Its absence dropped like a cannonball into a pond. In Cisco’s August 2024 earnings call, CEO Chuck Robbins laid out the company’s investment strategy—with nary a mention of networking. Cisco was laying off up to 7% of its workforce, shifting resources into strategic areas. Robbins outlined his three-point list: AI, cybersecurity, and cloud. Corporate focus was on integrating Splunk, the mega acquisition made in March. Cisco had yet to announce Wi-Fi 7, a year and a half after competitors in China had taken the lead in the new technology. It seemed that Cisco may be turning its back on campus networking, a market the company had dominated for decades.
What a difference 10 months can make.
Earlier this week, on June 10th, Chuck Robbins appeared on stage with Jeetu Patel, appointed by Robbins as Chief Product Officer just days after the August 2024 earnings call.Their message was that Cisco is an AI company with networking at its core, and that message was backed with a list of announcements so broad that Chief Marketing Officer Carrie Palin called it “bonkers”. Patel stole the show with a narrative designed to address the perception that a) Cisco is too complex and b) it missed the boat on AI.
The three focus areas outlined in August shifted. The word “cloud” morphed to “data center”, with a view that increasingly, AI workloads will be running on private infrastructure. Cisco’s new strategy was infused with AI throughout, starting with a prediction that millions of AI agents will one day be introduced into the human workforce. However, insisted Cisco executives, these agents will be “network-bound”. To grow to its full potential, AI needs network infrastructure, but it also needs to be trusted. To build trust, says Patel, security needs to be fused into the network, and Cisco, as a networking company, is best placed to make it happen.
To back up the proposition that the AI Era requires a robust underlying network, including inside the enterprise, Cisco revealed a slate of new developments for the campus network:
- Two new Smart Switches for the campus (C9350 and C9610) with Silicon One coprocessors designed to run parallel workloads, such as Cisco’s Hypershield.
- A cloud-native gateway, designed to help enterprises transition APs from controller-managed to cloud-managed architectures.
- 19 new industrial switches, including small form factors intended to be installed on robots.
- A behemoth of a Wi-Fi 7 AP, the CW9179F, weighing ten pounds, with front and back beam coverage, designed for large venue deployments. This is the latest addition to Cisco’s family of Wi-Fi 7 APs, the first of which was revealed in October 2024.
- The addition of Ultra-Reliable Wireless Backhaul (URWB) on 6E APs (IW9165 and IW9167), with a plan to introduce URWB to some Wi-F 6 APs as a software upgrade.
- The unification of Meraki and Catalyst from a hardware, licensing, and management perspective.
- An AI-fueled management platform, AI-Canvas, with a multi-player, dynamic user interface. The platform relies on an LLM purpose-built for networking (Deep Network) fed with live telemetry and Cisco’s vast array of TAC insights (alpha version expected in October).
The vision was compelling and impressive in scale. The reality will reveal itself as the platforms become available over the next few months. Only as customers begin ordering, deploying, and using these new products in earnest will we begin to get answers to the following questions:
Will enterprises be prepared to pay a premium for an additional DPU in a campus switch, a concept originally designed for the data center? Will the adoption of these models be tied to the penetration of Cisco’s Hypershield security strategy, and how will that unfold?
Will the North American market finally shift over to Wi-Fi 7, or will piles of remaining Wi-Fi 6E inventory continue to be the main source of shipments?
Can Meraki and Catalyst really be converged from a management perspective? How will Cisco address the challenge of feature parity between the two, and how will the new, converged platform be branded?
What will the fee structure be for AI Canvas? Can IT departments adjust from having their hands on the network to being humans-on-the-loop? Will the chosen licensing model for AI Canvas hamper its adoption?
While there might still be hiccups as products start rolling out (says Patel, products are never finished, they are either incomplete or obsolete), it is clear that Cisco has found a compelling vision to lay out for customers. The sheer breadth of the company’s portfolio is dizzying, which has previously worked against Cisco as a source of complexity. But breadth can also be a seller if it’s positioned correctly. Says Oliver Tuszik, Cisco’s newly appointed Chief Sales Officer, “When we combine two or three parts of Cisco, we are unbeatable… nobody in the market can build this solution.”
As for CEO Chuck Robbins, he called the June 2025 show the most important Cisco Live ever. “I probably say that every year,” said Robbins. “But this year, I mean it.”
