Cisco has been named as the fastest-growing partner for Microsoft Teams Rooms.
This was announced by Ilya Bukshteyn, VP for Teams calling, devices, and premium experiences at Microsoft at an event at the Cisco office in Oslo, Norway. UC influencer and Cisco employee Chris Palmero took to LinkedIn and shared the news and some other great quotes from Cisco and Microsoft that came from the event.
Ilya Bukshteyn and Espen Løberg discussed the progress and growth of Cisco in this space, Ilya said that: “We want Microsoft Teams in every space, and Cisco is so great at designing devices for every space.”…….
“The combination of our companies is uniquely positioned to deliver ‘eyes,’ ‘ears,’ and ‘brain’ for every space. And that is the future of work and this partnership (with Cisco) is based on providing customers with choice.”
During the chat, Espen Løberg added: “This collaboration of two world-class engineering teams that have strengths in different areas is moving the industry forward; it’s making the world better.“
As a leading UK Cisco and Microsoft Partner, it’s really great to see the power of these two collaboration giants redefining the entire employee journey. Whilst Cisco are still a way from being the largest Teams Meeting Room partners and still. Of course have their own Webex experiences they promote and drive, the combination of Cisco’s network, security, observability platform and their devices running Microsoft Teams and of course AI powered Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences are showing what two previously competing UC and Meeting room provider can achieve when they combine forces.
Cisco is one of a number of Teams Room OEMs and sits along side, Poly, Neat, Lenovo, Logitech and Yealink who are currently the number one provider globally.
At Microsoft Ignite in Chicago in November, I covered an interview with Cisco where they clearly expressed their ambitions to be number one Teams Room provider by the end of 2025.
It seems they are well on their way to achieving this…
…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
The Webex One 24 opening keynote was a showcase of Cisco’s commitment to revolutionising the way organisations collaborate and connect. It highlighted several new announcements, renewed partnerships and AI innovation across their portfolio which will continue to innovate the “future of work”.
This blog summarises my key highlights from Cisco’s fifth annual Webex One event. This year’s theme focussed on the transformative power of AI and human connection. Senior Cisco execs, including Aruna Ravichandran and Jeetu Patel, opened by discussing the latest AI innovations and their impact on customer and employee experiences and of course used the event to showcase new technologies and products from Cisco as well as new and extended partnerships with key vendors including Apple and Microsoft.
Cisco emphasised the integration of AI into (all) their products, the importance of secure and smart workplaces, and the future of seamless collaboration. They also introduced new technologies like the autonomous Webex AI agent and Cisco spatial meetings for Apple Vision Pro, showcasing their commitment to enhancing productivity and connectivity.
“Don’t worry about AI taking away your jobs, but worry about people who use AI effectively” | Jitu Patel
Aruna Ravichandran, Cisco’s Senior Vice President emphasised the importance of human connection and creativity in the transformative world of AI, highlighting the event’s focus on groundbreaking AI innovations and customer experience.
Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s Executive Vice President, talked about the “seismic shift in AI“, noting that while AI has brought significant momentum and pockets of impactful change, for the most, our lives have not yet materially changed. He said that he sees a dramatic change in the next decade, emphasizing the potential of agent-based technologies to redefine and reshape jobs and workflows fundamentally.
Let’s look at a few of these in more detail.
Cisco’s AI Strategy
Cisco’s AI strategy is focussed on integrating AI natively into their products, providing AI infrastructure, and ensuring AI security. Jeetu Patel talked passionately about the importance of AI-ready data centers, modern networks and AI aware security as well as what he called “future-proof workplaces”, and resilience in operations, driven by AI and data. Cisco unveiled new AI-driven features across their Webex collaboration suite, designed to make virtual meetings more intuitive and productive. These enhancements included real-time language translation, advanced noise cancellation, and AI-powered meeting summaries, ensuring that every participant can stay engaged and informed as well as work with Apple and Microsoft integration and connectivity.
Building Future Proofed Workspaces
Cisco talked about the importance of seamless integration across various platforms. They said they are introducing new APIs and partnerships that will better enable Webex and their meeting spaces technologies to integrate more effortlessly with other tools and applications, providing a unified and streamlined user experience, including with Microsoft Teams. Cisco aims to continue to raise the standard of what the workplace with secure campus and branch networking, smart building technology, workplace security, and seamless collaboration should look like something they see themselves having a unique industry advantage of.
“Our goal is to make every meeting as productive and engaging as possible, no matter where you are in the world.” | Jeetu Patel | Cisco VP
Cisco said the focus is on creating productive, automated, and secure environments for employees to work from anywhere. Cisco also showcases its advancements in spatial meetings, emphasizing the importance of human connection in AI-driven interactions – with a differentiated focus on creating immersive and engaging meeting experiences that feel as intimate and effective as in-person interactions.
Autonomous Agents in Webex Contact Centre
Cisco also introduced their upcoming autonomous Webex AI agent, designed to enhance self-service in contact centers. This AI agent combines conversational intelligence with generative AI and integrates with back-office systems to deliver personalized outcomes, reducing the need for human agents. The demo showed some advanced autonomous (AI Agents) enhancing customer self-service – combining conversational AI with generative AI along with integrates with back-office systems and processes like HR and Finance.
Extended Partnerships
Cisco discussed extended partnerships with both Apple and Microsoft, emphasizing their collaborative efforts to enhance technology and user experience and to meet customers where they are. These partnerships emphasize Cisco’s commitment to interoperability and enhancing user experiences across different (in some cases, competitive) platforms.
Cisco said that their Cisco Room devices for Microsoft Teams have become the fastest-growing Microsoft Teams Room solution in the world with over 3,000 customers now leveraging Cisco technology to power their Microsoft Teams investment.
Cisco’s long-term relationship with Apple was discussed and references made to Cisco technology being integral to Apple’s product development. The keynote highlighted the collaboration between the two including the development of the Apple Vision Pro, which integrates Cisco’s Webex for immersive 3D meetings
An AI powered Sustainable Future
High on the agenda was Cisco’s commitment to sustainability which was a key theme through the keynote. Cisco introduced new features aimed at reducing the environmental impact of virtual meetings, such as energy-efficient data centres and tools to measure and offset carbon footprints.
Did you attend Webex One or watch it remotely, what did you find of interest and what did you hope you’d see but didn’t?
Last week, Cisco reported its Q3 fiscal results which beat market in terms of both top and bottom-line.
Cisco achieved this despite a continued decline in overall revenue, showing that like many of the US tech giants, Cisco have become leaner and more cost effective as an entity. It is also recognition of their shift to a software organisation (that also sells hardware).
As a Cisco partner, we understand why Cisco have attributed the majority of their sales revenue decline being due to their customers still deploying data centre and networking equipment purchased late last year due to shifting busienss priorities and re alignment over hybrid work practices. This is certainly something we have seen some still an overspill from the huge chip and stock shortages we saw in COVID-19…
Cisco remain confident that Q4 will see a turn around. Personally, we (Cisilion) have already seen a great Cisco Q3 personally and expect a great Cisco Q4 with some large networking and data centre refreshes.
Riding the AI Wave
Cisco are also making big step forward in the new AI powered world in two parts.
Aquisitions and Parnering
Firstly, Cisco have recently closed the $28 billion acquisition of security and observability software Splunk. Whilst not yet assimilated and incorporated into Cisco’s mainstream portfolio (this won’t likely happen until mid to late FY25) the aquisition will boost their cybersecurity and AI goals. With Splunk, Cisco is gaining a tool to better compete with their competition such as Palo Alto and Crowd Strike and ensures they remain relevant.
Cisco is also well-aware that in order to grow, they need to join forces and work with the other tech giants that dominate the cloud and modern workplace technologies. Their partnership with Microsoft in the modern work space and alignment with building more services for Azure as well as supporting their digitial market place for software and service sales will also boost their reach.
Last month, Cisco have announced a new partnership with NVIDIA to enable enterprises to quickly deploy and manage secure AI infrastructure with new hardware being announced.
As a Cisco and Microsoft Partner, it is great to see the partnership paying off, and our customers live the choice, flexibility and sustainability offerings possible through the deep integration of Cisco meeting room technology on Teams, their integration with Microsoft Sentinel and the work they have done with Cisco Webex Contact Centre which now offers one of the most feature rich and mature customer experience platforms on both Cisco Webex and for Microsoft Teams.
Through these partnerships and aquisitions, Cisco seemed well placed to help organisations build, power, support, and secure AI
Partnership is great for our customers and for us (Cisilion) as a partner.
The Network: Powering the AI Wave
In a recent interview and video we did to celebrate the opening of our new Customer Experience Centre in London, Chintan Patel (Cisco UK CTO) said that “there is no AI without the network“.
This statement, made by Cisco CTO, underscores the critical role that networks play in the functioning and advancement of AI.
Cisco and Cisilion talking AI with Cisco UK CTO
AI rely heavily on data – they need to ingest, process, and learn from vast amounts of information to function effectively. This data needs to be transported, often across great distances, and this is where the network comes in. Without a robust and reliable network, data cannot be moved efficiently, and AI systems cannot operate at their full potential.
Cisco, with its extensive experience in network provision, is uniquely positioned to provide the high-speed, reliable network infrastructure that AI systems require. Their networks are designed to handle the high data volumes and fast data speeds that AI applications demand.
AI is fuelled by the Data Centre.
The Data Centre is the heart of any AI operation. They house the servers that store and process the data AI systems use and are vital for any organisation or service provider building out training their own AI models.
Having been along time leader in the data centre space, offers state-of-the-art technology, from a a compute and networking stack that help organisations design and build through their partners, modern environments that can handle the intensive computational needs of AI, providing a stable and efficient environment for AI operations.
When we come back to partnership and alliance, some of the largest AI service providers, including Microsoft and Adobe use data centres powered by Cisco (amongst others) and rely on their network and data centre (Azure) to power their AI services like Copilot and Azure AI. Cisco’s advanced network solutions and data centres provide the necessary infrastructure for these companies to run their AI applications effectively.
As we see more organisations look to build their own large and small language models, Machine Learning and AI computational and generative AI, Cisco will be helping to power this AI revolution.
As such their technology infrastructure will plays a crucial role in enabling AI service providers to deliver innovative solutions that drive business growth and societal advancement.
I’m confident this will re innovate the infrastructure market across both businesses and service providers. In conclusion, Cisco’s statement that “there is no AI without the network” rings true. As AI continues to evolve and become more integrated into our daily lives, the role of network and data centre providers like Cisco will only become more critical.
Of course Cisco aren’t the only provider in this space, but I’m impressed with shift and direction Cisco are moving to stay relevant and partner with the other AI giants. As a Cisco partner this is great to see.
