Latest news with #ChuckRobbins
Forbes
7 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
Cisco Live 2025 Touts Cisco's Platform Advantages For Enterprise AI
Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel presents at Cisco Live 2025. At last week's Cisco Live in San Diego, CEO Chuck Robbins said that it would be the most important Cisco Live ever and announce more innovations than ever. Having attended a ton of these events and followed the company closely for many years, I can tell you that the show mostly fulfilled that promise. More than that, it reinforced Cisco's areas of strategic focus in infrastructure, the modern workplace and digital resiliency. It's clear that Cisco is working hard to leverage its platform advantages across networking, security, observability, compute and even silicon to support agentic AI workloads. This should help customers simplify operations while maintaining the highest levels of network security and AI safety. As I pointed out in my analysis of the Cisco Partner Summit held late in 2024, Cisco was very deliberate — perhaps a touch slow — in establishing its overarching AI strategy. By now, though, I'm impressed with how quickly the company has been moving to bring this strategy to fruition. Let's dig into the details of what Cisco is doing, and what it could still do better. (Note: Cisco is an advisory client of my firm, Moor Insights & Strategy.) Cisco's Strategic Imperatives, Per Robbins And Patel Early on, Robbins made the fundamental point that networking is critical for AI to function, and will be a big factor in enabling AI growth going forward. Beyond that, agentic AI will be adequately secured only by applying security to the network. In this context, Robbins scored a direct hit on Cisco's competitors when he pointed out that 'None of our network friends have security and none of our security friends have networking.' He believes (and I agree) that this puts Cisco in a unique position to help integrate security into the network, which I think is going to be especially important in enterprise IT. AI is growing like wildfire against a backdrop of global turmoil. Robbins said that geopolitical dynamics are a big concern for Cisco, noting that AI competition isn't just between companies, but between nations as well. Whether companies or countries, everyone has FOMO, and everyone feels like they need to move fast. (He said that 85% of enterprises believe they must 'do AI' in the next 18 months.) This reminds me that most of my conversations at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos were spent discussing countries' needs for a disconnected, sovereign AI cloud. The need is there. A new type of infrastructure will be required to realize the potential of generative and especially agentic AI. According to Robbins, we need a similar kind of advancement in infrastructure that happened when the internet became ubiquitous in the 1990s. It's worth pausing here to reflect on how important that period of technology was for turning Cisco into a networking juggernaut. Here in the 2020s, this is going to play out with a hybrid strategy that includes both cloud hyperscalers and private enterprise datacenters. For meeting this need, Robbins told the crowd not to underestimate the impact of Cisco's combined strengths in networking, security and silicon. (In my view, Cisco needs to talk more often and in more detail about the silicon part. I'll come back to that in my recommendations at the end of this article.) After the CEO's keynote was done, Cisco's chief product officer — and newly appointed president — Jeetu Patel took the stage and echoed Robbins with his emphasis on: He later gave much more detail on each of those facets, as I'll cover below. But first he talked about how the ability of AI agents to autonomously execute tasks will compound productivity, especially when combined with advances in robotics, AI and other areas. As he put it, '8 billion [people] will feel like 80 billion.' However, this productivity explosion will be constrained by limits in power, networking and compute. He also foresees a growing divide between companies that are dexterous with AI and those that will struggle. 