Beyond routers and switches: Exploring Cisco’s new tech frontier

As it moves from a product culture to a platform culture, Cisco Systems Inc. is also reshaping a common perception of the 39-year-old firm as purely a networking business.

It is playing a broader role in key elements of the enterprise, from silicon development and hybrid work to security and application deployment in the cloud.

“Everybody thinks, ‘Oh, switches, routers, blah, blah, blah,’” said Bob O’Donnell (pictured), president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research LLC. “They’ve evolved quite a bit over the years. They are inherently involved with the creation and the delivery of applications. This stuff happens all over the place, and it’s making those network connections happen and then monitoring them … that is really their key to success moving forward.”

O’Donnell spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at Cisco Live, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed key areas where Cisco’s business may not be fully understood and impressions of the Apple Vision Pro headset.

In addition to supporting the application experience, Cisco has been focused on enhancing its Webex solution for video conferencing and online meetings as hybrid work has become the norm in a post-pandemic world. The company made several announcements during Cisco Live surrounding the use of AI for enhanced telepresence.

“It’s demonstration of innovation,” O’Donnell said. “They can put a 4K camera in, and then they can split it up intelligently. They’ve got some AI stuff in the background figuring this out, how to split up the view so that they can concentrate on the activity.”

Silicon is another important area in which Cisco has played an active role. The company’s Silicon One processors support the building of modular and fixed routers and switches for large enterprise and telecommunications networks.

“The Silicon One stuff that they’ve done has primarily been about moving data bits around and across networks,” O’Donnell said. “If there is a mechanism by which they can help enable the creation of devices that can do inferencing on the edge, it becomes interesting. They are an Arm licensee; they can absolutely leverage that.”

Development of technology for the edge represents a prime opportunity for Cisco. The firm has built momentum in the telecommunications market and is positioned to have a significant voice in the deployment of future edge computing strategies, according to O’Donnell.

“They’re hungry, that is the telcos, to figure out an edge strategy, because they know they have the physical point of presence that nobody else can touch,” O’Donnell said. “If Cisco can help somehow enable that for them, that I think is one of the calling cards for them to drive that.”

The security field has become an important part of Cisco’s business. During the conference in Las Vegas, the firm unveiled Cisco Secure Access, a security offering designed to provide features such as zero-trust network access, secure web gateway, cloud access security broker, firewall-as-a-service, DNS security and remote browser isolation. Secure Access is also integrated with Cisco’s ThousandEyes network intelligence software, so users can identify and resolve any network performance issues that occur.

“They are already starting to combine, and this came up today, this notion [that] security and observability are both going to leverage the same set of data,” O’Donnell said. “They’ve got this data from monitoring the network stuff. They can leverage that both for security purposes as well as observability purposes.”

Along with the areas mentioned above, another part of Cisco’s business that may not be fully understood is its partnership with Apple Inc. and a recent rollout of the Vision Pro spatial computing headset. The device’s operating system will feature a number of apps including Cisco Webex.

O’Donnell noted that Cisco executive Jeetu Patel briefly mentioned the collaboration with Apple during his keynote without providing much detail.

“We heard Jeetu this morning in the day two keynote say, ‘We’re going to have Webex on Vision Pro,’” O’Donnell said. “And that’s about all they said, but they did say it.”

During the interview, O’Donnell described his opportunity to test the latest Apple product during the announcement event.

“The screen is incredible,” he said. “It’s a face computer … and the problem is it just gets a little overwhelming. I describe it as it’s hyper-realistic, and your brain can only handle so much visual information.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s editorial coverage of Cisco Live:

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Cisco Showcases Vision to Simplify Networking and Securely Connect the World

News Summary:

LAS VEGAS, June 6, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- CISCO LIVE -- Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is on a mission to simplify IT, today announcing its vision for Cisco Networking Cloud, an integrated management platform experience for both on-prem and cloud operating models.

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Building a Better Future for Cisco Customers and PartnersManaging networks in today's era of connecting everyone, everywhere is hard. According to Cisco's State of Global Innovation report, 85% of IT professionals indicate they value simplicity in their IT systems. Simplicity becomes increasingly important with the advancement of cloud, IoT, Wi-Fi + 5G, AI/ML, and security. With so many technologies and applications coming together, it can be difficult for IT staff to deliver a consistent, unified experience whether in the office, at home, or on the go.

A simplified IT experience influences customer satisfaction, employee retention, and competitive differentiation. Cisco recognizes the struggles with fragmentation, lack of visibility, security threats, and time-consuming integration that get in the way of delivering better experiences. It understands that the journey to simplification is defined by each operator's business objectives, functional needs, and preferred consumption model. Whether the use cases require on-premises delivery, cloud-enabled delivery or anything in between, Cisco is meeting IT where they are.

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The Vision for Cisco Networking CloudAs part of its journey to simplification, Cisco has been working to create a simpler network management platform experience to help customers easily access and navigate its platforms to manage all Cisco networking products from one place. Featuring cloud-driven automation, rich network insights, and innovation through its partner ecosystem, Cisco Networking Cloud will accelerate the delivery of unified experiences and drive measurable business outcomes.

"Today we are sharing our vision and first steps to eliminate networking complexity and securely connect the world," said Jonathan Davidson, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Networking. "Only Cisco has the portfolio, experience, and partner ecosystem to bring together campus and branch, data center, compute, IoT, and SD-WAN to optimize outcomes using one networking management platform to deliver unified experiences."