To read more about Cisco technology, data centre, observability and network, you can check out their pages below.
This week, I had the pleasure of running a Fireside Chat with Mark Brown, who leads the engineering team at Splunk. The chat was streamed live on Linked In and YouTube as part of Cisilion’s monthly technology chat show which has been running for more than three years.
This month, we took to the virtual stage to discuss the acquisition of Splunk by Cisco, the history and innovation that Splunk brings across security and data analytics and observability, and some of the huge success stories and customers of Splunk since the company’s founding in 2003.
Cisilion and Spunk – May Fireside Chat
In this month’s show, we delved into Splunk’s history and capabilities, its evolution over the last 20 years, and its role as a data analytics platform. We talked about Splunk’s diverse customer base, including huge “high street” brands like Siemens and Gatwick Airport, where we discussed how Splunk’s data analytics is helping to enhance operational efficiency and security at the airport and how by processing local traffic and weather data along with real time people traffic in the airport, they help to ensure that LGW meet their people flow SLAs of getting people from check-in and through security.
Finally we talked about why Cisco have acquired Splunk, the market opportuntiy it creates and how partners like Cisilion will be able to leverage this aquisition into the Cisco portfolio over time. Mark talks about this being a strategic move to integrate Splunk’s data analytics with Cisco’s network and security solutions, offering a comprehensive approach to observability and security and giving them a real competitive edge whilst, increasing their market share and making the solutions simpler for their customers.
Using the power of AI, I have used Microsoft Copilot to breakdown the key sections of the video and help you to navigate to areas you think might be useful to you.
(I have a video on how to do this which you can access -> here -<
Cisilion and Splunk Fireside Chat – Key Coversations
[00:01:18] Introduction of Mark Brown from Splunk
Leads the UK solution engineering team
Discusses Splunk’s recent acquisition by Cisco
Highlights the value Splunk brings to businesses
[00:03:00] Explanation of what Splunk is
Describes Splunk as a platform for searching logs in data centers
Evolved into a leader in security and observability
Known as the “Google for the data center”
[00:18:09] Cisco’s acquisition of Splunk
Seen as a natural fit with little overlap in technology offerings
Expected to enhance both Cisco’s and Splunk’s product portfolios
Acquisition aligns with Cisco’s strategy to expand software offerings
[00:08:14] Reference customers of Splunk
Splunk’s reference customers span 110 countries and includes major brands across various industries
Talking through examples including Siemens, Singapore Airlines, and Gatwick Airport
Talking about wider use cases that demonstrate Splunk’s adaptability and impact
[00:14:22] Splunk’s competition in the market
How and where Splunk competes with and partners with various tech companies such as Data Dog and Relic
How Microsoft Sentinel have also become a leader in the SIEM space in just two years and how Microsoft and Splunk are working together to deliver Splunk Solutions to customers in Azure.
How Splunk have been leaders for more than 10 years.
[00:17:46] Cisilion’s perspective on the acquisition
How Cisilion are excited about the integration and potential for new market opportunities and the alignment between Cisco and Microsoft, Cisilion’s two strategic partners.
How we see the acquisition as a way to complete the technology journey for clients bringing together multiple technnologies and creating a single pane of glass for security logs and observability.
Our forward looking view on the game-changing advancements in observability and security this aquisition could bring to Cisco.
00:25:23] The chat continues around use cases, market trends and the future of security and observability
Welcome your views on the video and the discussion as always.
The digital security landscape is constantly challenged by sophisticated threats, making the role of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems more critical than ever. In the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SIEM, Microsoft and Splunk have been recognised as leaders, demonstrating excellence in vision and execution in the SIEM space.
Gartner said in their 2024 report that “The SIEM market grew from $5.03 billion in 2022 to $5.7 billion in 2023 (see Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2023), a 13% annual growth rate compared to a 22% increase the previous year. The primary drivers of a SIEM purchase are threat detection, response, exposure management and compliance. Buyers are seeking a SIEM ecosystem with broad and deep capabilities to satisfy multiple security and business use cases with capabilities to support a diverse environment.”
Image (c) Gartner 2024
The Significance of SIEM in Cybersecurity
SIEM technology is essential for organisations to effectively manage security events and information. It provides real-time visibility across an organisation’s information security systems (multi vendor), providing single pane of glass event log management, compliance reporting, and incident response capabilities. The ability to swiftly detect, analyse, and respond to security incidents is what makes SIEM a cornerstone of enterprise security strategies.
Friends and Foes?
In 2023, Splunk and Microsoft agreed to partnering to help build Splunk’s enterprise security and observability offerings on Microsoft Azure. This means that Splunk solutions are now available for purchase on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace as well as AWS Market place. This is great for both parties and Microsoft Partners who sell and deploy Azure Services to their clients.
Gartner cite Microsoft Sentinel as being best for organisations that require or demand a cloud-native SIEM solution with advanced AI capabilities and integration with other Microsoft security products will find Microsoft Sentinel to be an ideal fit. Sentinel works with a huge number of external cloud and on-premises data connectors (including Splunk).
Splunk’s Data-Centric Excellence in SIEM
Splunk remains a joint leader in the SIEM market, praised as always for their data-centric security analytics solution, The Enterprise Security application from Splunk is available both on-premises and as SaaS. Splunk provides pricing flexibility, which can be based on daily data ingestion or cloud workloads, referred to as Splunk Virtual Compute. Splunk primarily serves large enterprise organizations in North USA
Splunk have said they are launching a new AI Assistant for Security, which will be integrated with Enterprise Security to enhance detection and response functions. Cisco finalized the acquisition of Splunk on March 18, 2024 and we expect to see integration and cross pollenisation of their combined portfolio at somepoint in 2025.
Gartner point out that currently Splunk has a significantly higher-than-average cost compared to other vendors in their report, is more complex to deploy and configure (measured in pro services days) and currently low numbers of sales support staff outside the US – though with Cisco’s aquisiton of Splunk this is likely to change over the next 18-24 months.
Strengths:
Overall observability: The Splunk platform can integrate security, IT, application and other data sources. This, coupled with its federated search and analytics capabilities across third-party data stores, is a strength for clients seeking to build highly enriched queries and alerts.
Extensive integration: Splunk’s integration of SOAR enhances a wide range of common SIEM use cases. Clients wanting quick time to production automation for common SIEM operational functions will find Splunk’s library of playbooks a strength.
User interface: Splunk’s UI and dashboard provide significant customization. Clients requiring custom animations and visualization for specialized monitoring, such as OT or financial systems, will find the UI editor an overall strength
Best Fit
Splunk is particularly suited for very large organisations that value a data-driven approach to security and need powerful analytics to manage complex security environments. Microsoft is actually one of Spunk’s largest customers.
Conclusion
Microsoft and Splunk continue to lead the SIEM market with their innovative solutions. Sentinel offers a world-class leading, cloud-native, AI-enriched platform that simplifies operations and accelerates threat resolution.
Splunk provides a robust, data-centric approach to security analytics, enabling organizations to respond to threats with speed and precision and is ideally suited for the largest of enterprises as well as those who remain mainly on-prem and less “all in with cloud”. Splunk also has a strategic alignment and integration with Microsoft Sentinel.
As a Microsoft and Cisco leading UK partner, we are excited to be working with both Cisco and Splunk (Cisco) in this space with the abiluty to guide and consult around customer hosted, Azure hosted and cloud-native SIEM solutions. We also love ther fact that we can now meet customers on their ground with the ability to deploy Splunk on Azure via the market place to our clients.
Cisco has introduced a new product called Hypershield, which they claim is one of the most significant security products in Cisco’s history. It is expected to be generally available starting from July 2024.
What is Hyper Shield?
Hypershield is a cloud-native, AI-powered system designed to enhance the security of AI-scale data centers. Unlike traditional security products, hyper shield is integrated directly into the network’s fabric, offering a revolutionary approach to protecting digital infrastructure services in data centres, protecting applications, devices, and data across public and private data centers, clouds, and physical locations.
This is the Most Consequential security announcement In Cisco’s 40-Year History
Cisco.
The holistic system promises to bring the security advantages of a hyperscale model to enterprises, allowing security to be embedded in every software component of every application running on the network, on every server, and in both public and private cloud deployments.
How Hyper Shield is different.
Hypershield is different to traditional security “bolt ons” because it not just a new security product or the next version of something that already exists. What makes this different and unique, is that Hyper Shield represents a brand-new security architecture model built from the ground. It uses an open-source technology called eBPF that hyperscalers use to automate patching and other time-consuming jobs. It has the ability to transform every network port into a high-performance security enforcement point and works by blocks application exploits in minutes while preventing lateral movement of attacks.
Innovation from within
I think Hypershield is exciting because it represents a significant shift in how security is approached within the data centre fabric.
“Why we think this is the most consequential is we’re taking what used to be a firewall, an appliance, and we’re like melting into the network. It’s not a separate thing that you add on. It’s like magic. It writes its own rules, it tests its own rules, it qualifies its own rules, deploys its own rules, and then overnight it upgrades itself”
Tom Gillis | VP Security | Cisco
It is built with technology originally developed for hyperscale public clouds Cisco are making this technology available for enterprise IT teams of all sizes regardless of how big their data centre foot print is. It works by enabling security enforcement to be placed everywhere it needs to be, at the application and data layer, which is a major shift and change in how traditional data centre security works. Cisco say that it’s expected to have a significant impact on how businesses protect their digital assets.
With this innovation … we have actually been able to deliver something that’s unlike anything we’ve done in the last 40 years at Cisco. And I will say that we’re just getting started.
Jeetu Patel | Cisco’s EVP
Rather than relying on traditional network and application level firewalls in the datacentre, Hypershield works by essentially providing security boundaries around every application and service. It naturally uses artificial intelligence to learn and adapt, so it gets better at detecting and understand normal activity from attack attempts.
With the $28B aquisition now complete between Cisco and Splunk, both vendors will soon be in heavy marketing mode as they position their new combined offerings (under Cisco) to “unify the full power of network and endpoint data with leading Security and Observability solutions, all underpinned by our highly scalable, AI-powered data platform“.
The combination of Cisco and Splunk will provide truly comprehensive visibility and insights across an organization’s entire digital footprint, delivering an unprecedented level of resilience through the most extensive and powerful security and observability product portfolio on the market.
Gary Steele| VP Splunk.
So what does that mean?
Unification and Choice
According to the new Splunk website and publicly facing collateral, the combining of forces is destined to offer the following value and connected experiences to their combined customer base.
