Cisco Live’s coming next week. Here’s a preview

Cisco Systems Inc. will hold its annual Cisco Live user event next week in Las Vegas as the networking giant is coming off an impressive quarter in which Chief Executive Chuck Robbins (pictured) set a more than positive outlook for the company.

Given that the secular trends of cloud, mobility and hybrid work act as long-term tailwinds, I’m expecting the company to load up this year’s Cisco Live with announcements that sets itself up for many years. Here are some of the key themes I’m expecting from Cisco Live 2023:

Of all the product areas, I’m most interested to see what Cisco announces in security. In my security platform post, I mentioned that security provides the biggest needle-moving opportunity, since the company currently has single-digit share in a massive market. For Cisco, security innovation is less about new products and more about integration across its broad range of existing products.

The company announced XDR at the RSA Conference recently, and now it needs to build on that to make using Cisco security operationally simpler. Also, the prevailing trend is now toward a security platform, so any coupling that Cisco can do to tie security to its massive network installed base will only help it gain on the likes of Palo Alto Networks Inc. and Fortinet Inc.

The new security leadership at Cisco, which includes Jeetu Patel and Tom Gillis, seems well aware of what’s at stake. I’m hopeful that when Cisco Live is over, security will dominate the product news.

One can’t go to an event this year without hearing about AI. Although I’m not expecting Cisco to hit the audience over the head with AI, I do expect it will be a major theme of how it will use it to evolve its products.

In reality, Cisco has been using machine learning and AI for years to modernize its products. Its encrypted traffic analytics uses AI, as does its XDR offering. Cisco Webex uses AI for many core features, including noise block, transcription and translation. Also, its network automation and intent-based capabilities require AI to translate network telemetry into actionable tasks.

I’m sure most of the products announced at Cisco Live will include AI in some manner. The only question is how overt Cisco will be about it, given the current market hype.

The other aspect of AI that could be introduced is generative AI and how Cisco will use it to improve its products. The tie-in to Webex is obvious, as a worker can use it to find information or create content. With networking and security, Cisco’s operational dashboards could feature a ChatGPT-like interface to identify and solve problems. Given the R&D time required with infrastructure, I’m not expecting a big dose of generative AI.

If there were a market tracker for “single panes of glass,” Cisco would be the runaway leader, as it seems to have a dashboard for everything. At Cisco Live 2022, the company took its first step in addressing this by integrating Catalyst and Meraki, where administrators could see Catalyst devices in the Meraki dashboard.

We are a year removed from that, and we should see product areas addressed, including Cisco Spaces (formerly DNA), Viptela SD-WAN and Wi-Fi. Like with security, product breadth isn’t Cisco’s problem because it has a broader portfolio than any other network vendor, but it has made it operationally very difficult for customers to use multiple Cisco products. The pace of change in information technology is faster than ever, and improved cross-platform operations will help Cisco network engineers align operations with business demands.

ThousandEyes and “AppD” enable Cisco customers to “see” where no network engineer has seen before. ThousandEyes provides visibility across the internet, which wasn’t necessary a decade ago, but the cloud and software-defined wide-area network changed that. IT pros are responsible for user and customer experience, and the internet is widely used for business traffic, making it critical for network professionals to have granular visibility.

AppD is an application performance product, and one might wonder why a network vendor would care about apps. An understanding of application behavior can help network and security pros prioritize tasks. For example, its business risk observability offering announced at Cisco Live EMEA earlier this year can map vulnerabilities and threat intelligence to business context, helping security engineers understand where to prioritize activities. AppD information should be the lens through which almost all Cisco information is viewed, as it can translate between telemetry and business performance.

Cisco has had a strong focus on ESG long before it was in vogue. Its mission of making the world a better place dates back decades to when then-CEO John Chambers used to talk about how the internet could be used to democratize education, creating opportunities where none existed before. Under Robbins, Cisco has stepped up its ESG game with aggressive goals of the number of people it could positively affect.

There hasn’t been a Cisco Live under Robbins where ESG hasn’t been a key topic area, and I have no reason to assume that will change. Of all the areas that fall under ESG, sustainability is the one many businesses struggle with today. At IBM Think, CEO Arvind Krishna highlighted that its data showed that there was a massive gap between their customer’s goals and their ability to execute on those goals.

Cisco has been designing its product with sustainability in mind, including power-saving and efficiency features. The exhibit hall at Cisco Live EMEA featured a sustainability zone, and I would expect the same in Las Vegas to help customers understand what’s possible today.

I’m sure there will be some new products announced at Cisco Live, but the theme of this year’s event should be cross-product innovation. At $60 billion in revenue, Cisco has a massive portfolio of products that address everything from data centers to telco networks to cloud to campus networks. Cisco leadership has continually touted the importance of making the products easier to use, which is not a trivial thing to do, but it is what I’m expecting at Cisco Live 2023 in Las Vegas.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

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Cisco CEO: It’s time to make IT simpler

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins has outlined the company’s goal to help customers across the world have an easier time managing their systems.