'We want to help you be in that first category,' Patel said. He's making a very timely prediction. I presented to a group of European CIOs earlier this week in Munich, and one of the slides showed logos of companies that 'died' from not embracing the internet and e-commerce. The same will happen to companies that don't quickly embrace AI. You don't have to be first, but you can't be last. How can Cisco help? Patel brought it back to the compounding effect of Cisco's platform approach, where many different types of complementary technology work 'in harmony.' He referenced the company's silicon (so customers aren't stuck with a single provider) and especially programmable silicon (to adapt to new use cases). He also reiterated a point he had made in the 2024 Cisco Partner Summit — that AI is foundational to Cisco's products, so customers can expect it to be built right in. While I think that's an accurate thing to say, I would also suggest that by now it's not such a point of differentiation. The Need For AI-Ready Infrastructure Patel went into more detail about the massive, even exponential, buildout of datacenters underway right now. He said that Cisco is foundational in building out these new datacenters. For datacenters to support large-scale agentic AI, they need a new architecture that can support the constant high levels of AI model activity that agentic creates. This is unlike generative AI chatbots, where the activity spikes up and down. Patel believes that the company can take advantage of the opportunity based on the experience it has gained from many years of serving hyperscalers/CSPs, neoclouds and enterprise customers. In support of my praise for Cisco's impressive speed lately, Patel touted the 19 major datacenter innovations the company has launched just within the past six months. At Cisco Live, it announced the unified Nexus Dashboard, which creates 'one brain for all of our data center fabrics,' according to Patel. There was also plenty of talk about the company's partnership with AI bellwether Nvidia. Among other aspects of the pairing, Cisco switches are completely integrated into Nvidia architecture, and Nvidia NeMo models can be secured with Cisco AI Defense. As I have said before, I am a recovering product management and product marketing executive, and I always challenge tech companies to describe their product realization process. While Cisco gets criticized for its 'legacy' roots, Patel has very much changed the product culture there. Fewer layers and faster time-to-decision. Most of the new software underlying AI was developed by small teams with six to eight members. This is a new practice — and very much a new Cisco. I will be digging more into the metrics and outcomes as they're available, but I like what I hear so far. Given that this is Cisco we're talking about, that was just the tip of the iceberg for cybersecurity. Patel described security as a prerequisite for enterprise AI because 'If people don't trust the system, they're not going to use it.' There was also an announcement about the Hybrid Mesh Firewall, which enables distributed policy enforcement, adds security to all sorts of devices and can work with existing firewalls (even from third parties). There were other announcements of specific firewalls, and Patel asserted that Cisco is the price-performance leader for firewalls at every level of scale. The company also launched a new secure network architecture called Cisco Live Protect, which is meant to shield your network from an exploit within minutes to give your IT security team time to fix the underlying issue. The contrast between 'within minutes' and the industrywide 45-day average to patch a vulnerability is striking, to say the least. You can read more in this analysis from my colleague Will Townsend, who's an expert on networking and cybersecurity. Our colleague Matt Kimball, who has a long background in datacenters, will also be publishing his analysis soon. Networking And Equipping The Workplace Of Tomorrow This part of the presentation bridged various aspects of networking for enterprises, where Patel said the priorities were operational simplicity, scalability and — once again — security infused into the network. He got some cheers when he announced that Cisco's Catalyst switches are now unified with its Meraki network platform; there's now a single dashboard for managing these along with all of Cisco's next-gen devices. From my perspective, this is a nice example of Cisco's growing emphasis on easing the customer/user experience. In that vein, there was also an impressive demo of the new AgenticOps platform, which includes a multiplayer management console called AI Canvas. Will Townsend wrote much more about this in his article, praising its 'dynamic and real-time view into the inner workings of a customer's infrastructure expanse' to manage the network assurance, observability and remediation supplied by other Cisco tools. The live demo showed a user fetching data on a network outage and making UI widgets in real time to manage it. The engineer using it walked through troubleshooting, then inviting other users to help — with an autogenerated AI summary of what had been done so far. The AI model recognized missing data and looked for it, and then it was easy to apply a