Power the SOC of the Future, by
improving the efficacy, efficiency, and economics of defending organisations and service providers against modern security threats, offering what they claim will be the “most comprehensive security solutions for threat prevention, detection, investigation and response.”
Continuing to deliver Splunk’s existing security and monitoring platforms, while adding Splunk technology to Cisco’s existing portfolio with enhanced network, endpoint and cloud data for” unparalleled insights and faster remediation“.
Enhancing Cisco’s security offerings across the board to help organisations secure users, protect infrastructure, and improve prevention, detection and remediation with Cisco’s User Protection, Breach Protection, and Cloud Protection suites which is fed from Cisco’s Talos data intelligence platform.
Enrich Observability across all and any environment by:
Offering a comprehensive full-stack observability solution, enhancing customers’ ability to deliver seamless digital experiences and prevent downtime across any environment, combining and joining Cisco Thousand Eyes and App Dymanics with Splunk’s portfolio of products.
Continue to offer choice to customers, by offering unified solutions as well as the individual Cisco and Splunk whilst providing unified management and insights.
Create a world leading observability platform through the Integration of the best of Cisco and Splunk technology leading to an holistic ability ability to detect and remediate incidents, empowering IT Teams to focus on enablement, security and digital transformation rather than troubleshooting performance and issues.
What about AI?
Yes… Cisco and Splunk also talk alot about AI empowerment and execution. After all, AI workloads are intense, drive traffic into different places and have a profound impact on how people use and access data and applications.
Aimed more at organisations who build and operate on their own data, rather than consume SaaS, the fuel of AI and its ability to provide information and serve requests is reliant on fast and secure access to models trained on huge volumes of the data.
Cisco beleive that their combined forces will bring an unmatched breadth of data through allowing organisations to build, scale and tune, highly scalable data platforms while ensuring performace and security at scale.
The competition?
The race to empower and secure both traditional and AI powered workloads continues up pace. Cisco have a great history of building arguably the best networking technologies in the world, have one of best SaaS performance monitoring platforms and now with the added arsenal of products from Splunk, puts them in a great position to win over customers, partners and MSPs with a unified offering.
Cisco have struggled to win hearts and minds with security for years but this combining of forces gives them an ACE card to play. Whether they will get this right (from a hearts and minds, price and integration) is yet to be seen, but Cisco have a great track record of integrating technologies from vendors their aquire.
More information
More information around the combined entity of Cisco and Splunk are coming in fast and late last week, Cisco ran a customer and partner briefing which is now available on demand here.
Last month, and now just a few weeks away from Cisco Live, Cisco have announced they are bringing a new “AI Assistant for Security” to market this year. This is an artificial intelligence tool that combines generative AI technologies with an “unparalleled scope of data” , giving IT/SecOps teams the ability to generate more secure, AI-driven insights that span devices, applications, security, networks, and the internet .
“AI Assistant for Security will help provide better protection to our customers by simplifying management for both seasoned administrators and novice users. Our aim is to inject generative AI and unify telemetry across all Cisco Security solutions to create a more effective experience and safeguard our customers”
Brian Feeney | VP Global security partner sales | Cisco
Cisco AI Assistant for Security marks a major step in making artificial intelligence pervasive in the Cisco Security Cloud. Starting with the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center, Cybersecurity professionals will be able to leverages Cisco AI Assistant for streamlining and automating firewall management both on premises and in the cloud.
Firewalls first – more later
Cisco have said that they will launch the AI Assistant for firewall as soon as Spring 2024, with this representing a great opportunity for their partners and customers to start leverage the advantages of AI.
Cisco say this will be included and integrated into their cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center with no additional charge. Longer term, Cisco said they plan to extend it to their other firewall management tools later.
Why? Well, according to Gartner, Configuration complexity and inconsistent rules are among the highest cause of security risks and breaches when it comes to configuring networks and firewalls with misconfiguration being the cause of nintey nine percent (99%) of all firewall breaches.
Image (c) Cisco
The AI Assistant for Security is built on “Ciscos foundation of security, data protection, and privacy, guided by Cisco’s responsible AI principles and framework”. Their AI assistant is trained on Cisco’s huge security-focused datasets, (Talos) which analyses more than 550 billion security events daily and helps IT and SecOps teams in making informed decisions, enhancing their tooling and reporting capabilities, and automating intricate tasks.
“Cisco is harnessing AI to reframe how organisations think about cybersecurity outcomes and tip the scales in favor of defenders. Cisco combines AI with its breadth of telemetry across the network, private and public cloud infrastructure, applications, internet, email, and endpoints. “
Jeetu Patel | VP security and collaboration | Cisco
Cisco say that their Cisco AI Assistant for Security is a major step forward in making artificial intelligence relevant and pervasive in the Cisco Security Cloud – their unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform. Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center will be the first platform to leverage the AI Assistant for Security to simplify firewall management.
This should make it much easier to manage and maintaining firewall rules and policies, by enabling administrators to “talk to and administer” the platform to with natural language to find policies, understand rules, spot anonomises and even get suggestions for new rules.
How AI Assistant for Security is different to Microsoft SecurityCopilot?
Scope
Cisco AI Assistant for Security and Microsoft Security Copilot are both artificial intelligence tools that are designed to help IT and SecOps teams work do efficiently, smarter and safer users work faster, but the platforms and services are different in several ways when comparing to Microsoft Security Copilot.
Cisco’s AI assistant is designed to work across (initially) their firewall services (with other services that make up the Cisco Secure Cloud portfolio coming later), Microsoft Security Copilot is designed to assist cybersecurity professionals in investigating critical incidents across their entire security portfolio including Microsoft 365, their XDR platform, Azure and Sentinel. Microsoft Security Copilot doesn’t work across physical security devices like firewalls so the two services are potentially good complementing services.
Microsoft has combined the power of OpenAI’s large language model with Microsoft’s own threat analysis footprints which is informed by more than 100 different data sources across Microsoft 365,Azure and hundreds of this party data analysis companies. It uses the combined intelligence of more than 65 trillion threat signals every day to provide company and sector specific insights, alerts and guidance.
Use Cases
Currently AI Assistant for Security is designed to help organisations better configure their security services (starting with firewalls), detect inconsistencies (for example across different sites, service or offices). This will expand over time however and we expect more to be annouced in Feb 2024 at Cisco Live in Amsterdam.
Use cases for Microsoft Security Copilot include for example the ability to allow admins to use prompting language prompting to ask Copilot to acreste an exec level report on an incident response for a particular ongoing investigation. Copilot will pull data across multiple sources based on the set of interrelated and connected tools and services. Another change of prompt for example could the see Copilot provide more information, change how it displays or summarises the report, or even create lessons learned documents or suggest changes in process.
Cost
According to Cisco, the AI assistant for Security will be generally available for firewall customers in the spring of 2024 at no additional cost via the cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center (FMC) and expanding to other management tools in the future.
Microsoft Security Copilot, however, which is currently in paid public preview is expected to cost >$100k when it’s officially availabily later this year.
A better together story?
As you can see the Cisco and Microsoft’s offering in this space is quite different. While Cisco see their AI Assistant for Security as a way of differentiating their brand in the cyber security space and to leap ahead of the competition in this traditional secoery space (think Palo, HPE, Dell, Checkpoint etc), Microsoft Security Copilot is more geared towards collating security signals from the organisations configuration, reports and signals from Microsoft’s own threat intelligence of 65 Trillion signals, the organisations configuration and third party connected signals to provide almost an AI powered cyber security team.
I very much see this as a “use both” better together theme.
Closing Thoughts
According to Gartner, Configuration complexity and inconsistent rules are among the highest cause of security risks and breaches when it comes to configuring networks and firewalls with misconfiguration being the cause of nintey nine percent (99%) of all firewall breaches.
As such, launching this with a “firewall first” approach is a sensible move by Cisco to add more value to their offering through the use of embedding generative AI into their core security product base without adding a surcharge or making it “Premium”. It should help to further position Cisco as a Leader in the security space against the fierce completion. I look forward to this being available and for Cisco to increase it’s reach over time to the rest of their portfolio.
Read more
You can learn more about Microsoft Security Copilot at and Cisco’s AI assistant below.
Hello, followers and subscribers! As the year comes to an end, I want to take a moment to thank you for your support and interest in my blog. It has been a busy and exciting year in tech and I hope you enjoyed reading my posts which focussed mainly around AI, Modern Work, Cloud Security, Windows and Surface.
In my last blog post before Christmas, I will recap some of the highlights of what I posted about throughout 2023. Let’s take a look at what news and info I shared this year.
If you dont currently read or subscribe to my blog you can tune in or subscribe here.
January 2023
I kicked of the new year with ISE event, some news around Microsoft’sd Secyriuty revenue, the MVP programme and Cisco and Microsoft’s partnership around collaboration.
Cisco and Microsoft Teams partnership: The blog discusses the significance and benefits of the collaboration between Cisco and Microsoft to enable Cisco devices to run both Webex and Teams seamlessly without a reboot¹[1].
Microsoft’s security revenue and market share: The blog reports on Microsoft’s impressive growth in the cybersecurity market, driven by its integrated and comprehensive security portfolio and partner ecosystem.
Teams Premium features and pricing: The blog explains what Teams Premium is, how it differs from the standard Teams license, and how much it costs for different currencies.
Microsoft’s cloud price harmonisation: The blog informs about Microsoft’s plan to align the pricing of its cloud products and services across the globe based on the US dollar exchange rate, and how customers can prepare for it²[2].
Windows Insider MVP award and program: The blog shares the author’s personal experience and excitement of being re-awarded as a Windows Insider MVP, and invites others to join the Windows Insider Program and nominate potential MVPs.
February 2023
In february 2023, we sawe Cisco Contact Centre certified for Teams and a new Teams client announced (which is now generally available). I also found my old RM Tablet PC (running Windows XP tablet and did a quick recap review). Here is a summary of all the things I blogged about in Feb 23:
Microsoft Teams new client: The blog reports that Microsoft is working on a new version of Teams that will be faster, more efficient, and more stable than the current one. The new version will use Webview2 and React technologies and will be available in preview soon.
Webex Contact Center for Teams: The blog announces that Cisco Webex Contact Center has received official Microsoft Teams certification, which means that it can integrate seamlessly with Teams to provide enterprise-class customer service across multiple channels. The blog explains the benefits of this integration for both Microsoft and Cisco, as well as for organisations, partners, and customers.
Yealink DeskVision A24: The blog reviews a new all-in-one collaboration device from Yealink that combines a 24 inch 4K touch-display, a pop-up camera, a speaker, a wireless charger, and a touch screen monitor. The device is certified for both Teams and Zoom and offers a premium desktop collaboration experience. The blog praises the device’s design, functionality, and value.