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Speaking in his opening keynote at Cisco Live 2023 in Las Vegas, Robbins covered a host of topics and areas, but kept returning to one key message - making technology simpler.

“We want to help you accelerate your innovation. We want to simplify your experience,” he noted. “We love features..For years, it’s been a feature game. But if you can’t deploy them, they’re no good. So, the number one feature that I think our team needs to continue to focus on is simplicity. Simplify your experience using our technology.”

“We know how important technology is to the success of your businesses...and to humanity," Robbins added, highlighting the key role of technology played for organizations everywhere during the pandemic.

“Technology is key to everything we're doing going forward…(but) It's a complicated world - but we have to bring this technology to bear to realize the benefit of what we can do around the world.”

Robbins noted that Cisco now works with over a million customers and partners across the globe, with its technology present at 98% of the largest organizations in the world. This gives the company unparalleled insight into the issues affecting businesses in multiple industries, he added, particularly around security and connectivity - Cisco’s traditional strong points.

“When we look to the future, we want to connect everything securely,” he stated.

The company was able to share more on both its Cisco Networking Cloud, and its Cisco Security Cloud platforms, both of which look to give companies far more insight and intelligence to help them run more efficiently and safely.

AI was the elephant in the room, but Robbins did not avoid it, noting that Cisco had been using the technology for some time before ChatGPT and OpenAI grabbed headlines around the world.

"AI is moving so quickly and we as organisations are trying to figure out, how do we use it, along with trust, and what are the risks, how are we getting benefits,” he noted. “We want to do great things with AI - but we want to do it responsibly.”

Overall, the message from Robbins was fairly clear - Cisco is set to continue its push to connect and secure customers all over the world.

"We care deeply about your success,” he concluded, “we are innovating at a faster pace than we have done for some time, and we want to continue to do so."

Cisco Introduces New Innovations for the Future of Hybrid Meetings

Cisco's new Room Bar Pro being used in a hybrid meeting for videoconferencing among young adults.

AI will play an important role in the future of collaboration. It’s a tool that can solve the biggest challenges of workplace collaboration: challenges like meeting equity, language barriers, meeting fatigue… the list goes on. Cisco's focus has always been on the experience of our customers. This makes its AI innovations purpose-built into Cisco's RoomOS platform to provide the best collaboration experiences across a spectrum of workspaces.

Cisco unveiled its new video bar, the Room Bar Pro. The Room Bar Pro is an easy-to-deploy video bar with significant processing power, more connections, touchscreen integration, and all of the advanced AI capabilities built into Cisco's RoomOS platform. Based on the powerful NVIDIA processor, it supports tomorrow’s meeting advancements.

The Room Bar Pro is optimized for medium workspaces (5-12 seats) of varying shapes. This is due to a dual camera system that reaches further, wider, and frames everyone in the room in ultra-high quality, even when participants are sitting at the ends of the table. Cisco recently asked facilities experts about their top workspace priorities, and 73% say that they are most likely to video-enable medium spaces in the next three years. With the Room Bar Pro, Cisco is uniquely positioned to provide the most powerful processor in a collaboration device, deployable across our customers’ workspace environments.

Cisco's goal has always been to uplevel hybrid work for every person, regardless of where or how they work. To support varied workstyles and use of multiple meeting platforms, Cisco devices will now support a native Microsoft Teams Rooms experience. With a range of certified devices for Microsoft Teams Rooms, IT teams can confidently deploy this experience across a range of meeting room and desktop workspaces.

Powered by RoomOS, customers choosing to deploy a native Microsoft Teams Rooms experience will benefit from the added capabilities of built-in audio and video intelligence, like noise removal and Frames. Customers can join Teams and fully featured Webex meetings with the same join experience across both platforms. And, all certified devices will be manageable in the Teams Admin Center and Teams Rooms Pro Management Portal, as well as through the Cisco Control Hub device management.

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In today’s hybrid world, organizations need to video enable their workspaces to account for remote meeting participants. And with additional technology, IT teams experience additional management lift. With global HQ’s and hundreds of workspaces, the old-fashioned “walk-the-floor” is not feasible for many enterprises. IT teams require centralized access to workspace insights from wherever they are.

Cisco now offers a brand-new device management experience in Control Hub. With a birds-eye view of your workspaces and powerful filtering, this “out-of-the-box” solution gives IT teams a real-time aggregate view of their workspaces. From this view, admins can see the Cisco devices and partner peripherals in each room, the health of their connections, and at-a-glance usage and environmental statistics like room temperature and humidity.

These usage statistics and workspace insights help our customers make informed decisions about their workspace deployments. IT Teams can understand which are the most popular, which rooms are sized just right or overcrowded. You can see which are used for scheduled, versus ad-hoc meetings. And coming soon, new ThousandEyes vantage points on RoomOS devices will allow IT teams to rapidly identify and resolve issues with calls and meetings by visualizing the full network path of those services—all via easy activation through Control Hub.