…and that’s what the innovations and announcements at Cisco Live this week were all centered around. in networking, security, data centers, and more that we unveiled at Cisco Live EMEA are all about.

Reliving the past to innovate the future

The Cisco Live keynote began with Oliver Tuszik [President, Cisco EMEA] walking us through the 40-year history of Cisco’s innovations that powered big data, IoT, and cloud computing – reminding us that Cisco has been here since the beginning of the internet days and how their technology is what powered the internet and cloud generation we are all now firmly in.

In his opening, he said that “every business in this world will become a technology company,” stating that every organisation is or will soon face three main challenges in this journey:

• Unlocking the power of AI, especially as we move out of the ‘hype cycle’ of AI, with companies now seeing tangible, real-world efficiency and productivity gains using the technology, but with only 7% of European companies being “AI ready”.
• Killing complexity. “Everything is growing fast” as companies scale and grow their technologies in the face of the skills shortage. To do this they need to re-invent, simplify, and consolidate complex technology and multi-vendor products into solutions.
• Strengthening digital resilience.“Digital resilience is business resilience,” especially if every company is to become a tech company.

New Products and Services for the AI Generation

Following the keynote, Jeetu Patel (EVP and Chief Product Officer) talked about what Cisco stand for and the product strategy and vision saying that Cisco’s mantra is to build products people love; quality is priority zero; and think ‘10x’.”

Echoing the opening messages, he enforced that every business is working frantically to understand, play out and refine the opportunities and challenges of realising and adapting to how they work and serve customers in the era of AI.

Jeetu said that “every organisation needs to lay the groundwork for AI,”. He went on to say that the last two years have been “experimental” and that Cisco believe that over the next 2 to 5 years, the world’s workforce will be “supplemented” by AI agents and apps and eventually robots and even humanoids. Cisco said that whilst they believe this shift will create more jobs than it removes, the working world will change, and that change will happen rapidly. He said the IT and Digitial industry needs innovative technologies, new operating processes, and new outlook to business, one that we haven’t seen in this capacity since the dot com boom.

There was loads of technology and updates to existing products announced and a reminder from Cisco just how much of a Software company they now are…

Networking

The first new product announced was the Cisco UCS C845A M8 Rack Server – a modular rack with flexible GPU scaling designed to run AI workloads faster and more efficiently.

Cisco said that this will be the new Cisco blueprint for service providers as they look to capitalise on the opportunities of AI. These new Servers will helpo service providers and large enterprise organisions building their own AI services to meet the demand for high-bandwidth along with secure, and energy-efficient connectivity.

Cisco say that this architecture will result in simplified networks, AI-powered operations and resilient networks with end-to-end network security and observability. Cisco also said that this will better help service providers and telcos monetise easier, by allowing them to deploy services closer to their customers to provide intelligent service delivery.

Cisco also annouced two new N9300 Series Smart Switches, with Cisco’s Silicon One E100 chips, AMD Pensando DPUs, and Cisco Hypershield built in…. Cisco say that Hypershield will be embedded on the new switches, meaning that multi-layer protection can be scaled for zone segmentation, micro segmentation, and distributed exploit protection, along with with a centrally managed firewall distributed throughout the datacenter at the service level.

Cisco Hypershield will be embedded on the new switches, meaning that protection can be scaled for zone segmentation, micro segmentation, and distributed exploit protection – with a centrally managed firewall distributed throughout the datacenter at the service level, allowing service providers and enterprise customers to enforce security policies directly on the network fabric, enabling a “fully distributed security model”.

Cisco AI Defense

DJ Sampath, VP of Product, AI Software and Platform, showcased on stage on how Cisco’s newly announced AI Defense application allows businesses to validate and test new AI models in a matter of minutes which will represent a huge time saving reducing the typical weeks of testing down to hours.

Webex Contact Centre

Cisco Webex also got some new AI attention, with Caitlin Lacey (Director of Global Product Marketing, Collaboration Devices) showing off the newly updated Webex AI Agent that can be used to build autonomous AI chatbots to elevate the customer support experience. Cisco showed how these new AI models are not just limited to text either as they showcased voice based agents with ‘lifelike’ voices and super-low-latency responses which can be built to reduce the number of telephone agents needed and also reduce the time customers need to spend waiting on hold only to be transfered to another department and put back on hold. They even showed how customers can interrupt the agent mid flow. Impressive demo.

Cisco said that the new Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center is natively integrated with Webex Contact Center today and will be available for integration with third-party contact centers later this year. It includes context transfer summaries, dropped call summaries, Human Agent Wellbeing and automatic customer satisfaction scores (Auto CSAT). They are also introducing new features later this year including suggested responses, real-time transcription for agents, wrap-up summaries and mid-call summaries.

The agents will be available in English only at launch, however, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish will come later in 2025.

Webex Meeting rooms

Recognising the volume of BYOD meeting room solutions (where customers are not tied to any meeting platform like Webex, Zoom or Teams), Cisco are continuing their investment by supporting “Flexible Conferencing” with their Cisco Room Bar BYOD. This are designed for small to medium rooms, allowing seamless laptop connectivity along with the quality of Cisco audio and video experiences for BYOD / plug n play spaces.

Thousand eyes

Cisco announced updates to Thousand Eyes with a new traffic insight functionality which will give IT support and network administrators greater observability along with the ability to pinpoint disruptions within connected networks, WAN and Internet more easily and visually. This helps identify and pin point potential network disruptions on their own and public/third party infrastructure more easily.

Meraki and Cisco XDR

Cisco Meraki suite is now getting integration with Cisco XDR to power “the SOC of the future.”. For any organisation looking to build their own or build and sell their own SOC, this integration of Meraki dashboard data into Cisco XDR will allow SecOps to see incidents and threats as they emerge across their network infrastructure adding to the visibility scope over what they had before.

Firewalling

Cisco announced their “Hybrid Mesh Firewall“. This is a brand new AI optimised firewall that combines Cisco Firewall Threat Defense, new AI Defense capabilities, and their Security Cloud Control into a single management system.

From what I have read so far (so correct me if I am wrong), each firewall in the mesh will have two versions – an active and shadow version. As such new updates to rules and threat protection for example will be first introduced on the ‘shadow’ device which will then become ‘active’. They will then swap roles, with monitoring taking place over a period of time at a highly granular level to ensure the update works as intended. This will reduce downtime and provide consistent operations. .

Skilling for the Future AI Generation

Cisco has also launched a new AI Skills Journey program to help partners and companies build this much needed AI Infrastructure skillset. This new training will be available at https://u.cisco.com

Cisco are are also updating their current certifications, including traditional certs like the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) and Internetwork Expert (CCIE). These updated certifications reflect the AI and cybersecurity skills needed to achieve impactful business outcomes. Select programs