RM Tablet PC: The blog revisits an old RM Tablet PC from 2002 that ran Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, which was a special edition of Windows XP designed for pen-sensitive screens. The blog credits the RM Tablet PC and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition for introducing and innovating the touch and tablet computing world that we now take for granted. The blog also reflects on the evolution of tablet devices and operating systems since then such as Microsoft Surface Pro.
March 2023
March was a busy month. We saw the Cisco and Microsoft partnership expand, talked about how Cisco Thousand Eyes is a vital tool for troubsleooting and managing the end user expewrience in the world of remote work and SaaS applications, chewed the fat over Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop, covered new AI features coming to Windows 11 and of course, covered the huge announcement about the upcoming Microsoft 365 Copilot. Here’s some of the things I talked about:
Microsoft and Cisco partnership: The blog starts with the announcement of the certification of Cisco Board Pro to run Microsoft Teams Rooms natively, as well as supporting Webex. This is part of the ongoing collaboration between Microsoft and Cisco to provide interoperability and seamless experiences for their customers.
Surface Hub 2S update: The blog then mentions the new version of Windows that will ship with the next generation of Surface Hub 2S devices, called Teams Rooms on Windows. This will feature a new user interface, unified management, and new collaborative features such as FrontRow and Copilot for Teams.
New Teams app for Windows: The blog also covers the new preview version of the Teams app for Windows, which is said to be faster, more efficient, and more streamlined. The new app also includes the foundations for new AI-powered experiences, such as Copilot for Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft 365 Copilot: The blog introduces Microsoft 365 Copilot, a new AI assistant that leverages large language models and Microsoft Graph data to help users with natural language queries, tasks, insights, and content creation across Microsoft 365 apps and services.
ThousandEyes by Cisco: The blog explains how ThousandEyes by Cisco is a digital end user experience monitoring solution that helps ensure optimal performance of SaaS apps and cloud services for employees and customers. It also compares it with Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365.
Windows 11 updates: The blog concludes with a summary of the latest updates and features coming to Windows 11 in 2023, such as Taskbar enhancements, Energy Recommendations, File Explorer improvements, and Moment updates.
April 2023
April saw me talk more about updated to Windows 11 and Windows 365 (including Windows 365 Boot), a review of the gorgeous Surface Pro 9 5G, new AI features in Widnows 11 and Surface and the lauch of Mcirosoft Designer in preview.
Windows 11 Insider builds: New features and fixes for Windows 11, including a revamped widget board, spatial audio support, and Windows Studio Effects.
May 2023, saw Microsoft Announce Fabric – their new data analtics platform for the AI era, Windows Copilot (the neg gen Clippy/Cortana for Windows 11) and a in depth comparison of ChatGPT vs Bing Chat (now, Copilot). Here are the summaries of the blog posts in order:
Windows Copilot: The Cortana that never was. This post discusses the new Windows Copilot feature that will bring AI to the forefront of Windows 11. Copilot will live in the Windows sidebar and offer contextual actions and suggestions based on what’s on screen. Users will also be able to ask natural language questions and Copilot will respond much like Bing Chat. Copilot will also support third-party plugins that use OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology, enabling cross-application tasks and generative AI capabilities.
Bing Chat vs ChatGPT: Why Bing Chat is better. This post compares and contrasts Bing Chat and ChatGPT, two natural language chatbots that use OpenAI’s GPT technology. The post argues that Bing Chat is superior to ChatGPT in several aspects, such as speed, accuracy, quality, capability, and accessibility. The post also highlights some of the unique features of Bing Chat, such as web search, image search, image creation, conversation modes, and integration with other Microsoft apps and services.
June 2023
June 2023, I talked about how Microsoft is helping defend Ukraine from Cyber Attacks from Russia, the death of Internet Explorer and Windows Autopatch. We also looked at the massive changes to Cisco’s Cloud managed network infrastructure solutions.
Here are the summaries of the blog posts in order:
Microsoft shares lessons from Ukraine cyber war. This post talks about how Microsoft helped Ukraine defend against Russian cyberattacks and information operations, and what insights they gained from this experience.
Cisco brings Catalyst to the Meraki cloud. This post announced that Cisco was introducing a new option for customers to manage their Catalyst switches and access points using the Cisco Meraki cloud dashboard. This was announced at Cisco Live 2023.
Microsoft announces Viva Sales. This post introduces a new intelligent service that connects customer data across any CRM into Teams and Office and fills many of the gaps left by legacy CRM platforms. This was the latest additon to the Microsoft’s Viva suite.
Internet Explorer is officially dead: This post marks the end of life of Internet Explorer, the once dominant web browser that was released in 1995. It explains what end of life means for users, and why they should switch to Microsoft Edge or other modern browsers. It also reviews the history of Internet Explorer, its decline in market share, and its legacy features that are still supported by Edge.
Microsoft acquires Milburo: This post reveals that Microsoft has agreed to acquire Milburo, a world leader in foreign threat analysis and research detection services. It states that Milburo will join Microsoft’s Customer Security and Trust organisation, and will enhance Microsoft’s threat detection and analysis capabilities.
Microsoft launches software updates dashboard: This post unveils a new software updates dashboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center that enables IT to get a unified overview of the installation status of Windows and Microsoft 365 app updates across all their devices. It shows how the dashboard provides charts and statistics on update status and end of service, and how it supports both fully managed and monitored only devices. It also provides links to further information and instructions on how to enable the preview.
Windows Autopatch reaches public preview: This post announces that Windows Autopatch, a service to automatically keep Windows and Microsoft 365 up to date in enterprise organisations, has now reached public preview. It describes how Windows Autopatch shifts the update orchestration burden from the IT department to Microsoft, and how it provides features such as testing rings, halt and rollback, and expedited updates. I also covered prerequisites, licensing, and features of the service, and how to join the preview.
July 2023
The second part of the year, kicked off with pricing being announced for Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft renaming Azure AD to Entra ID and Bing Chat Enterprise (a commercial grade version of Bing Chat) being made available free to Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise Customers.
Bing Chat Enterprise: A new version of Bing Chat that is secure and private for work, powered by generative AI. It can be accessed from Microsoft Edge, Windows 11, or bing.com/chat. It is free for existing Microsoft 365 customers or $5 per user per month as a standalone version.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Pricing: An AI powered service that brings generative AI features into Microsoft 365 apps and services. It is currently in a closed private preview and will cost $30 per user per month for commercial customers on top of their Microsoft 365 licenses.
Orca AI: A new open-sourced AI model that can imitate the reasoning of large foundation models like GPT-4 in a much smaller footprint. It is designed to solve the limitations of using smaller language models and revolutionise the AI industry.
Microsoft EntraID: A new brand name for Microsoft’s unified access and security offering, which includes two new products: Entra Private Access and Entra Internet Access. These products are designed to provide identity-centric and zero trust network access to any app or resource, from anywhere. Azure Active Directory is also renamed to Entra ID.
August 2023
In August (while many of were on summer holidays), I gave some key tips o Microsoft 365 Copilot based on feedback and questions from customers, talked about Microsoft’s upcoming Surface and Windows 11 event, highlighed key things from Cisco’s latest Network Trends report.
Here are the summaries of the three blog posts on this page:
5 things you need to know about Microsoft 365 Copilot: This post covered the main features and benefits of Microsoft 365 Copilot, a new AI-powered assistant that can help users with various tasks across Microsoft 365 apps. It also discussed the pricing, availability, and preparation for Copilot, as well as the potential drawbacks and limitations of AI-generated content.
New devices? More AI? What is coming to Windows 11 and Surface?: This post speculates on what Microsoft we going to announce at their “special event” on September 21st, 2023. It expects that Microsoft will unveil new Surface products, such as Surface Laptop Studio 2, Surface Laptop Go 3, and Surface Go 4, as well as highlight the recent advancements in AI, such as Windows Copilot, Bing Chat Enterprise, and Windows Studio Effects.
Cisco adds ransomware detection and recovery to their XDR system: This post reports on Cisco’s new solution that integrates their Extended Detection and Response (XDR) system with Cohesity’s DataProtect and DataHawk offerings to provide ransomware detection and recovery support. It explains how this solution can help organisations protect and restore their data in the event of a ransomware attack, and how it fits into Cisco’s comprehensive security portfolio.
Key highlights from Cisco network Trends Report. The blog post discusses the 2023 Global Networking Trends Report by Cisco, which covers some of the emerging networking trends in the multi-cloud world, and how they affect the IT operations and security of organisations and highlights the challenges and opportunities of hybrid work and multi-cloud adoption, such as providing secure access to applications distributed across multiple cloud platforms, gaining end-to-end visibility into network performance and security, and adopting a SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) model that delivers simplified and consistent security and performance for multi-cloud access and hybrid work. I also covered an overview of the Cisco products that can help organisations address many of the challenges of multi-cloud networking and security, such as Cisco SD-WAN, Cisco Umbrella, Cisco Cloudlock, and Cisco SASE.
September 2023
This was a busy month of blogging. I talked about the Meta and Microsoft partnership, availability of Microsoft 365 Copilot for “some customers”, Cisco’s aquistion of Splunk, New AI features in Surface and Windows, Microsoft Copilot “copyright” protection, changes to E5 licensing with more Security included and more.
Here are the key things talked about in each blog post on this page:
Meta AI to use Microsoft Bing: This post discusses the expanded AI partnership between Microsoft and Meta, which will integrate Bing Search into Meta’s AI chat experiences, such as ChatGPT, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.
Microsoft Mesh entered public preview in October: This post introduces Microsoft Mesh, a new 3D immersive experience that will be surfaced through Microsoft Teams. It explains how Mesh can help blur the lines between the physical and virtual space, and how to get started with it.
Microsoft unveils the Surface Hub 3: This post explores the features and benefits of Surface Hub 3, the latest all-in-one hybrid meeting and collaboration device that combines the best of Microsoft Teams Rooms, Windows, and Surface Hub. It also compares it to Surface Hub 2S and explains how to upgrade from it.
Cisco to Aquire Splunk: This post reports the news that Cisco will acquire Splunk, a cybersecurity and observability platform, for $28 billion. It describes how the acquisition will help Cisco create the next generation of AI-enabled security and observability solutions.
Microsoft announces Microsoft 365 Copilot availabilty: This post announces the availability and pricing of Microsoft 365 Copilot, a new AI assistant that helps users with various tasks across Microsoft 365 apps and services. It also covers the features and benefits of Copilot in Windows, Bing, and Microsoft Shopping.
