A tremendous number of enterprises and service providers view Cisco as the nexus of their network, security, and cloud operations. At the company’s Cisco Live customer and partner conference in June, Cisco boldly connected the dots of a network- and cloud-based ecosystem that ties together innovative technologies to drive productivity, resiliency, and growths, while also showcasing its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
Cisco’s market share for ethernet switches was 43.3% for 2022, according to IDC’s tracker report, while combined service provider and enterprise router revenue accounted for 35.1% of the total market. Network World named Cisco #1 in its 2022 list of “the top 10 vendors providing corporate networks with everything from SASE and NaaS to ZTNA and network automation.”
Cisco believes it’s best positioned to help customers seamlessly manage networking domains, provide secure frictionless cloud access, and provide observability into the full stack of network and applications to quickly diagnose and remediate performance problems.
At Cisco Live, the company backed that up with a bold set of launches, including:
- Cisco Networking Cloud. A strategic vision to deliver a single, integrated management platform experience for both on-prem and cloud operating models, to help customers manage all Cisco networking products from one place.
- Cisco Secure Access. A security service edge (SSE) solution for its Cisco Security Cloud platform designed to simplify security experiences in today’s hybrid world for frictionless cloud access across any location, any device, and any application.
- Full Stack Observability (FSO). Cisco’s FSO Platform is designed as a unified, extensible platform that is focused on OpenTelemetry. This vendor-agnostic solution empowers customers and partners to seamlessly bring together Metrics, Events, Logs, and Traces (MELT) data from multiple domains to enable new use cases, while elevating and securing digital experiences.
- Generative AI to empower security and productivity. Cisco announced it is harnessing large language models (LLMs) across its Security and Collaboration portfolios to help organizations drive productivity and simplicity for their workforce.
- The Cisco Security Cloud leverages a generative AI assistant that addresses two use cases. This includes an SOC Assistant to dramatically increase the threat response speed and effectiveness of the Security Operations Center (SOC). Cisco’s Policy Assistant simplifies policy management and enables Security and IT administrators to describe granular security policies and evaluate how to best implement them across different aspects of their security infrastructure.
- Additionally, with new summarization capabilities in Webex, users can give prompts and ask questions, and automatically summarize meetings and contact center chats. This will drive real value by helping people collaborate better and increase productivity at work.
- Supercharging an ‘unrivaled portfolio.’ The new capabilities announced at Cisco Live are designed to help teams leverage end-to-end security monitoring, analysis, and remediation. This is what organizations need to build, deploy, and run secure cloud-native applications in today’s distributed, multi-cloud environments. The new product line “supercharges its unrivaled portfolio that solves customer cloud application security challenges of today and the future,” the company says.
That can’t come soon enough for the IT and network teams crying out for simpler ways to manage their resources. “As Cisco’s customers add billions of new connections to their enterprises and as more applications move to a multi-cloud environment, the network becomes even more critical,” The Strategy Story observed in early 2023.
