In the opening keynote at its annual Cisco Live EMEA event, regional leadership moved to cement the networking giant’s embrace of artificial intelligence (AI) with a raft of technology launches, some of them previously trailed.
Marking the supplier’s 40th anniversary, EMEA president Oliver Tuszik spoke about how the organisation began with the idea of connecting two networks together, and how, since 1985, it has acted as a steward and innovator as this simple concept origin became a foundational platform for all organisations.
Tuszik also described how over the past two or three years, the pace of innovation has ramped up – with analysts at Gartner now predicting the firm will see almost 11% growth in the region this year.
If this growth indeed materialises, Cisco believes it will come not just from organisations spending after a fallow period, but from organisations trying to become technology companies themselves.
“I’m very positive that we can manage these challenges and deal with the disruption. We have the power and experience of 40 years of working together,” said Tuszik.
“Cisco is in a unique position to help guide our customers through the incredible change we’re seeing right now across industries,” he added.
“From the changing nature of the workplace to the AI revolution in datacentre and network infrastructure, and the need for digital resilience at all levels, Cisco has solutions for our customers’ biggest challenges.”
With AI clearly driving this, Cisco cited a recent study conducted on its behalf that found 85% of customers felt they “needed” to adopt AI within 18 months lest they start to fall behind, but only 12% globally, and 7% in Europe, said they were ready for this. The data show there are three things behind this – skills and knowledge gaps, limitations to existing network infrastructure, and security.
All of these problems, the supplier says, are addressable, and it is this goal that is fuelling its product and service pipelines, the output of which was the main reason 17,000 people showed up at Amsterdam’s RAI conference centre.
The core introductions made at Cisco Live EMEA centred on AI infrastructure and datacentre solutions for both enterprise and service provider customers.
These include the launch of Cisco N9300 Smart Switches with its Hypershield network security fabric onboard, designed to enhance AI datacentre architectures by embedding services directly into the network as opposed to on the endpoint; Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall, a distributed security fabric to bring zero-trust segmentation and guard against app vulnerabilities; Cisco Agile Services Networking, an architecture for service providers to enable AI connectivity, supported by Silicon One-powered platforms, coherent pluggable optics and provider management; and finally, the debut of the Nvidia MGX-based Cisco UCS C845A M8 server, designed specifically to offer sufficient compute power for emerging AI use cases.
In other areas, Cisco added hybrid private access features to its zero-trust network access (ZTNA) proposition, expanded its Wi-Fi 7 access point portfolio to target small and mid-size deployments, and added both an AI assistant to Webex Contact Center and new support for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) across Webex.
Finally, on the security and resilience side, it is introducing traffic insights to Cisco ThousandEyes, and unveiling a number of new integrations with recently acquired Splunk.
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