Windows 365 get’s top spot in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. – where I discussed that Microsoft had been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Desktop as a Service (DaaS), which is the provision of virtual desktops by a public cloud or service provider. We covered their Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop platforms and Microsoft’s unique position in this space.
October 2023
October saw me talk more about the ROI of Microsoft Copilot, the new vision for Micrsosoft OneDrive, Teams Town Hall, major updates to Bing Image Creator and the end of support (RIP) for Windows Server 2012!
OneDrive 3.0 Update: This post announces a major update for OneDrive, which includes a new design, AI features, and more. It also explains how to get started with OneDrive Town Hall, a new experience for large-scale events that replaces Live Events.
Teams Town Hall: This post introduces Teams Town Hall, a new feature that allows users to host various types of internal and external events, such as company-wide town halls, all hands, global team meetings, etc. It also describes the advanced production capabilities, the structured approach for attendee engagement, and the unified experience for users that Teams Town Hall offers.
Windows 11 Moment 4 Update: This post highlights the new features and improvements that are rolling out with the latest feature update for Windows 11. It includes a new File Explorer design, Copilot for Windows, a new AI assistant, improvements to the Taskbar, and notable in-box app updates.
Windows Server 2012 End of Support: This post reminds users that support for Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 ended on 10th Oct 234. It also provides some options for users to upgrade, purchase Extended Security Updates, or migrate to Azure.
Bing Image Creator: This post showcases the new Bing Image Creator, which uses OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 to generate high-quality, creative, and realistic images from natural language prompts. It also explains how to use Bing Image Creator and how it provides improved safety and ethics with content credentials and content moderation system.
Microsoft 365 CoPilot: What is the ROI? – This talked about availability and pricing of Copilot, and went into looking at examples around the ROI. We explored how it can help with productivity, creativity, and decision-making for users who can leverage its features and capabilities and looked at some numbers. We also covered the need to adopt Copilot in the right way – proper planning, training, support, and data management to ensure successful adoption and measurable outcomes.
News about the key annoucements at Microsoft Envision: this was a review of the key things announced at Microsoft’s AI event in London in 2023. I talked about my take on the keynote speeches and what we have and what is coming in this esciting world of AI.
November 2023
Another busy month of news – it never slows down. In November I talked about my hands on experiences with Windows 365, Copilot coming to Windows 10, all the new “Copilots” Microsoft announced at Ignite, new Apps in Teams and did a demo and walk through of Copilkot Studio. I also shared my view on why “everyone” needs a Surface Pro for work!! I also shared details of major updates coming to Cisco’s partner programme in 2024.
Here is a summary of my key blog posts:
Cisco Announce major changes to Partner Programme in 2024. In this blog, I talk about Cisco’s new partner incentive programme that rewards partners for selling Cisco hardware, software and as-a-service solutions, as well as driving customer adoption and growth of subscriptions and a new set of specialisations to help identify and reward key partners.
Intro and demo of Microsoft Copilot Studio: An overview of Microsoft Copilot Studio, a new platform that allows Microsoft 365 customers to build their own generative AI copilots and custom GPTs. I included a step-by-step guide on how to create a simple copilot using a website as a data source, and showed how to test and publish it.
Copilot coming to Windows 10: We see Microsoft announce that Copilot is coming soon to Windows 10 devices – we look at the hardware requirements, the availability, and the benefits of using Copilot on older devices.
In the the last month of 2023 (a short month for many), I closed the year with a post about the Cisco and Microsoft “better together” story and invited people to register for our event in January at our new Client Exdperience Centre, gave tips on writing AI prompts, talked about Google’s Gemini AI (the ChatGPT compete), talked more about Designer and Image Creation, updates to Copilot with GPT4 Turbo, and highlighted the results of the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for UCaaS. We also talk about Mcirosoft investment in the UK for AI data centres and charges coming for Windows 10 support beyond 2025.
Cisco and Microsoft: Simplifying Enterprise Collaboration. This post discusses how Cisco and Microsoft have partnered to enable Cisco’s Webex video devices to connect to Microsoft Teams meeting services, and how this collaboration benefits customers who use both platforms.
Prompt Engineering: AI prompts that punch! This post provides some tips on how to write and perfect good AI prompts for generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot, including how to be specific, provide context, use simple language, and experiment with different variations.
Teams meetings, webinars and Townhalls. What to use when. This post explains the differences and use cases of three distinct formats of virtual events in Teams: meetings, webinars, and town halls. It also outlines the key features and considerations of each format.
Microsoft and Cisco: Leaders in the UCaaS Gartner 2023 Magic Quadrant This post summarises the highlights of the Gartner 2023 Magic Quadrant for UCaaS, where Microsoft and Cisco are both Leaders. It also compares their strengths and weaknesses in terms of messaging, meetings, telephony, contact center, and pricing.
What is Google Gemini and when is it available? This post introduces Google Gemini, a new AI-powered search engine that aims to provide more relevant and personalised results for users. It also discusses the features and benefits of Google Gemini, such as semantic understanding, contextual awareness, and conversational interface. It says that Google Gemini is expected to launch in mid-2024.
Goodbye 2023 – Hello to an AI Powered 2024
That’s it for my year in review! I hope you enjoyed reading it, maybe learned something new or useful from it or saw different perspective.
I want to thank you again for your support and interest in my blog and for being part of my journey. I appreciate your comments, likes, shares, and feedback and I look forward to hearing more from you in the future.
In 2023, we witnessed the dawn of a new era, where AI became an integral part of our everyday lives, enabling us to accomplish things beyond our imagination. This era is as significant as the inception of the personal computer, the start of the world wide web, mobile phones, and cloud in the previous decades. What new opportunities and challenges will AI bring us in 2024?
I wish you all a Happy New Year! May 2024 bring you health, happiness, and success in all your endeavors!
Gartner this week published their 2023 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service. The full report from Gartner details all the players across all quadrants. This blog is a summary of the highlights from this report on the strengths and weaknesses across both Microsoft and Cisco – who have been in the top right quadrant for many years.
2023 – Key Unified Comms Trends – by Gartner
Gartner’s report identifies an increasing demand for bundles UCaaS and CCaaS solutions, along with the continued growing popularity and demand for Microsoft Teams for voice, meetings and messaging. They also point out the growing importance of CPaaS for customisation and integration, and the changing preferences of users moving more towards collaboration rather than telephony and dial-tone calling. There are five leaders in the 2023 magic quadrant ranked in the following order:
Microsoft
Ring Central
Zoom
Cisco
8×8
I have summarised the core two vendors I work closely with below
Summary of Microsoft’s Position in 2023
Microsoft Positioning: Microsoft remain 1st – top right in the leader’s quadrant with the gap between their competitors increasing. They continue to grow their market share and this year have seen more vendors join their partner eco system for phones and meeting rooms including Cisco.
Microsoft’s strengths: Microsoft Teams is the most popular choice in the UCaaS market, especially for organisations that are already using it for messaging and meetings. Microsoft Teams’ telephony capabilities satisfy the requirements of most organisations, and Microsoft has invested have many options to bring telephony into Teams including their own calling plans, direct routing, direct routing as a service and more recently in Operator Connect services. Microsoft has strong financial health and a long track record as a UC/UCaaS vendor. Their seamless integration into both Microsoft 365 and vast extensibility has been a key ingredient for its continued success.
Microsoft’s cautions: Microsoft Teams Phone still has some gaps in advanced telephony features, which require third-party solutions or integrations – though it is noted that they are working to close these. Gartner also points out that Microsoft does not offer a self-developed contact center solution for Teams which requires customers to choose from a wide range of varying solutions and levels of integration. Gartner also calls out that Microsoft’s availability SLA target for core UC services (other than PSTN) is lower than most of the UCaaS market.
Summary of Cisco’s Positioning in 2023
Cisco Positioning: Cisco remain in the top right quadrant (4th out of 5) but have been over-taken recently by pureplay UCaaS vendors including Zoom and RingCentral. They remain a solid UCaaS vendor with quality products and services.
Cisco’s strengths: Gartner credit Cisco as one of the few UCaaS vendors that can deliver a complete, self-developed UC portfolio, including hardware, software, and cloud services. They call out that Cisco has deep expertise and investments in security, regulatory, and industry-specific capabilities and certifications. Cisco has also made big improvements in its Webex Control Hub for unified management, making it a competitive option for large and/or highly distributed multinational organisations.
Cisco’s cautions: Gartner say that Cisco’s offering is perceived to be more expensive than its competitors, and its pricing strategy is not very aggressive. Cisco’s Webex contact center solution, whilst suitable for small or midsize contact centres, is not best choice for large, high-volume ones. Cisco faces continued fierce competition from other UCaaS vendors that offer collaboration capabilities to its existing customers, and many have also partnered with Microsoft to provide more choice.
The following table shows a comparison of the vendor, strengths and cautions:
Vendor
Strengths
Cautions
Microsoft
Popular and growing choice for voice, messaging and meetings
Satisfactory telephony capabilities
Strong integration with their own- and third-party apps and services.
Strong financial health and track record with loyal customer base.
Gaps in advanced telephony features
No self-developed contact center option
Lower availability SLA target
Confusing PSTN options
Cisco
Complete, self-developed UC portfolio
Deep expertise and investments in security and regulatory
Strong unified management for large and distributed organisations
Perceived to be more expensive than competitors with complicated discount schemes
Contact center solution not suitable for large, high-volume ones
Vast competition from other UCaaS vendors for collaboration
Summary of Cisco and Microsoft in 2023 Garner MQ for UCaaS
Summary
In summary, this report evaluates the UCaaS providers based on their ability to execute and completeness of vision. Microsoft and Cisco are both Leaders in this Magic Quadrant, but they have different strengths and weaknesses.
Gartner say that Microsoft excels in messaging and meetings but lacks advanced telephony features without third parties and has no native contact center solution.
Gartner say that Cisco offers a comprehensive UC portfolio but is more costly and less competitive in contact center. They also have fierce competition amidst the continued growth of Teams and pure play UCaaS providers.
At Cisco’s 2023 Partner Summit this week, Cisco annouced a massive shakeup in their partner incentive programme. I my experience (and from the partners I work with), this makes Cisco’s incentive programme really stand out as top in class, in terms of where and how partners are rewarded.
In short, this new Partner Incentive is based-on three areas.
Rebates for one-time sales deals.
Incentives for recurring business.
Additional rebates for driving customer value services such as driving adoption and increasing subscription volumes (seats).
Inventives aligned to Cloud
Cisco said that they are transforming the partner program to align with its transition to more software and services-based offerings.
