It’s not surprising that the focus of the recent
Cisco Live 2025 conference in San Diego, California, was on
AI and the emerging agentic AI era. AI is at the center of what every IT vendor is working on these days.
However, Cisco executives were lockstep that while IT infrastructure is key to enabling enterprise use of technology, just as important is ensuring that everything touching on AI – such as the hardware itself, training and inferencing models and workloads, and myriad software tools – are also secured.
As Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel said in his keynote, “Without AI trust and security built-in to the underlying network infrastructure, there won’t be AI, and every new AI agent is both an asset and a new security risk. As such, agentic AI will force us to challenge assumptions, such as how we validate identity and how quickly we must respond to threats when something goes wrong.”
During the three-day event, the San Jose, California-based IT giant rolled out a range of security-related announcements about capabilities that are being integrated into the network. This included
Hybrid Mesh Firewall, a security fabric for distributed environments that reaches from the data center to the edge, the Mesh Policy Engine enforced in Cisco and third-party firewalls, and two additional mesh firewall offerings, the high-end 6100 Series and 200 Series for branch networks.
Cisco Puts a Channel Focus on Security
Working on the security angle with MSSPs, MSPs, and other
channel players is Brian Feeney, who was brought to the company as the vice president of global security partner sales for Cisco, two years ago. Feeney brought with a broad range of experience, including more than four years with Palo Alto Networks, two stints with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and positions with Intel and Imperva.
In an interview with MSSP Alert at Cisco Live, he said his initial goals included growing the company’s reach in the channel, including among its 12,000 or so MSPs.
“Coming in, I realized we primarily focused on the traditional Cisco resellers, where we've had 40 years of heritage,” Feeney said. “One major focus for me has been expanding new routes to market and really ensuring we have a very strong, robust MSP motion working with our service providers, GSIs, cloud service providers [and] – very important to us in security – managed detection and response in that MSP community.”
First Things First
Feeney outlined a three-step approach. The first step was to build security-focused partnerships with both long-standing Cisco partners and security-focused channel players. The second focused on simplifying how partners do business with Cisco, by offering the right programs and promotions for security and reducing complexity through tools like a dedicated concierge deal-registration desk.
“If you're a security partner and you register a Cisco security opportunity, right from the beginning, we grab it, work alongside of you, you apply to the right programs, promos, talk to our portfolio account managers, and get you integrated in the process,” Feeney said. “That's borne a lot of fruit for us in terms of pipelines [and] closed deals.”
Finally, Feeney aimed to build the capabilities partners increasingly rely on—such as multi-tenancy, usage-based consumption models, and platforms tailored for MSPs. That includes supporting growth areas tied to Cisco’s earlier investments, like the $635 million acquisition of OpenDNS in 2015 (now Cisco Umbrella) and the $2.35
purchase of Duo three years later.
Simplification and Integration
Feeney also stresses on simplification and integration when it comes to AI and security to MSPs and other channel partners. When he started with Cisco in 2023, the company had 30 point products in security. Now the company has three go-to-market areas – Hybrid Mesh Firewall, Universal ZTNA (zero trust network architecture), and SOC (security operations center) of the Future.
Cisco executives also talked about AI Defense, an AI security tool inherited from the vendor’s $400 million acquisition last year of Robust Intelligence and
introduced in January, to protect the development and use of AI applications by guarding against AI tool misuse, data leakage, and increasingly complex threats.
Underpinning all of that is the vendor’s Firewall Assistant, a tool that includes generative AI and natural language processing to simplify firewall management, from creating rules to understanding policy configurations to troubleshooting issues.
“There was no cohesive vision and central security strategy that we could take to our customers or to our partners,” he said. “That's why we've simplified to the three go-to-market areas. ... Rather than speak about secure AI as a stand-alone, we can really go back to how we've infused it into each of those three motions. A great example was AI Defense as an infusion into our Cisco Secure Access Universal ZTNA platform and that's a differentiator for us. We shine where security meets the network. If you look across Cisco's estate and how we have integrated AI not just in security but in cloud and networking and overall infrastructure, there's a fantastic consolidation and tie-in that goes across the Cisco portfolio.”
Enterprises Need Help with AI
This is important for the channel to know enterprises push to adopt AI. Cisco last month
released a report that showed only 4% of organizations have reached a “mature” level of cybersecurity readiness as their IT complexity grows with AI and hyperconnectivity coming into play, a situation Cisco called “alarming.”
“The way that many of them are quickly – and over the last two years in particular – leaning into AI, how can we utilize AI within our SOC?” Feeney said. “Now we talk about autonomous agents, with agentic AI.”
In addition, partner readiness for AI is disparate, Feeney said. Some have multi-million-dollar investments in AI for their practices, while smaller MSSPs and MSPs that lack the in-house capabilities and can lean on what Cisco is offering them.
“My message to our channel partners is, number one, Cisco security is back,” he said. “Cisco shines where security meets the network and because of that, we have a very compelling story to tell. We have the right profitability, we have the right enablement, and also a deep bench of AI resources and experts that can help them in their journey.”
