At its annual flagship occasion, Cisco Stay, about 20,000 IT and safety execs gathered in Las Vegas to listen to the corporate’s newest bulletins, plans for its $28 billion Splunk acquisition, and imaginative and prescient for the long run. Whereas there was a heavy dose of AI all over the place, as in comparison with different vendor pronouncements, Cisco’s AI aspirations are modest and achievable. And like final yr, the tech big sought to simplify its worth and aggressive differentiation with a easy message: Cisco connects, protects, and offers insights throughout your whole complicated enterprise – together with all of your areas, owned and unowned networks, gadgets, internet hosting fashions and so forth. This roughly corresponds to its main portfolio domains: networking, safety, and observability.
There was a further theme executives aimed to hammer dwelling inside this message – the corporate was dedicated to deep integration and innovation. To that finish, over two days, it introduced a parade of recent merchandise and capabilities.
Networking And Computing
As a substitute of conventional bulletins heralding new switching, routing, and wi-fi merchandise networking, Cisco’s networking bulletins centered on the intersection of networking with its new areas of focus:
- AI infrastructure: Cisco revealed its Nexus HyperFabric AI Clusters: new cloud administration system; new Cisco 6000 switches primarily based on Cisco Silicon Open; and predefined, validated designs and configurations for NVIDIA’s AI answer and VAST information platform. As a substitute of managing AI throughout Infiniband and ethernet, Cisco’s new providing will help simplify AI networks by consolidating connections utilizing 400 and 800G ethernet switches.
- Growth of Digital Expertise Assurance. Cisco is increasing its Digital Expertise Assurance announcement in 2023–primarily based on ThousandEyes–from simply offering WAN visibility and insights to now together with data from cloud, LAN, and WLAN. Principally, purchasers can map out the connections of an utility from an end-user gadget throughout the WAN to a microservice or a digital machine within the information heart or cloud. ThousandEyes now collects data from Meraki {hardware}, Catalyst product traces, and digital gateways inside IaaS platforms. Meraki has abstract (Digital Expertise) Assurance web page fed by ThousandEyes.
Safety
Safety was the second theme after (after all) AI, at Cisco Stay! Content material-packed keynotes and deep dives helped shed extra mild on the seller’s upcoming HyperShield structure. Moreover, Cisco introduced plans for smart integrations with its XDR answer and Splunk, its largest acquisition to this point. Splunk remains to be internet hosting its annual .conf consumer convention which takes place simply subsequent week, additionally in Las Vegas. Cisco safety bulletins at this yr’s Cisco Stay embody:
- Introduction of Cisco HyperShield and its capabilities. HyperShield is a software program structure that isn’t a product however somewhat a mesh of software program brokers embedded to the material. Think about hundreds of “child firewalls” positioned very near the functions and containers they shield; safety coverage will probably be distributed such that every child firewall solely has the coverage it wants to guard its tiny area. AI will probably be wanted to refine and preserve the coverage (therefore the descriptor “AI native”). In the event you assume this sounds very very like VMware’s method to integrating LastLine into NSX, you’re proper. There is a chance right here for Cisco to seize disgruntled VMware clients. HyperShield can substitute NSX. Within the quick time period, they’d need to depend on OpenShift or much like substitute ESXi.
- Autonomous Segmentation. The primary of HyperShield’s use instances will probably be to make use of AI and Isovalent’s eBPF kernel-level filter to each simplify and deepen the seller’s microsegmentation answer. On servers this can reside as an agent – within the community, as digital home equipment. Sooner or later it should exist on Cisco routers and switches with an AMD DPU embedded into the {hardware}. HyperShield targets east-west, and the seller encourages one to think about HyperShield as offering visibility and coverage enforcement as a “cloth not a fence.”
- Integration of Cisco XDR with a wide range of merchandise. Integration contains sending information to Meraki MX and Splunk. HyperShield may have twin data-paths that may generate orders of magnitude extra telemetry, and Splunk expertise will probably be used to digest all of it (they declare).
- Introduction of a 1200 sequence firewall and a Meraki MX650. The 8-port equipment 1200 sequence will characteristic built-in SD-WAN and the seller claims an enormous worth / efficiency enhance (in all probability to compete with PANW and Fortinet). The MX650 will transfer up from the MX450 and have SD-WAN interconnect so an administrator can connect it to present SD-WAN config objects.