The new Cisco Partner Incentive programme is designed to reward partners for selling Cisco hardware, software and as-a-service solutions by aligning the rebates paid, based on total contract value, customer adoption and growth of the subscriptions they have bought. This will help ensure Cisco partners work more closely with their customers (as against one off deals) to ensure their customers buy it, use it and grow it, rather than just focusing on selling product.
This is a similar approach that longer standing cloud vendors such as Microsoft use to drive usage and adoption of their products and services.
The Cisco Partner Incentive is the biggest change we’ve made to partner incentives in more than a decade and is the capstone on the Cisco partner programme evolution started in 2020.
Marc Surplus |VP partner programs|Cisco
The new icentives will also better support their partners to acquiring new logos, for up selling additional cisco products and services and for cross selling into other accounts. Partner that offer and upsell “Cisco Powered Managed Services” will also receive increased rebates.
Skills Shortages driving Managed Service Demand
Cisco estimates that the managed services market for its products is worth $161 billion, and expects 46% of its sales to be sold as a managed service by 2027.
More and more organisations are turning to trusted Cisco Partners to look after support and maintaining their technology and help drive adoption of technologies to increase ROI and usage across their organisations.
New Specialisations to differentiate the top partners
To help partners differentiate in the market and demonstrate their expertise, Cisco is also introducing up to six new solution specialisations within the next nine months. These will cover areas such as cloud, security, collaboration, IoT, data center and enterprise networking.
Cisco is also enhancing its partner experience platform (known as PXP) with new features which include as a new sustainability estimator, that will enable partners to calculate and present their customers with environmental and cost benefits of modernising their IT hardware with the latest technology. This will made available only to environmental sustainability specialised partners.
Cisco is also introducing new Partner Advanced Support for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) along with guided access to API integrations that build on MSPs’ existing services and integrate into their operation and support services platforms such as Service Now.
New partner program starts H2 2024
The new Cisco Partner Incentive is expected to begin in the second half of 2024, and will replace the existing Value Incentive Program (VIP) and VIP Annuity.
Designed for everybody to wins
Cisco says the new incentive will provide more predictability and profitability for partners, as well as more value for customers. This is great news for partners like us (Cisilion) as it helps us drive more value for customers, while keeping prices for product and services low in an ever more competitive landscape.
Rewarding partners for growth and adoption of Cisco products helps ensure customer leverage maximum value and ROI of their investment, ensures partners continue to add value and that Cisco (hopefully) retain and grow their market share across their extensive product portfolio.
One of the most frustrating thing about Teams intelligent Recap and Copilot in meetings is in its ability to not understand company acroymns and internal “language” …
Cisco has been named as the fastest-growing partner for Microsoft Teams Rooms. This was announced by Ilya Bukshteyn, VP for Teams calling, devices, and premium experiences …
Cisco has announced that it will acquire Splunk, a cybersecurity and observability platform platform for $28 billion.
Cisco say that acquisition is expected to help them create the next generation of AI-enabled security and observability solutions, moving organisations from threat detection and response to threat prediction and prevention.
This will help build on the extensive full stack observability platforms Cisco have already including Thousand Eyes and Cisco App Dymanics.
We’re excited to bring Cisco and Splunk together. Our combined capabilities will drive the next generation of AI-enabled security and observability…. From threat detection and response to threat prediction and prevention, we will help make organizations of all sizes more secure and resilient.”
Chuck Robbins | CEO | Cisco
This is the biggest acquisition in Cisco’s history and a massive push into software and artificial intelligence-powered data analysis. With three two complimentary services coming together it should help Cisco achieve it’s mission to “securely connect everything to make anything possible, and move from threat detection and response to threat prediction and prevention”.
Splunk President and CEO Gary Steele will join Cisco’s Executive Leadership Team reporting to Chuck Robbins.
What is Cisco’s Full Stack Observability offering?
Cisco’s Full-Stack Observability (FSO) solutions bring together performace and availability data from on-premises, cloud and SaaS applications allowing organisations to monitor traditional and modern applications, track performance of cloud-native applications, and correlate network metrics with application performance data and provide real-time insights and recommended actions for any performance related issues along with the potential. Impact to the business.
Cisco Full-Stack Observability is comprised of a single platform that brings together multiple solutions such including AppDynamics, ThousandEyes, and Cisco Secure Application. Splunk will soon be added to this!
The platform is open and extensible, API-driven, focused on OpenTelemetry, and anchored on Metrics, Events, Logs, and Traces (MELT).
You can find more information about Cisco Full-Stack Observability solutions on the Cisco website
Cisco has added ransomware detection and recovery support to its recently unveiled Extended Detection and Response (XDR) system.
Ransomware is a type of malicious software that encrypts the end user’s device and data and demands a ransom for its decryption. Ransomware attacks can cause considerable damage to businesses and organisations, disrupting their operations and compromising their data. To combat this threat, Cisco has now introduced a new solution that integrates with their new Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solution with Cohesity’s DataProtect and DataHawk offerings.
Cisco’s XDR system is a cloud-based platform that combines multiple security products and telemetry sources to detect, analyse, and respond to threats across the network and endpoints. As Cisco announced the General Availability of their XDR platform, they also announce that they have added ransomware detection and recovery support to their XDR system, enabling Security Operations Center (SOC) teams to automatically protect and restore business-critical data in the event of a ransomware attack.
This feature is made possible by integrating Cisco’s XDR system with Cohesity’s DataProtect and DataHawk offerings, which are well established and trusted, infrastructure and enterprise data backup and recovery solutions. These provide configurable recovery points and mass recovery for systems assigned to a protection plan and can preserve potentially infected virtual machines for forensic investigation and protect enterprise workloads from future attacks.
Cisco said that the exponential growth of ransomware and cyber extortion has made a platform approach crucial to effectively counter adversaries. It also noted that during the second quarter of 2023, the Cisco Talos Incident Response team responded to the highest number of ransomware engagements in more than a year.
The integration of Cisco’s XDR system and Cohesity’s solutions is designed to help Security Operations Centre (SOC) teams and IT to automatically detect, snapshot, and restore business-critical data at the very first signs of a ransomware outbreak; often before it has had a chance to move laterally through the network to reach the high–value assets.
In the announcement, Cisco and Cohesity said that they already have a long-standing partnership, with over 460 joint customers. Cisco have said that the Cohesity Cloud Services package will also be able to be sold by their Cisco channel partners like Cisilionlater in 2023. The Cohesity Cloud Services include data security and management as well as threat defense, data isolation and backup/recovery. Cisco have also said that the software can be deployed and hosted on both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) via their marketplaces.
This brings more features to Cisco’s XDR service (a competitive landscape where they compete against the likes of Microsoft, Sentinel One and Palo Alto) and brings together a myriad first-party Cisco, and third-party security products to control network access, analyse incidents, remediate threats, and automate response all from a single cloud-based interface. The offering gathers six telemetry sources that SOC operators say are critical for an XDR solution: endpoint, network, firewall, email, identity, and DNS, Cisco stated in the announcement.
Part of Cisco’s growing Security Portfolio
The Cisco Security portfolio is a comprehensive set of solutions that work together to provide seamless interoperability with your security infrastructure, including third-party technologies. Their growing portfolio covers various aspects of security, such as network security, user and endpoint protection, cloud edge, advanced malware protection, email security, web security and workload security. The Cisco XDR system is part of this portfolio and integrates with other Cisco products and services to detect, analyse, and respond to threats across the network and endpoints.
Cisco XDR system can leverage the threat intelligence from Cisco Talos – the cloud-based platform known as Cisco SecureX, as well as the backup and recovery solutions from Cohesity to provide a powerful and proactive defense against ransomware and other advanced threats. Cisco XDR system also supports third-party integrations with other security vendors, including Microsoft, Splunk and many others.
Cisco have, and continue to invest heavily in their end-to-end security portfolio and their XDR solution (as of December 2022) is on the cusp of moving into the Leaders Quadrant in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection.
Cisco's XDR play competes against other industry leading XDR vendors including Sentinel One Microsoft Defender, Crowdstrike Falcon, Palo Alto Cortex XDR and Trend Micro Vision One.
Cisco are on the verge of become a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection.
Conclusion
Ransomware is a serious threat that requires a comprehensive and proactive solution. Cisco’s XDR system, integrated with Cohesity’s DataProtect and DataHawk offerings, provides a powerful way to detect, prevent, and recover from ransomware attacks.
For organisations with a fragmented security portfolio and those heavily invested in Cisco infrastructure, Cisco’s XDR can be an excellent choice for organisations that need to increase visibility and simplify the detection and remediation time with the integration of XDR with the rest of their Cisco Security portfolio – enhancing the visibility, automation, and effectiveness of security operations.
Cisco has just published their 2023 Global Networking Trends Report. This report covers some of the emerging networking trends in the multi-cloud world, and how they affect the IT operations and security of organisations. The report is twenty-one pages long and covers some interesting trends and observations from more than 2,500 IT leaders in 13 countries across North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Western Europe (including the UK).
Image (c) Cisco
My key take aways from the report
Hybrid work and multi-cloud adoption are driving the need for innovative approaches to securely connect remote workers to corporate data and assets distributed across multi-cloud environments with a huge need (40% of respondents) to de-silo operations and bring together network and security controls and visibility.
Cisco says that “providingsecure access to applicationsdistributed across multiple cloud platforms” is the top challenge cited by 41% of networking professionals, followed by gaining end-to-end visibility into network performance and security (37%).
Growth and demand for SASE. SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) is a convergence architecture that delivers simplified and consistent security and performance for multi-cloud access and hybrid work. Cisco are a leading vendor in the SASE space which combines SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) and SSE (Security Service Edge) into a single, integrated SaaS security offering.
In the report, Cisco highlighted that 47% of respondents expect to connect their branches and remote clients using a SASE model by mid 2025, while 59% said that they will be prioritising centralising and consolidating cloud security over the same period.
Extending SD-WAN connectivity consistently across multiple clouds can automate cloud-agnostic connectivity and optimize the application experience. 53% of respondents prioritise integration with cloud service providers for this purpose5.
End-to-end network visibility and predictive analytics are essential for ensuring a consistent user experience across the complex digital service delivery chain, especially around SaaS apps with 51% of respondents prioritising end-to-end network telemetry and visibility. 47% of respondents said they will be prioritising predictive network analytics.
More organisations are multi-cloud than ever before with 92% of organisations reporting that they use more than one public cloud service (includes SaaS, IaaS and PaaS).