patch straight from the dashboard. Even a non-engineer like me could see immediately how helpful this console would be. Patel is not afraid to use hyperbole when it's warranted, so he summarized the impact of AgenticOps by saying, 'The way in which you run your network will never be the same again.' And he promised that much more innovation like this is coming through the pipeline. There was a lot more, including 'one of the largest refreshes of networking devices in Cisco history.' This includes smart switches, secure routers, WiFi 7 gear, campus gateways, industrial IoT . . . if you can network it, Cisco wants to do it smarter. For example, the new smart switches have isolated compute so you can run things like security right on the switch, plus all of the devices act as sensors that provide information about their environment back to the system. Harnessing Data And AI To Fortify Digital Resilience When the conversation turned to digital resilience, Patel and other presenters continued the theme of bringing more data into the picture to keep infrastructure running well. Enterprises routinely expend many hours determining the causes of outages; in Patel's view, the friction of this process is created by not having the right data available. 'One of the reasons we acquired Splunk for the low price of $28 billion,' he said, 'was to take all this data across multiple domains and correlate it.' He added that the core method of digital resilience is to distill data, correlate it, then unleash AI on the problem. There were plenty of specifics in terms of new launches, new Splunk integrations and so on, not to mention using smaller, more efficient bespoke AI models for specific security needs. (Those Cisco folks really are building AI into everything.) But for me there were two big takeaways from this part of the show. First is the idea of reimagining security operations by performing security at machine scale, and consolidating and simplifying security solutions to make that easier. Second is the extension of observability to AI. Some aspects of AI may still be 'black boxes' in terms of what the algorithms are doing, but Cisco wants to give its customers the ability to see everything their AIs are doing in terms of compute usage, network traffic, power draw and so on. If the company is able to pull off everything talked about onstage, I think that can only help with operationalizing AI to yield real business results for enterprises. Messaging All This AI Innovation Cisco Live reminds me a little bit of Google Cloud Next in terms of the sheer number of announcements packed into a couple of days. And it makes sense, given that both Cisco and Google Cloud (a) operate across multiple product areas with many different individual offerings in them, and (b) are investing enormous amounts of bandwidth (and capex) into AI — at speed. There are a couple of risks I see for Cisco. First, yes, the company's leaders told us repeatedly that AI is 'foundational' in their products. But it's one thing to claim this — as do most of the big infrastructure providers and enterprise software vendors. And the demos were great. But it's another thing to accurately engage with the market as a whole and with individual customers to help them understand the many potential payoffs for Cisco's AI innovations, area by area and product by product. I have great faith in Cisco's go-to-market prowess, but there's so much coming down the pike so fast that, to be most successful, the company needs to do the very best job of explaining its wares that it's ever done. Maybe it's my background in semiconductors talking, but I see this especially in how Cisco talks about its in-house silicon. In my view, Cisco doesn't blow this trumpet as loudly or as often as it should. The company announced its Silicon One initiative in 2019, and has been shipping its own chips for years by this point . . . yet there still aren't enough people who know about it. And look at the valuations of AI chip companies today. So I urge the company to talk more about its chips and how they add to the differentiation of Cisco's portfolio. The good news is, the introduction of all this AI functionality from Cisco — and the sea change underway in AI datacenter infrastructure — offers a perfect opportunity to do this. Cisco has some unique advantages in the market, starting with Chuck Robbins' correct and fundamental assertion that no one else in networking can match Cisco in security, and no one else in cybersecurity can match Cisco for networking. I'm also impressed by the waves of smart, relevant, user-friendly products I see at each Cisco event I attend. Now I want to see just how well Cisco can market, message and sell all this goodness into the enterprise.
