers to really realize the potential of their investments.

We did a great job of protecting our partners for the first 18 months and making sure that they were going to stay above that 7.5 mark if they were already there, or at least holding that high-water mark.

But as they continue to evolve and we go back into a qualification period, we’re paying particular attention in Canada to our partner community to make sure they’re doing all the right things to set themselves up for success.

Once that 18 months lapses, we don’t want any of them to fall below where they are, because it’ll have a material impact on their profitability and working with us.

Robert Dutt: Any early, I hesitate to say it’s too early for a metric, but gut feelings, reactions, thoughts on how that’s landing and how partners are doing on meeting that mark?

Erin Gertner: I think partners have been pleasantly surprised as they got their first cheques from us and continued to work with us.

Change isn’t easy.

And this was the first big change we made to a program that was beloved by partners and profitable for partners for many, many years.

They understood it, and they knew how to make money with us.

And we changed the game a little bit. We had to.

But I think after all that transition and all the difficulty partners anticipated in getting there, a lot of them have been pleasantly surprised by where they landed.

And in all the conversations we’ve had with partners, I think they understand the why behind it.

Many of them feel like they are in a good place, and they have an understanding of where we’re going and how our sales teams are compensated.

You saw them get up on stage and actually share that information, and share how our incentives are aligned to that.

So I think the fact that those two things are aligned is really important for them because it means what they’re investing in, what they’re building, is what our teams care about.

And that alignment drives the right behaviour.

Robert Dutt: On the demand side, we talked about this a little bit six months ago, or now more, but obviously this is a fast-changing market.

Erin Gertner: Yes, it is.

Robert Dutt: Things evolve.

When you’re talking to Canadian customers, both of you, where are you seeing the strongest demand right now?

Is it infrastructure, security, modernization of networks, something else?

Where do you see the biggest opportunities at this moment and developing into the early parts of 2027?

Erin Gertner: I can answer from what I’m hearing from partners and customers, and then I’ll pass it over to Raj.

I still think secure networking is one of the biggest opportunities out there.

What worked a couple of years ago in terms of longevity of a network, or having a network that’s ready for agentic AI and AI workflows, it’s not the same.

And I think that has caused a lot of customers to think through how they keep up with patching, as an example.

Things we’ve heard from customers are that it’s consuming an enormous amount of time, effort, energy, and resources within their organizations.

And they’re looking for better ways to do that and get an inventory of where they are.

Security, obviously, is very top of mind for everybody, especially given what the security landscape looks like today and the vulnerabilities that have been identified in the broader landscape.

I don’t know if you have anything else.

Raj Juneja: Yeah, no, I think it’s spot on.

I think the network presents a huge opportunity, especially in the world of agents and the throughput that’s going on.

And so that obviously is what they’re seeing from a demand standpoint.

Coming through the network requires a different approach to management, if you will.

And I think that’s where the opportunity is that we’re taking full advantage of.

Robert Dutt: That chart that Jeetu showed with the difference between network consumption for chatbot AI versus agentic AI was, A, sobering, and B, if you’re in the business of selling networks, it looks like dollar signs in a big way.

Last one for me.

Looking ahead over the next year, what’s the one thing you’d most like to see Cisco Canada partners do differently as a result of what they’ve heard here at Partner Summit?

What would tell you that the Canadian partner is taking advantage of the opportunities out there if we’re doing this again next year in Las Vegas?

Raj Juneja: From my lens, I’d say it’s taking advantage of what we’ve highlighted here at Partner Summit this week.

Taking advantage of the capabilities of building on top of IQ and leveraging the capabilities they’ll see in the combination of IQ and Cloud Control.

So I’d say that.

And then something that we’re preaching to all our partners is that we have a large network refresh going on across Canada, especially with the demands of AI.

Let’s not just focus on like-for-like.

Let’s make sure we’re surrounding the network with all the capabilities we have to offer, whether it be from a security standpoint, an observability standpoint, everything that we have.

Let’s not just sell the network refresh the same way we have in the past.

Erin Gertner: I would say that cross-sell piece, or upsell, is very, very important.

Don’t just look at something for what it is today.

We’ve got buying vehicles, and there’s a ton of data that our partners can leverage to broaden deal size and broaden opportunities that they identify in our customer base.

And PXP, I always sort of joke, has almost too much data for our partners, but in the best possible way.

It really helps them identify what they can be doing better and helps them think bigger.

The other thing that we are very focused on in Canada is market share.

We want to go out and grow our market-share footprint, and we have incentives in place that our partners can leverage to help them do that, and they’re very lucrative.

So we’re trying a few new things here that we’re very excited about that we think will help our partners be much more profitable upfront.

Because we know how our partner sellers get paid, and we want to make sure that they’re able to leverage those programs to want to partner with us.

But we also want to go out and win.

We think we have a great portfolio, and we think we have the right tools to help partners be successful in winning.

And we want to take advantage of that opportunity this year.

So we’re very bullish on that.

Robert Dutt: All right. Once again, I appreciate you both taking the time.

Erin Gertner: Thank you.

Raj Juneja: Thank you for having us.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, Raj Juneja and Erin Gertner from Cisco Canada.

I’d like to thank Raj and Erin for their time, and thank you for listening.

One of the themes running through this year’s Partner Summit has been the idea that Cisco wants its partners to build more sophisticated businesses around its technology rather than simply selling more products.

And I think this conversation offers some useful starting points for Canadian partners, whether that’s finding new value in the data their customers are already generating, building services around Cisco IQ, or taking advantage of the changes Cisco is making to how it recognizes and rewards different kinds of partner contributions.

But there’s also a fairly straightforward message here.

As customers modernize their networks and prepare for AI, partners have an opportunity to do considerably more than replace existing infrastructure.

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I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.