How Cisco Technology can help address these challenges
Cisco provide a comprehensive portfolio of products that can help organisations address many of the challenges of multi-cloud networking and security which fall into the SASE and SD-WAN categories. These include:
Cisco SD-WAN with edge security stack or SD-WAN with Umbrella Cloud Security (SASE) both leverage the Cisco Identity Service Engine’s Security Group Access Control Lists for segmentation policy management and enforcement across the WAN.
Cisco SD-WAN integrated with Cisco Umbrella SIG for a cloud-delivered SASE model that seamlessly secures access wherever users and applications reside.
Cisco Cloudlock, – Cisco’s cloud-native cloud access security broker (CASB) that helps secure your use of SaaS applications
The Cisco SD-WAN and these SSE collaborations provide a range of SASE deployment options for our Partners and Managed Service Providers (MSPs), allowing them to utilize a mix of networking and cloud security solutions to offer multiple managed options to enterprises at various stages of their SASE journey 3.
Cisco Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a cloud-native platform that combines SD-WAN, SWG (Secure Web Gateway), ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access), DNS-layer security, CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker).
The table below shows the key challenges discussed in the report and the corresponding solutions from Cisco that can help address them:
Challenge
Solution
Providing secure access to applications distributed across multiple clouds
SASE (Secure Access Service Edge), a convergence architecture that delivers simplified and consistent security and performance for multi-cloud access and hybrid work. SASE It combines SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) and SSE (Security Service Edge) within Cisco’s cloud platform
Gaining end-to-end visibility into network performance and security
Cloud-based network detection and response solutions, such as Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics, which provides visibility and threat detection for an organisations’ network across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.
Extending SD-WAN connectivity consistently across multiple clouds
SD-WAN multi-cloud integrations, which allow networking and cloud teams to accelerate and automate extensions from enterprise sites to various cloud providers and other enterprise sites through Internet, interconnect, or colocation and cloud provider networks.
Siloed cloud, network, and security operations
Cloud-centric operating model, which brings cloud operating model principles to the network and across the entire cloud/network IT stack, enabling more integrated workflows and better collaboration between network, security, and cloud operations.
Visibility into end user experience and performance of multiple Cloud SaaS apps
Cisco ThousandEyes provides real-time and historic view into the availability of thousands of different SaaS apps. It allows IT to monitor all employee’s user’s digital experience against software as a service and on-prem applications, regardless of where users are, through the essential elements of your SASE architecture. With ThousandEyes, organisations can gain back visibility and control over SaaS applications and ensure that they are performing optimally.
Table 1 – How Cisco technology addresses the challenges of securing and managing Networking and Security across multi-cloud environments,
Summary
Cloud is the new data center, Internet is the new network, and cloud offerings dominate applications. By gaining a view of global Internet health and the performance of top SaaS applications, IT teams can proactively detect and remediate major unexpected network or application issues affecting them as soon as they happen.
Based on the report, Cisco say that organisations can mitigate against many of the challenges discussed by adopting a cloud-centric operating model that brings cloud operating model principles to the network and across their entire cloud/network IT stack. This can enable more integrated workflows and better collaboration between network, security, and cloud operations.
Yesterday (6th June 2023) was the first day of Cisco Live which was hosted in Las Vegas.
CEO Chuck Robbins hosted the keynote, along with a host of product leads and Cisco executives who ran through their huge list of updates. The core focus for Cisco and the announcements made, were focussed on security, networking, cloud, AI, and sustainability. Some of the key announcements were:
Updates to their Full Stack Observability Platform (FSO), a cloud-based service that provides comprehensive visibility and insights into applications and networks.
Cisco Cloud Application Security, a new feature of their FSO ⬆️ that monitors and protects cloud applications from threats.
Cisco Networking Cloud, a unified cloud network management platform that simplifies connectivity and security across devices and networks.
Cisco Secure Access, a single sign-on solution that enables users to access any application from any device or network.
Cisco Multicloud Defense, a platform that unifies security controls across clouds and applications, with support for multiple firewalls.
Cisco Secure Firewall 4200, a new, faster, and more reliable firewall that works with their Multicloud Defense service
Cisco SOC Assistant, an AI-powered tool that helps security teams detect and respond to incidents, with optimized remediation tactics.
Cisco Key Themes
Chuck Robbins highlighted, Cisco’s five key themes going forward as:
Reimagine your applications.
Power your hybrid work.
Transform your infrastructure.
Secure your enterprise.
Your journey to sustainability.
Reimagine your applications
The first main product announcement was that of the general availability of Cisco’s Full Stack Observability (FSO) Platform which has been in preview for a few months.
The focus and need for FSO was positioned as the fact that “Every business is a digital business“. She discussed how that while having the right applications is critical to getting work done, they also need to work efficiently for people to be productive, wherever they work. Liz Centoni pointed out that the magnitude of apps used by businesses can “lead to an avalanche of data and insights that can be overwhelming, meaning delays in functions such as threat detection“.
Origibally announced last year, but now available to all, FSO is designed to let organisations gain insights and analytics almost any data source, helping reduce the number of monitoring tools needed, speed up support efforts and keep users online and productive. One of the key use cases for FSO is that in customer digital experience monitoring, whereby Cisco are able to measure predict and monitor the end-to-end user experience across various parts of a customer journey (for example, during an online e-commerce experience).
Joining FSO to Security, Cisco also announced that a new product – Cisco Cloud Application Security, is also coming FSO, which will bring a new layer of security insights into FSO to help understand, see, and act on threats affecting the organisation.
Power your Hybrid Work
The focus on this topic was really blended into Security and FSO which I cover later. There was not much talk about collaboration tools like Webex, though they did say that Webex was remains as a key part of Cisco’s collaboration strategy, which is now able to work seamlessly with Microsoft Teams with their support for Cisco Powered Teams Rooms. Cisco revealed how global organisations like Audi, Carhartt, and MGM Resorts International are using the end-to-end Cisco stack to enable hybrid work and improve productivity.
Journey to Sustainability
Sustainability was a key focus for Cisco, and they publicised a few key initiatives and some major pledges and initiatives to help both Cisco and their customers get greener, recycle more, and ensure sustainability manufacturer, supply chain and lifecycle management. “If you take our technology and put our ecosystem along it, it can help the transition to a modern and low-carbon economy” was a statement given by Cisco Chief Strategy Officer Liz Centoni.
Transform your Infrastructure
Jonathan Davidson, EVP and General Manager of Cisco Networking, announced the launch of Cisco Networking Cloud, a simplified, single cloud network management platform that aims to make cloud networking easier and more secure for organisations. During the announcement he said that Cisco Networking Cloud will provide
Unified experiences across technologies, applications, and networks
Radical simplification through platform consolidation
Cloud-first management with enhanced security and visibility
A simpler design experience with consistent interfaces
Cisco’s claim and message around Cisco Networking Cloud was “If it’s connected – it’s now protected“, and the key focus was about simplicity, with their vision being to bring unified visibility and management covering all an organisations’ technologies, applications, and networks. Cisco said that today, in the most, such unified experiences are being inhibited by operational complexity, but that Cisco is leading the fightback with what he called, “radical simplification“.
Secure your Enterprise
Liz Centoni said, in her presentation that “When it comes to security, we want to frustrate attackers, not users…..giving users safe and easy access to their apps and data“.
Security was the biggest talking point for at the keynote this year and was the topic for the last part of the presentation. The session was led Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s EVP and General Manager of Security & Collaboration. During this part of the keynote, he talked about Cisco’s vision and solutions for network, cloud, and application security. Some of the key points he shared were around how security services needs proper coordination and management to avoid discord and inefficiency – comparing them to an orchestra where everything needs to work in harmony to avoid just being lots of different noises.
Cisco also spoke about the issues and complexities that the traditional patchwork approach of the security has in most organisations and that these point products and solutions typically creates silos and complexity for customers as well increased cost and often areas of little or no protection.
This was used as a hook into announcing Cisco Security Cloud, which is an open, integrated security platform for multi-cloud environments that leverages generative AI capabilities to optimise performance and security of every connection.
Cisco shared how they now observe over four hundred billion security events every day, which provides them intelligence and trends and insights into the threats facing businesses. Cisco talked about the importance of AI within their products sets, which cuts around one hundred billion hours of work in threat detection and mitigation across their customer base.
Cisco emphasised the need for organisations to adopt zero trust and zero friction security, whereby users can connect to any application, from any device, or any network, without compromising on security or having a clunky and difficult user experience. Cisco talked about their Cisco Secure Access, solution – a single sign-on offering that is claimed to “enable seamless connectivity”. Linked to this was Apple iCloud Private Relay an integration with Apple devices and iOS that provides secure access to an organisation’s apps and services with the need to download anything extra on their iOS device. The words “Cisco makes security simple and magical for users” was one of my favourite quotes of the day!
“The world needs security defenses that are completely synchronised, this is what we set out to do – provide a platform for security”
Jeetus Patel | EVP of Security & Collaboration | Cisco
Finally, Cisco talked about the integration of Cisco Secure Access and Thousand Eyes (which is their cloud-based network intelligence platform that provides visibility and insights SaaS applications network performance and user experience. Jeetus Patel, talked about the challenge of securing private and public clouds, which often have different admin consoles, firewalls, and security controls. Cisco said that that their new Cisco Multicloud Defense platform is a new solution that will provide a translation layer to enable seamless communication and unified security across an organisation’s multi-cloud environments.
Cisco also introduced the new Cisco Secure Firewall 4200, a faster (and more energy efficient) offering that improves redundancy and was built alongside their new Multicloud defense platform as well as Cisco SOC Assistant, an AI-powered tool that helps security teams detect and respond to incidents, with optimized remediation tactics.
Did you attend or tune into Cisco Live? What were you most excited about?
Cisco have announced that they are to acquire Armorblox, a leading email security house whose portfolio (which is centred around email protection) includes email security, DLP, data encryption, impersonation protection, fraud protection, URL, and ransomware protection.
What do Armorblox do?
Founded in 2017 and now with over 58,000 customers, Armorblox protects organisations against data loss and targeted email attacks like business email compromise, vendor fraud, and account takeovers. Their tools leverage Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). They have scored highly in the Gartner Peer Insights report and have invested heavily in their interoperability through APIs.
Armorblox are also part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association and has deep integrations with Microsoft Sentinel which will play well with Cisco’s goal to work more closely with Microsoft.
Cisco say that “Through this acquisition though, we see many exciting broad security use cases and possibilities to unlock“.
Armorblox seamlessly integrates over APIs with existing security stacks, making life easier for security teams. Our comprehensive security solution leverages large language models, such as GPT, and a broad set of deep learning algorithms to accurately detect today’s targeted threats, protect key business workflows, and reduce manual work for security teams through automated processes.