Forbes
2 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Cisco Charts Its Agentic AI Journey At Cisco Live U.S. 2025
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins delivering the opening-day keynote at Cisco Live 2025 At last week's Cisco Live event in San Diego, the IT and OT infrastructure giant showcased the development of deep agentic AI integrations across its broad portfolio of networking, cybersecurity and observability offerings — with a renewed focus on customer experience. I have had the opportunity to participate in many of the company's past events around the world, but this year's conference could be considered historic given the payload of substantive announcements. Let's dig into what I found most important — and how Cisco might improve on what it's already doing to further its ambitions. (Note: Cisco is an advisory client of my firm, Moor Insights & Strategy.) Cisco Live's mainstage sessions across two days focused on two things: (1) a dizzying number of new solution announcements, and (2) improvements in its customer experience journey. Not surprisingly, day one outlined Cisco's continued progression with modern AI into agentic functionality, from both connectivity and security perspectives. Jeetu Patel, the company's chief product officer who was recently promoted to president, articulated a pragmatic approach that focuses on AI-ready datacenters, future-proofed workplaces and digital resilience created by infusing security controls into the company's network infrastructure portfolio. I was particularly struck by how he contrasted the demands of generative versus agentic AI inferencing, highlighting the need to future-proof connectivity and compute infrastructure to support the demands of agentic persistent workloads. His illustration also demonstrated the need for Cisco to double down on supporting these workloads, something that I will come back to as an opportunity for improvement. On day two, executive vice president Liz Centoni, who took the reins of the company's overall customer experience efforts a year ago, outlined a completely retooled strategy. A new approach was desperately needed, given that Cisco's initial launch of the CX was more programmatic and decoupled technically from its infrastructure solutions, making it complex to navigate for both its channel partner sellers and its customers. What I like about the new effort is tighter product and solution integration supported by an AI adoption agent and a purpose-built large language model. It is a powerful combination, leveraging the company's vast knowledge base with 40 years of issue and remediation experience. Cisco unquestionably possesses the largest data lake in its market, one that has the potential to speed deployment and resolve ever-present issues such as infrastructure misconfigurations quickly and easily. Centoni's 'drop the mic' moment for me was the stated goal to make every customer feel like Cisco's only customer. That is an audacious statement by any measure, and I believe that Cisco has the potential to deliver on its promise. Given the vast number of announcements at Cisco Live this year, it might be difficult to pick one that stands above all the rest. However, the company's new AgenticOps platform landed for me as the most significant for two reasons. First, it includes what I consider to be a beautifully executed management console, dubbed AI Canvas. AI Canvas incorporates an intuitive user interface that integrates a generative AI-powered natural language tool that allows users to customize views with dynamically generated widgets. In doing so, AI Canvas provides a dynamic and real-time view into the inner workings of a customer's infrastructure expanse — providing network assurance, security observability and remediation functionality supported by Cisco's Splunk, ThousandEyes, AppDynamics, Duo Security and other solution offerings. Second, a newly developed Deep Network Model aims to feed AI Canvas with data pulled from Cisco's knowledge base. Combined, they have the potential to dramatically simplify network and security operations with deep observability, exceptional visualization and robust collaboration features to remediate network issues and improve security posture and cyber defense. I also had the opportunity to spend time with senior vice president DJ Sampath, who leads Cisco's AI Software and Platform organization. What I find noteworthy about his team's efforts is the rapid development cycle that brought AgenticOps to market so quickly — in less than one year. As a former product marketer, I can tell you that is a significant achievement by any measure, and it's one that continues to feed Cisco's innovation engine under Patel's leadership. From my perspective, the newly announced AgenticOps platform could serve as the tip of the spear to facilitate the company's deeper infrastructure sales penetration into its competitor install bases. Moor Insights & Strategy founder and chief analyst Patrick Moorhead and The Futurum Group's chief executive Daniel Newman dive deeper with Sampath in this Six Five Media On The Road conversation from the event. A handful of other announcements are worth highlighting: I have highlighted only a handful of the networking and security announcements at the conference. With that said, I really like what Cisco is doing to drive to a platform approach at scale — making it easier for channel