Cisco Enterprise Networking Vision, Strategy, and Execution

My name's Ki Ker. I lead, uh, product marketing for our secure WAN portfolio here at Cisco. And today we're gonna run through what is our enterprise networking vision and strategy, and how we're executing it from a, uh, from a platform perspective.

So it's two hours, but we're gonna break it up into some fast chunks of 20 minutes, uh, presentations for you. Uh, we'll go through a little bit about our vision and strategy, and then how we're applying that vision and strategy to a lot of the, uh, familiar products that, you know, Cisco builds, uh, today, uh, across our routing, switching wireless products. And then also from a management perspective, we've got a great lineup of presenters, uh, from our team across the product management and across the technical marketing teams.

So I'll let them introduce themselves, uh, as they present their sections, but, uh, I just want to, you know, take a few, take a second just to thank them for, uh, taking the time today to come out here and, uh, present to you guys in person and everybody watching online. So, Cisco has been around for over 40 years. We celebrated our 40 years, uh, anniversary last year.

And I, I don't need to kind of explain to everybody how important the, the era of AI is, uh, to you guys. But I think what's important is we look back a little bit to some of the history here and some of the disruptions that we've seen in the market where Cisco's really been at the forefront of those innovations. At the end of the day, we are in the business of connecting people to users and applications.

We use technology every day, and whether it's in our personal lives or it's in, it's in our business lives. And so when we first started out, it was about really connecting people to the internet. And, um, you know, we were known as a routing company and we've often been built on standards.

We try to maintain open standards. And, and back then it was a lot about interconnecting different types of networks and, and getting people connected. And then we had the mobile era where people started to move around BYOD, bring devices into the workplace, consume applications a little bit differently.

And then we had the cloud era where applications started to move out of the enterprise into the cloud. And so now we're here at the AI era. All of these disruptions have forced us to rethink how we build our products and how we adapt to the changing ways that you as users consume our, uh, applications and data today.

And so what you're gonna hear about today is really how are we rethinking networking in the era of ai? So this isn't industry data. We obviously talk as, as, as a leading networking vendor.

We have a lot of customers and we talk to them a lot. Um, in the past year, we've had a lot of industry customer advisory boards where we invite some of our biggest customers who are at the forefront of innovation to come in and tell us what's top of mind for them. And so what are we hearing?

And I think, uh, this three consistent themes that we, we continue to hear from our customers and, and hopefully, uh, you guys can relate to them. Uh, number one is the complexity is increasing, right? I think when we talk about complexity, we're talking about the number of different types of devices that are coming into the, into the workplace, the number of different products that are being deployed.

You know, in many cases you're deploying products to solve a problem at a certain point in time. And you know, over time you've got a stack of products and they may, may or may not work together. They may be managed differently, but ultimately, how do you deal with that complexity when it seems like in this AI era, we're being asked to move faster and faster and faster.

The second, uh, is around IT hiring and budget constraints. And we're all hearing about the skills gap. It's not that there's a skills gap from an AI perspective, there's a skills gap from an IT perspective.

There's a, the, the IT teams, uh, leaders are struggling to hire people with networking skills. And then now as security starts to converge with networking, how do I find people with networking and security experience, right? Couple that with networks that have been installed a long time ago, the person who originally installed them may not still be there.

So how do I move and, and, and refresh my portfolio? And then we're all dealing with budget challenges, right? More and more budget is being redirected to AI projects, um, or projects that add more va, uh, that are adding new business initiatives.

And so we, it hiring and budget constraints is, is probably the other one that we hear about. And then AI is moving very quickly. You know, networking has a long lifespan.

You know, we, you know, we built some very good, reliable products that have been out in the market for a long time. Customers have, you know, typically deployed rider on a seven year timeframe. And so how do we think about products?

Um, you know, how do you make a buying decision today knowing that things may change tomorrow? And what do you, how are you gonna get some longevity out of the equipment that you're buying and installing today? Okay, so those are some of the top three things that, that we're hearing about.

So when we looked at, took a step back and, and, and looked at our strategy, how do we build an architecture for that AI ready, secure network? What are some of the key things that we should be thinking about and our product team should be thinking about and engineering leader should be thinking about, uh, as they build products for this AI era? And we started on this journey a while back.

So a lot of what you're gonna hear today is the result of some of that thinking. And there's really three key pillars that we see are, uh, core to our strategy and also are gonna be core to our customer strategy as they build out their networks for the AI era. So the first one is, how can we simplify operations And simplifying operations isn't necessarily about having a single dashboard.

It's about how can we leverage agen ops to help partner with you as IT leaders and make it easier for you to do your jobs on a day-to-day basis, right? The second one is around security. More and more security is top of mind now, especially in this AI era where we're starting to deal with issues with deep fakes, data leakage, um, uh, and, you know, uh, bad actors coming onto the network.

And more and more customers are saying, well, can I use the network as a line of defense? And so we're definitely starting to, to be asked around how can we fuse more security into the network? And then there's also standards that are being developed, right?

NIST has developed standards around security. Post quantum is something that you may have heard of and we'll talk a little bit more. And so, uh, security fused into a network is another core strategy for us.

And then scalable devices ready for ai. You know, no longer is it possible just to build faster and faster and faster equipment. You know, how do we now have build devices that can do networking and security at the same time, right?

And provide low latency capabilities for AI workloads. So these are all, uh, these are what's top of mind for us. I know our, our Cisco, uh, general managers are all looking at these three pillars and thinking about how do we, how do we build out our products and provide that blueprint for our customers?

And the last slide I have here before we get into, uh, the platform section is really around, well, what does it mean to build AI hardware for the AI era? This is AI infrastructure, let's talk about it, right? And you'll, some things you're gonna see coming out of, of Cisco, and we've talked a little bit about this, is, is custom silicon, right?

No longer is off the shelf, Silicon gonna be suitable, but what we need our products to do, uh, you know, how do we provide that high bandwidth, high performance, be post quantum ready and also provide security? Another one that's coming up is observability, right? How do I provide deep packet inspection at the same time?

So I'm really being asked to do three or four things that a networking device from the cloud era or even the mobile era is not capable of doing operating system. You know, we do have multiple operating systems at Cisco. Uh, iOS xe, uh, is on the enterprise side, has been the most prevalent.

Uh, and how do we kind of, number one, make sure that we are making it easier for you as our customers to deploy ISXE upgrade when there's a patch without downtime. Um, get that deep observability, right? How do you run containers within ISXE efficiently?

And so programmability is also top of mind now, and, and, and you know, especially in this era of AI where we're starting to see APIs being used a lot more mm-hmm. To provide telemetry, right? And data source.

How is your operating system gonna be able to securely be able to communicate with other, uh, applications and, and management tools? And then from a system perspective, which is really the platform, which is how do we provide visibility, uh, programmable stay open, you know, this era of AI is more open than I've seen before, right? Um, and there's a real conscious effort to, to really make sure that we can interop across the board.

So, and then the last one, I think actually just touching on the system is power efficiency, right? Talk about it. You know, we all think about data centers, um, being con, you know, uh, consumers of energy, but actually your network equipment does too.

Combine that with different standards. We're a global company. We have to deal with, uh, things like carbon credits and sustainability across the globe.

And so how do we provide you with more power efficient equipment as well?