How you buy from Cisco can depend on where you are located geographically, assuming you are not in a country where US law prohibits trade.
As of a year ago (when I retired), if you were located in the US, you could have a direct sales team if your account was big enough. The Cisco account team (Account Manager, Systems Engineer/Architect, Service Account Manager, etc) would talk directly to you and issue quotes. If your own supply chain organization preferred to purchase through a VAR for various business reasons, Cisco would work through an authorized Cisco partner/reseller for fulfillment (ie shipping to your location) and give that partner a few margin points for their trouble. That partner might also make an "added value" sales pitch to you of some sort in the form of additional PoC, installation, management, or integration services. Note that even huge SP customers would frequently have their orders fulfilled through VARs after working with their direct Cisco account team to build the Bills of Materials.
Authorized partners and Cisco direct teams do not compete with each other, as all deals that the direct team work on are registered internally in the salesforce.com system and the direct teams are credited (ie, compensated and quota retired) when the partner fulfills the order. Partners have access to the Global Price List (GPL) which has the list prices of all orderable SKUs. Many years ago, the GPL was available to the public, but I doubt that is still the case. It should also be noted that the GPL represents Cisco's opening offer in a price negotiation and that all customers should negotiate a lower price than the GPL.
If your US account was not deemed big enough by whatever financial metric was being used for that particular Cisco fiscal year, sales management would push you off to a partner for most all pre-sales contact, rather than have you talk with a direct sales team. Outside of the US, partners have long been the norm with direct teams being rare.
Finally, if by "can we buy directly from Cisco" you really meant "can we order from cisco.com and pay with a credit card?", then no. Some authorized resellers may take orders for Cisco products from their own online stores, but with the exception of the Learning Store, cisco.com has not been set up with shopping baskets.
Disclaimer: I am long in CSCO