partners to sell and deploy the company's numerous new offerings and for customers to consume them. As previously mentioned, Cisco's announcement payload was massive at Cisco Live. Consequently, customers and partners may have a tough time digesting all of this. The risk is that some of these new capabilities may be lost in the mix, and it's going to be a challenge for Cisco to prioritize which elements are most important, whether for overall product marketing or in go-to-market conversations with individual customers. Furthermore, I felt that Cisco's compute strategy fell flat during Patel's keynote. A handful of Cisco executives I spoke to acknowledged the need to strengthen the messaging, especially given the company's desire to deliver full-stack, AI-ready infrastructure through its AI PODs platform, which marries compute and networking to address AI modeling and ML operations. However, I will defer to my Moor Insights & Strategy colleague Matt Kimball to explore this more deeply, given his coverage of datacenter compute. Despite some of those short-term challenges, I like what the company is doing to execute against a platform strategy that addresses the challenges organizations face in deploying AI-ready infrastructure to transform network and security operations. Historically, through Cisco's parallel organic roadmap and acquisition efforts, it has duplicated functionality — especially from an automation perspective. The good news is that its rapid adoption of agentic AI is addressing its myriad automation tools, and in the process is simplifying automation capabilities though more unified product development and go-to-market efforts. I liken a complete and modern AI infrastructure stack to a three-legged stool providing the requisite compute, networking and security functionality. In my mind, it also includes storage as table stakes, given the demands placed on unifying data to train large and small language models. The recent announcements at Cisco Live U.S. address all of these elements to help enterprises unlock the transformative potential of generative and agentic AI applications and workloads securely and at scale.
Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
CEOs haven't felt this gloomy about the economy since the pandemic
The Business Roundtable CEO index dropped 15 points in the second quarter, its lowest since 2020. The decline was driven by plans for reduced spending, sales expectations, and employment. CEOs cited trade policy uncertainty as the driving reason behind a declining index. CEOs aren't feeling too hot about the economy. The Business Roundtable's CEO Economic Outlook Index dropped by 15 points in the second quarter to 69, marking its lowest level since 2020 and well below its historic average of 83. A total of 169 CEOs participated in the survey, which was conducted between June 2 and June 13. "The quarter's survey results signal that Business Roundtable CEOs are approaching the next six months with caution," Cisco CEO and Business Roundtable chair Chuck Robbins said in a release accompanying the results. The survey assesses three categories: capital spending plans, hiring intentions, and sales expectations. Hiring plans saw the steepest decline this quarter, dropping 19 points. Capital investment plans followed with a 15-point decrease, and sales expectations fell by 11 points. The survey indicates that 41% of CEOs surveyed expect their company to decrease employment in the next six months, compared to 29% last quarter. The percentage of CEOs surveyed who expected hiring to increase in the next six months also dropped quarter over quarter, from 33% to 26%. It's the latest indication of a challenging job market, as many companies have made moves to flatten their org charts and slow hiring. A number of major companies have conducted layoffs this year, including Meta, Microsoft, BlackRock, and Intel. Other companies, like Salesforce, have announced a pause on hiring engineers. Business Roundtable CEO Joshua Bolten said the quarterly decline was driven by "broad-based uncertainty," stemming from an "unpredictable trade policy environment." The CEO said expanding tax reform is important but will not solve the issue on its own. "American businesses also need the Administration rapidly to secure deals with our trading partners that open markets, remove harmful tariffs and provide certainty for investment," Bolten said. President Donald Trump's tariff threats have taken consumers and businesses on a roller coaster ride over the last few months. While some tariffs were enacted in April, the bulk of new tariffs have been paused until July to allow time for negotiations. The ups and downs have resulted in sharp stock market swings, led some companies to make tweaks to their supply chains, and impacted retail and food service sales as well as the outlook on home sales. Uncertainty around tariffs has made long-term planning difficult for many companies. The Federal Reserve's Beige Book, released this month, indicated that half of the districts saw "slight to moderate" declines in economic activity, while three reported no growth at all. The Trump administration has said that tariff policies are in the best interest of the US, even if they create some short-term pain. While the report paints a largely gloomy picture of CEO sentiment, it's not at levels previously seen during the last recession. The Business Roundtable states that "readings at 50 or above indicate economic expansion," while readings below indicate a recession. In the second quarter of 2020, the economic outlook plummeted to an overall Index of 34.3, and quickly rebounded to 64 in the next quarter. However, the survey adds to a growing chorus of CEOs who are voicing concern for the near future as they navigate a choppy economic environment.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Cisco Systems (CSCO): It's the 'Cheapest AI Story There,' Says Jim Cramer
