Australian partners have been “very vocal” around Cisco’s changes to its 360 Partner Program

Rodney Hamill at Cisco ANZ speaks exclusively to CRN Australia about how Australian partners are taking to the first major changes in 25 years to its partner program.

With the introduction of the new Cisco 360 Partner Program later this year, Rodney Hamill, managing director, partner and routes to market sales, Cisco ANZ says Australian partners have been “very vocal” about the upcoming changes.

In October last year, Cisco announced it was making changes to its partner program for the first time in 25 years.

CRN Australia spoke exclusively with Hamill at Cisco ANZ where he explains how the global team has been engaged with Australian partners, and he said they “don’t pull any punches”.

“We're known for adopting tech fast, so [the partner’s] feedback has been critical into the mix, and we have seen a lot of that been received, and we're hoping to see the changes come out,” he explained.

According to Hamill, one of the biggest input from the partners have been around localising Cisco’s Partner Value Index. In this value index, Cisco measures its partners through four categories: foundational, capabilities, performance and engagement.

“The biggest input is, ‘what's our ability to localise it?’,” he said.

“We're not big for localising programs, I don't think we'll go down that path.”

Australian partners have also been curious about the changes to payments.

“We haven't shared a lot of the detail yet in terms of our payments, that's coming in June on how it will all flow,” he explained.

Hamill said the feedback from the Australian partners have been great, but they are eager to see the details and begin modelling it.

In terms of what Hamill could share about payments, Hamill said they are going to pay more “after the land piece”.

“We're paying a lot on the land piece at the moment, up front, we will spread that out to be more across the life cycle of the of the partner,” he said.

“But our intention is to reward partners who are delivering a better outcome for our customers, and the better outcome for us comes when our technology is being adopted, and it's been renewed.”

When it comes to measuring outcomes, it is something Hamill is currently discussing with Australian partners as it can become subjective on what value is to a customer.

“We're looking at it and thinking we want to make sure that technology stacks that we're selling are landing, the customers are adopting, the customers are then getting value out of that, and they're renewing,” he explained.

For Cisco, the value to them is the customers and partners using the technology.

“A long time ago, a lot of software was probably sold by many vendors in the past that probably hasn't had the best customer use in adoption. We want to make sure that we're our customers getting good value out of it,” Hamill added.

Evolution of the partner program

When the partner program began, Cisco was selling switches and handsets. But, as technology has evolved and the company has made acquisitions, like it did with Splunk in 2023, the company needed to refresh its program.

“Splunk is pure software, all subscription, we had 39 percent growth in our subscription software sales last quarter. Subscription is now 56 percent of all of our revenue,” Hamill explained.

“It's a massive number, it is tipped beyond hardware now, so we need to build a program that's going to help us grow and sustain that.”

Hamill explained the 360 Partner Program will be focused more on the customer life cycle.

“We were very good at dealing with the first part of customer life cycle, which was the land, and our partners were called ‘the kings of land’. They'll go out and they'll win big projects and deploy it,” he said.

“The new program deals with the whole life cycle. It deals with the adoption of the technology, deals with renewal of the technology. It's a different view on the whole life cycle of a of a customer in a software world,” he said.

Hamill explained that customer’s buying patterns have changed and Cisco are making sure they’ve got the right route to meet them where they want to buy.

“As the customers move more to cloud, they're aggregating more of their spend, and Amazon has got a big marketplace aspiration, so they've offered more services in there,” he said.

“The way [AWS] has taken to market has proven to customers use in terms of where I can get value and obviously customers are signing up to big commitments to get better pricing. It becomes a bit of an aggregation point for them as well.”

Cisco will begin measuring partners in August on the new program and then the 360 Partner Program will go live in February 2026.