- SnortML . This was one other announcement buried below the bigger focus of AI and HyperShield. The forthcoming FTD 7.6 launch will add the SnortML characteristic to boost firewall preventative capabilities, promising higher detection by leveraging recurrent neural networks (RNN), enhancing deep studying to assist distinguish good from dangerous extra precisely. Most of the enhancements and optimizations introduced don’t embody Cisco’s ASA platform, leading to a doubtful future for the platform as Cisco has not confirmed plans to part it out; though it may be surmised that “the writing is on the partitions” for patrons nonetheless using the ASA.
- Cisco ISE (sure, that’s proper). It’s a part of the updates and optimizations with the combination of HyperShield. The purpose is for a “seamless integration” of the community and safety cloth for selective workflows and to push these flows to HyperShield for L4 inspection with SGT supported. This integration is deliberate for August, within the meantime, it’s latest 3.4 launch continues Cisco’s imaginative and prescient of frequent coverage, which now extends past customers and gadgets to incorporate utility and workloads no matter the place they’re operating (cloud or on-premises).
- Safety Cloud Management for tying all the pieces collectively. A lot of the early HyperShield will probably be administered from CDO, with a path to maneuver to SCC sooner or later.
Unified Observability
The sudden early closure of the Splunk acquisition, simply weeks earlier than Cisco Stay, featured prominently in keynotes and breakout periods. Cisco’s multiyear funding in its Full Stack Observability (FSO) answer will now remodel right into a broader strategic narrative. FSO and App Dynamics merchandise and their growth groups, will consolidate below Tom Casey, SVP & GM, Product & Know-how at Splunk. FSO’s scalable information integration structure will play a distinguished function enabling use instances for the Splunk platform and its drive for unified observability whereas ThousandEyes will drive the brand new Digital Expertise Assurance (DXA) initiative.
Carlos Pereira, Cisco’s FSO Chief Architect, will now head-up Cisco’s Buyer Expertise efforts for Liz Centoni, an space given appreciable protection throughout her keynote and one thing that Forrester sees as a core driver for the way forward for all operations. With Splunk’s established model, a contemporary and scalable information integration structure, and a transparent directive to be expertise centered, Cisco may shed its siloed product supply notion and simply grow to be a dominant AIOps and Observability participant.
AI
Looming over the convention and permeating all of Cisco’s messaging, was the theme of AI. However, following the compulsory “we’re doing AI innovation” statements, Cisco’s AI bulletins tacked into ‘early’ specifics and labored to attach Cisco’s disparate portfolio into the AI growth. And considerably surprisingly, all bulletins had been easy, leaned into its strengths as a supplier, and are achievable.
Whereas there wasn’t something as bold because the mannequin suppliers latest enhancements (e.g., GPT 4o’s multi-modal or Gemini’s 1M token context window), Cisco’s introduced technique does define alternatives the place it should play in AI workloads. Bulletins revolved round two themes:
- Investments and partnerships. Cisco introduced a billion-dollar AI fund, its investments into strategic AI companies like Scale AI, highlighted a spread of partnerships with the likes of NVIDIA, AMD, and even Microsoft. Whereas the partnerships had been huge ranging throughout the Cisco stack, the principle logical through-line was – appropriately – integration and multi-party cooperation to pursue higher AI outcomes for enterprises.
- Iteration. Cisco additionally made a bunch of bulletins in increasing their AI options already of their merchandise, towards the themes of “personalised, proactive and predictive”, rising ‘out-of-the-box’ AI performance (like automated buyer help churn analytics). Cisco’s AI assistant, particularly, is getting an growth, utilizing a skills-based structure to extend its flexibility and applicability to new domains like contact heart and rising end-user going through automation choices, much like how different suppliers at the moment are introducing ‘vendor ecosystem configured’ conversational AI programs.
It’s clear Cisco is dedicated to integration and starting to ship – a lot of its bulletins centered on sharing telemetry between choices, simplifying administration, creating frequent insurance policies, enhancing consumer expertise, and so forth. It’s additionally clear that Cisco is doubling down on some great benefits of its in depth visibility into networks, apps, hosts, and gadgets. Its portfolio and integrations enchantment to present Cisco clients (each IT and safety leaders) who wish to consolidate the plethora of level merchandise and distributors that create unnecessary complexity and overhead with small benefits.
The place Cisco has extra work to do is on innovation, many bulletins it characterised as innovation akin to single signal on unification, sharing telemetry, availability of AI assistants and so forth. – are both capabilities clients count on from a portfolio vendor or different distributors have already got. To be progressive, Cisco wants to take care of its present momentum whereas choosing just a few areas the place it will possibly pull forward of rivals. HyperShield is essentially the most bold of its bulletins and represents actual innovation, as it’s almost all software-based, highly-distributed and begins with essentially the most tough safety use instances like segmentation.