We recently published a list of . In this article, we are going to take a look at where Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) stands against other stocks that Jim Cramer discusses. Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) is one of the largest networking and communications products companies in the world. In today's era of AI-driven stock market returns, the firm's shares have gained 8.4% year-to-date despite a 13% drop after the Liberation Day tariff announcement in April. Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO)'s shares gained 5% in mid-May after the firm's fiscal 2025 midpoint revenue and earnings guidance of $56.6 billion and $3.78 surpassed previous estimates. The revenue guidance also beat analyst estimates of $56.5 billion. In his earlier remarks about Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO), Cramer outlined that he preferred the firm over rival Arista Networks. Here are his latest thoughts: 'Last night I spoke with Chuck Robbins. He is positioning himself as being now the backbone of the internet with AI. It reminded me very much about John Chambers being the backbone of the internet. He began to get Cisco having its big move. But you also know David, remember the customers. The customers of Cisco, the telcos, its got a little telco feel to it. I think. Engineers using the latest Cisco TelePresence technology to collaborate with colleagues around the world. Cramer has also previously commented on Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO)'s partnership with NVIDIA: 'People are talking about NVIDIA. And there is a nice deal this morning with Cisco. I think it's actually much more important than people realize. Cisco's the first to qualify. It's going to be a real partnership. And that uh Chuck Robbins working closely with Jensen. But there is an overwhelming sense that this market keys on NVIDIA at a moment when we have no idea what the federal government's gonna do to NVIDIA.' While we acknowledge the potential of CSCO as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an extremely cheap AI stock that is also a major beneficiary of Trump tariffs and onshoring, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock. READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stocks To Buy Now and 30 Best Stocks to Buy Now According to Billionaires. Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Time of India
11-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Cisco aims to build AI-ready data centres, future-proof workspaces: Chuck Robbins
Live Events Networking hardware and security solutions provider Cisco said Tuesday that the company aims to build artificial intelligence (AI)-centric data centres and future-proof workplaces for enterprise customers."We want to help you (enterprises) build AI-ready data centres. We want to help you future-proof your workplace. And we want to do that with an underlying layer of digital resilience," Chuck Robbins, chairman and chief executive, Cisco Systems was speaking at the Cisco Live 2025 annual US multinational said that it would transform data centres to power AI workloads anywhere."We need seamless operations, observability, and security everywhere. We want to help you (enterprises) do this with technologies like Secure AI Factory that we have announced with Nvidia," Robbins has doubled down on partnership with Jensen Huang-headed two companies enable enterprises to have access to a secure and scalable platform to fast-forward the creation and deployment of AI solutions to drive business by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner back in 1984, the company said that it could facilitate enterprise customers with "massive innovation" enabling them to modernise and reimagine data centres with solutions such as Expanded AI Pods, Unified Nexus Dashboard."So we need a huge amount of security into the underlying network in order to be able to apply network services. We believe that we have a meaningful role to play."The top executive said that Cisco offers a combination of networking and security offerings which acts as a key strength which its rivals San Jose-based multinational said that Cisco is foundational to data centre build outs worldwide, and offering "critical infrastructure" catering to the AI has also partnered with OpenAI, and is working on its newly-released Codex software engineering agent that allows network engineers access tools for writing, testing and building further said that the fusion of security with the network would be critical for agentic month, Cisco and G42 extended their strategic partnership to drive AI innovation across the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the United company collaborated with the AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), led by BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), MGX, Microsoft and Nvidia.
