AI, Industrial Networking, and Cisco’s Custom Silicon at Cisco Live 2025 – Tech Field Day Takeaways

I'm Tom Hollingsworth event Lead at Tech Field Day and here are my takeaways from Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live. Hi everyone. I had a great time at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live.

If you've ever been to an event as big as Cisco Live, you know that there are so many things going on. There are so many people to talk to and so much information to digest and one of the reasons that we continue to have successful Tech Field extra events is because we are able to take that information and present it to our audience of delegates and our community in such a way as to make it easy to digest, but also be able to ask the right questions. We had three great presentations that happened over the course of the day at Tech Field, a extra, and it is interesting to see how the industry is continuing to evolve around new ideas like AI and industrial IO ot.

And I think that the presentations that we got touched on that just a little bit and gave us an opportunity to really dig into the topics that are top of mind for our community. My first big takeaway is of course, that AI is going to continue to define enterprise IT strategy into the near future. Cisco had a huge section of their keynote that was dedicated to talking about things like ag agentic ops, which utilizes their deep learning that they have accrued over the last decades of networking experience to be able to build agents that are able to run a network kind of on their own or with very minimal human input.

That also means that companies are starting to build AI into things like security to make better security decisions, to assist operations teams with a multitude of threats that they face on a daily basis. Cisco not only is building those, but they're integrating AI into things like Splunk. But I think it's important that people understand that AI is not the only solution to all of your problems because as pointed out by word cobbley at avi, sometimes when you ask AI something simple like, tell me what's wrong with this packet capture, you can get wildly different results based on the inputs, the model that you're using or even the way that you asked the questions.

He had one of the most entertaining presentations from Cisco Live and Tech Field Day Extra simply just pointing out that sometimes AIS will flat out lie to you or pretend that they don't see problems. My second big takeaway from Cisco Live is that industrial networking is becoming a much bigger part of the overall enterprise IT landscape. I know that most people think of the enterprise IT market as switches in MDFs and IDFs wireless access points hanging from ceiling brackets.

But I'm here to tell you that the number of networking devices that are now being connected not only to things like giant milling machines but also to the growing list of iot devices out there is too big to ignore right now. Cisco brought us some great presentations around new industrial switching capabilities that meet the unique needs that we have. So for example, maybe you need additional power to run a, an external camera that has pan tilt zoom capabilities that are more than the traditional 20 watts of power to the port.

Maybe you need something that's providing up to 50 watts per port. Well, Cisco has a switch with an enhanced power budget that will let you take care of that. And don't forget that most of the time these switches don't live in what we would like to consider a clean data center environment.

Uh, that thing could be sucking in dirt and uh, be exposed to the elements and being able to see how those things operate are, it's important to understand the challenges that you might face so you don't just stick a regular switch out there. Another thing that I thought was kind of fascinating was to hear about some of the ways that Open Gear is tying all of their capabilities together to enhance the way that people can do things. In fact, I saw an amazing demo on the show floor with Open Gear and one of their partners where they were doing something as simple as controlling access to a small rack with uh, Meraki Identity Management, but also through integration with an open your box that says, I'm not gonna open the lock on this rack until I can verify that you are who you say you are.

And oh, by the way, I have a picture of or I have a camera stationed over the rack so that if I have a picture of whoever opened it as soon as it is popped so we can verify the identity of the people who are working on things. I think industrial, while maybe not the most impressive way to showcase the technology, is one of those things that is gonna become important later if only because so many things that we're going to need to use into the future requires some form of industrial overlap. The third big takeaway that I have from Cisco live US is the continued integration of Cisco's Silicon One Design.

This was something that I saw years ago and I thought to myself, if this is the direction that Cisco is going to go with their technology, it's going to have a huge impact. So many other companies in the industry have decided to use Merchant Silicon. They go with ODMs or large recognized vendors and their feature sets tend to look very similar because of that, oh, you're gonna be using this protocol to send information back and forth between these two devices.

The reason why you're using that protocol is because the merchant silicone that you have has a decoder for that protocol, whereas Cisco is using Silicon One and they're developing it on their own to have the capabilities that Cisco needs. And some of the newest switches in the catalyst line that we're debuted at Cisco Live and at Tech Field, a extra leveraged Silicon one in some very interesting ways, enhanced tcam, um, more high bandwidth memory to allow for different kinds of traffic flows. And there was an excellent presentation from Sean Wargo, a friend of mine who has talked a lot about why Silicon One develops the way that it does.

And yes, it takes a little bit longer to get a Silicon One chip out the door, but I promise you in the long run you're gonna be a lot happier with what you get out of it if only because Cisco is meeting the needs of their customers as opposed to making a more generic platform that tries to do a little bit of a lot of things as opposed to doing a few things really, really well. My final thoughts from Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco live US is that I continue to love the opportunity to take technologies that maybe get a passing mention in the keynote or maybe a few minutes at the most and bring them to a group of smart independent people in the industry to dig deep into them to understand that the challenges behind the technology, something as simple as an outdoor wireless access point may get a passing mention from one of the heads of Cisco in a keynote address. But we get to see live pictures and we get to see, uh, radiation patterns and we get to understand why having something like this is so important.

And that's why we're gonna continue to bring things like Tech Field Day extra to as many events as possible is because we get to spend time not only with the company that put on the show, but with other companies that are there that want to get in front of people like you to show what they've been working on and take a little pride in all of the efforts that they've been putting into their products and their presentations over the year. We had a great lineup of delegates at this event, too many to shout out, but there's some of the people in the industry that I consider clo my close friends and I also met so many new people while I was go live and I can't wait to bring them to a future field day event and show you just how smart they are. I also want to thank all of our presenting companies, Bibi Solutions, open Gear and Cisco for taking part in this event.

It was great to see you, it was great to be able to learn from you and it was great to laugh along with you as you, uh, showed us just how crazy the world of enterprise it can be. Don't forget that if you wanna learn more about what we did at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live, that you should check out the Tech Field Day website, including the Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco live event page where we're gonna be posting presentations, videos, as well as delegate coverage from the event so you can hear the thoughts of the people who were on the ground in San Diego enjoying all the great information sharing. Thanks for watching this episode of Tech Field Day takeaways on the Tech Field Day plus YouTube channel.

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