From Vision to Value: Innovation Launching Today

Supporting Resources

About Cisco  Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that securely connects everything to make anything possible. Our purpose is to power an inclusive future for all by helping our customers reimagine their applications, power hybrid work, secure their enterprise, transform their infrastructure, and meet their sustainability goals. Discover more on The Newsroom and follow us on Twitter at @Cisco.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.

SOURCE Cisco Systems, Inc.

CloudFabrix Debuts Data Modernization and Composable Dashboards Services on Cisco’s FSO Platform

LAS VEGAS, June 7, 2023 — Today at Cisco Live, Cisco’s annual IT and communications conference, CloudFabrix, the inventor of Robotic Data Automation Fabric (RDAF) and the “Data-centric AIOps” leader announced the launch of Observability Data Modernization (ODM) and Composable Dashboards services for Cisco’s Full-Stack Observability (FSO) Platform.

CloudFabrix Apps on Cisco FSO Platform

Cisco’s FSO was a major announcement around its vision of breaking operational silos to enable “Experience as the new Digital currency.” The FSO Platform is focused on OpenTelemetry (OTel)and ingests, stores, and provides a unified query engine for MELT (Metrics, Events, Logs and Traces) signals in a unique relationship-based entity model. Cisco FSO Platform enables partners to build an ecosystem of applications with Business and IT Contexts. CloudFabrix is one of the first few design partners to showcase the extensibility of the platform, with its patent-pending Robotic Data Automation Fabric (RDAF).

“CloudFabrix has demonstrated outperforming leadership in our 2023 Gigaom Radar report. Their Observability Data Modernization Service is a significant development for the OpenTelemetry (OTel) ecosystem. Any Observability provider can now consume non-OTel data using this service to deploy in hybrid environments that are not OTel compliant and still deliver all the OTel benefits. This enables a path for end users and OTel providers for phased OTel adoption. We will be watching this development as it matures,” said Ron Williams, Principal Analyst at Gigaom.

Observability Data Modernization Service (ODMS)

ODMS like ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) ensures data from disparate sources is extracted, transformed, enriched, and ingested in Cisco FSO Platform’s Entity model in OpenTelemetry format. Once ingested it can be contextualized, correlated, queried and visualized for root cause analysis and remediation.

ODMS powered by CloudFabrix’s RDAF Edge provides the following benefits for consumers of Cisco’s FSO Platform:

Data Modernization:OpenTelemetry has become the gold standard for Observability, however, there are still applications and libraries which do not support OTel standards and use vendor-specific agents for data collection. ODMS transforms Non-OTel signals from Hybrid applications into OTel signals and enriches them with Topology and service maps.

CloudFabrix will demonstrate Data Modernization, for vSphere Observability at Cisco Live 2023 (4-8 June). Beyond Cisco Live, ODMS will be leveraged for the modernization of Non-OTel signals in Healthcare, FinTech, Telco, and SAP environments.

Contextualization: ODMS does near real-time topology discovery using the pipelines, enriches attributes with metadata, and builds cross-domain service and dependency mappings. The Cisco FSO Platform entity model and hypergraphs are enriched with these mappings for full-stack correlation and user experience.

ODMS leverages low code bots, to extract, transform, enrich, map, and ingest data in the Cisco FSO Platform entity models. Cross-domain metrics, events, logs, traces, (MELT) data types can be normalized and ingested, including operational data types (Incidents, Tickets, GitOps), code commits, Bugs, API alerts, CI/CD build failures, etc.

Composable Dashboard Service

Persona-based and Domain-specific Composable Dashboards can be quickly composed to show all the heuristics around the entity models, their relationships, and their correlation within the Cisco FSO Platform.

“CloudFabrix is an important partner when it comes to Cisco’s FSO Platform,” said Carlos Pereira, Fellow and Chief Architect, Cisco. “The FSO Platform extensibility was designed to empower an ecosystem of observability partners, enabling new solutions and use-cases via their diverse domain knowledge and experience. CloudFabrix brings expertise around data and intelligent automation, and built an FSO solution that converges siloed operational domains – such as public cloud infrastructure and on-premises vSphere environments – through OpenTelemetry ingestion and transformation via the CloudFabrix’s Robotic Data Automation Fabric (RDAF) integration with the FSO Platform.”

“Cisco’s FSO Platform is a game-changer for Full Stack Observability. We were honored to be one of the first few design partners. The extensible FSO Platform entity model enabled us to model any Full stack entity quickly and ingest any data types with our Robotic Data Automation Fabric (RDAF). Data is at the center of the FSO Platform and RDAF plays a key role in bringing data to the FSO Platform and the business. We are very excited about the possibilities of what we can achieve together with Cisco and we will be in full strength at Cisco Live,” said Raju Datla Chief Executive Officer, CloudFabrix.

This solution will also be on display at Cisco Live Las Vegas June 4th-8th, booth #732.

Watch Cisco Appdynamics and CloudFabrix joint webinar here.

About CloudFabrix

CloudFabrix is the leading Data-centric AIOps Platform vendor and the inventor of Robotic Data Automation Fabric (RDAF). RDAF delivers integrated, enriched and actionable data pipelines to operational and analytical systems. RDAF unifies Observability, AIOps, and Automation for Operational Systems and enriches analytical systems. CloudFabrix empowers Business and IT leaders with AI-powered actionable intelligence to make faster and better decisions and accelerate IT planning and Autonomous operations.

Source: CloudFabrix