Armorblox
Cisilion plan to leverage this investment to bring new AI powered security offerings to their existing portfolio across as well as enable them to leapfrog their competition and offer compelling, integrated, and advanced threat protection.
I’m excited to see the ways in which Cisco leverage this acquisition to bolster security across all their offerings. Assimilating and embedding the technologies they aquire is one of their huge strengths.
At Enterprise Connect this week, Microsoft and Cisco took to stage again (this is now a serious relationship) and annouced that the Cisco Board Pro is now certified to run Microsoft Teams Rooms natively on the device as well contining of course, the ability to still fully support Webex.
Cisco Board Pro offers advanced AI-powered collaboration features that can now be used in Microsoft Teams meetings for the first time. Organisations can join feature-rich, back-to-back Teams and Webex meetings on the same device from the Teams Rooms home screen – with no reboot or reconfiguration required.
The initial partnership was announced back at Microsoft Ignite in October 2022, where a new look harnessing was unveiled in which Cisco are extending the interoperability of their latest hardware and software portfolio with support and full interoperability with Microsoft Teams, empowering their customers with seamless, connected experiences that can be customised to best suit their needs support native Cisco Webex experience, native Teams experience or both worth seemless meeeting switching without reconfiguration or admin intervention.
With this official certification, both the 55-inch and 75-inch models can be configured at set up to run Teams Rooms as the default experience, allowing their customers to experience Teams’ digital workplace with Cisco’s purpose-built video conferencing hardware.
Cisco Board Pro
The Cisco Board Pro joins a list of other devices and peripherals Certified for Teams including the Cisco Desk Camera 4K, the Cisco Headset 320, and the Cisco Headset 720 which I covered in more detail here.
This comes the same week that Microsoft quiet announced the next generation of their Surface Hub devices.
Pricing and availability
55-inch Cisco Board Pro RRP: $13,995
75-inch Cisco Board Pro RRP: $22,995
Cisco also offer a good discount to customers who invest in a Cisco Webex Enterprise Agreement.
For the current list of Cisco devices certified for Teams see here.
Hybrid Work and the growth of SaaS makes troubleshooting end user experience so much harder.
ThousandEyes by Cisco is a digital end user experience monitoring solution that helps ensure your business SaaS apps are running at optimum performance wherever your employees or customers are.
ThousandEyes proactively monitors, alerts, and provides visual “route cause analysis” within minutes of a User Experience issue, regardless of if whether the issue is the LAN, WAN, Internet, “XaaS”, ISP, Collaboration Service (such as Teams, Webex or Zoom), or Cloud Provider. It can even determine whether the issue is caused by any third-party dependency such as Content Delivery network, Application, Connector, Secure Web Gateway, Identity Provider, or firewall.
What is ThousandEyes?
ThousandEyes enables organisations to rapidly increase the responsiveness of support teams and managed service providers by providing end-to-end visibility and performance monitoring across the ever-changing and distributed IT landscape wherever your applications, data, infrastructure, user, and devices are located by. This helps organisations to:
Better support their hybrid workforce with near-real-time visibility of the employee’s experience.
Quickly identify and solve app experience issues by continually monitoring employee interactions with web and SaaS-based applications.
Gain end-to-end visibility from the user, across the network, WAN, and the Internet as well as to their cloud service providers and SaaS applications.
Cisco Thousand Eyes provides and end-to-end End user Experience Monitoring to help ensure that your employees / customers experience of your service or applications is “as expected” and helps proactively detect when there are issues which might impact this performance before users start complaining.
End to end visibility with Cisco ThousandEyes
Thousand Eyes provides end to end visibility and intelligence”. Its aim is to help IT provide the best possible employee and customer experience, whatever the application or service by comprehensively measuring and monitoring network performance end-to-end. This means that IT get complete visibility across the internet or WAN, edge, network, application, routing, and device layers to see exactly how and where the Internet and WAN connectivity is impacting employee or customer user experience.
Paying customers of ThousandEyes – and one of its’ killer features, is its’ ability to perform performance “snapshots” which provide clear-cut information – either on demand, or on a schedule. These can be shared with people outside your organisation and is pivotal to proving where the fault lies, therefore helping to help SaaS vendors troubleshoot their own infrastructure and it won’t be a surprise that many of the worlds’ largest SaaS providers are also Cisco Thousand Eye customers!
It does this by using “active monitoring” that utilises a software agent that simulates user activity and checks availability from multiple locations. Cisco leverage Thousand Eyes agents across much of their network equipment including wireless access points and switches (such as the Cisco Catalyst 9k), Cisco SDWAN solutions and SASE services, and is even incorporated into their Webex Meetings platform. There are also agents for desktop devices that can be deployed and what’s more you don’t need a Cisco network to use it. Thousand Eyes is proven to work well with leading SaaS and collaboration platforms such as Slack, Webex and Microsoft Teams.
Cisco Thousand Eyes – Image (c) Cisco.
The Synthetic testing constantly simulates user interaction with SaaS and Web applications, represented by a series of page loads interspersed with interactions like typing in fields and clicking buttons, making the synthetic test “feel” like a user to the actual applications under test. These tests are invaluable to application and network operations staff, since it helps IT and App Support better understand actual user experiences rather than playing the best guess or deflect game. These are presented back as “experience scores” which can be reported on, alert and track trends over time, providing an early warning before issues arise.
What problem does ThousandEyes fix?
In short, when an employee or a customer has a bad digital experience, they don’t care where the problem is, or what has caused it – they simply want to know what is wrong and when it might be resolved.
Marketing slide from Cisco ThousandEyes
The need and therefore market for this kind of tool is increasing, as the global pandemic dramatically accelerated the shift to the cloud and SaaS apps, and with the hybrid work, now just the way we work, we need a better way of monitoring and managing the end-to-end employee experience in an environment that no longer directly in control of IT!
As the world settles into what is now a hybrid work world dominated by the continual adoption of SaaS apps and work from anywhere mindset, visibility into how applications are performing for your employees and customers across the internet and various cloud services is critical to business continuity, employee, and customer experience.
Hybrid Work and the growth of SaaS makes troubleshooting end user experience so much harder.
Today, we, many organisations are still reliant on “self-diagnosis” (or no diagnosis), which leads to conversations like “it’s the network” or “my broadband is slow” or “XXX application is running slow”. This might have been ok during the peak of the pandemic when everyone was sent home to work and was “making the best out of temporary situation”, but three years on this from this, diagnosing and troubleshooting performance related issues is still too commonplace. Now, more than ever, the ability to monitor the end-to-end performance of your business apps, dictates the experience of your customers and employees and the excuses of before are no longer tolerated.
When an employee or a customer has a baddigital experience,they don’t care where the problem is or what has caused it – they simply want it fixed quickly.
Many of these issues are not new, but the shift to cloud and our new distributed hybrid workforce, means that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to understand and support the right “experience” using traditional legacy application performance management tools. What’s more the lack of visibility can often means employees and customers can be having a poor experience without IT or support evening knowing about it until someone complains!
Who needs ThousandEyes?
Do you have employee experience issues due to lack of Internet, WAN or SaaS visibility?
How do you know your Content Delivery Provider is serving your content quickly and consistently whether users at home or in the office?
Do you have inhouse web apps and need a better way of understanding how they perform? when your users work remotely or from disparate offices?
Does your IT help desk struggle to add value and provide answers to users experience issue with SaaS applications?
Is the lack of visibility and ability to monitor cloud apps, impacting employee productivity and/or customer experience?
If the answer to the above is mainly “yes”, then it’s worth looking at investing your time in a proof of concept to see how Thousand Eyes could help.
Why Cisco?
Personally, I think ThousandEyes is a great fit for any organisation with a cloud-first approach that has offices globally and leverages a high degree of hybrid workers (that’s most of us right!)! Whilst it’s not limited to those with only Cisco networks, the economics work well for organisations that already leverage Cisco networking, due to native integration across most of Cisco’s core product offerings including their Cisco Catalyst networking, SASE, SDWAN and their Collaboration suite (Webex).
This makes integration and deployment slick and negates the need to deploy additional agents, since Cisco include the ThousandEyes agent across many of their devices. Customers that buy into Cisco Enterprise Agreements also get a more competitive price point for ThousandEyes and from a support perspective it’s an integrated suite which means less finger pointing.
Speak to a Cisco partner for help
Speak to your favourite Cisco Gold Partner (I’m happy to help you need one) and they will be able to help demonstrate, deploy, configure, and support ThousandEyes for your organisation.
You will find your trusted Cisco partner can help in many ways including:
Demos, PoCs or specific product/application performance assistance
Cisco funded free trials
Help with business case development following a successful PoV
Scoping, deployment and tuning to ensure you can monitor all your in-house web and public SaaS hosted applications, connecting into your underlying Wireless LAN, WAN, MPLS, Internet connectivity and WFH remote locations to provide end-to-end visibility and end user performance monitoring.
Consultancy and support to ensure key departments, locations, users, and application estate is under cover.
Access to the best pricing through your Cisco Gold Partner.
See it action and find out more
Cisco provide free to access to this awesome “live outages site” where you can look at the live state of the world’s most popular commercial and consumer cloud services and see just how comprehensive and simple it is to use.
With ISE 23 kicking off this week in Barcelona, the UC world will no doubt be excited to see the developments, fruition and live demos of Cisco tech running Microsoft Teams.
This is significant for several reasons. Of course, Microsoft can run Webex, Zoom, RingCentral, and others from within Teams and many of the Teams hardware from Yealink, Poly, Logi etc can also run both Zoom and Teams on the same hard hardware, but this requires a reboot of the hardware causing a less than slick experience.
Is Cisco Rooms on Teams the beginning of a bigger plan?
What Cisco and Microsoft have done differently is that with this partnership, Cisco devices will not only run Webex or Teams, but the Cisco Meeting room kit will be able to do this seemlessly withoutareboot.
Cisco Room Kit running Microsoft Team
It will be interesting to see if any other Annoucements this week suggest that other Teams & Zoom meeting room kit will be lookimg to do the same!
Why is this significant?
The big questions is why would Microsoft find value in this after all Microsoft now has close to 300 million monthly active users and is the clear leader in is this space which it continues to innovate with new services and revenue streams expected from the recent launch of Teams Room Pro and Teams Premium.
According to analysts, Cisco and Microsoft share close to 90 percent of the same customers. Not necessarily in the collaboration space but across the board. Where that is Cisco’s networking business or Call Manager or Webex, Security or indeed their Contact Contact centre (which is soon to be certified for Teams.)
Most organisations like the idea of a smaller number of vendors to work with and if they can standardise on Cisco and Microsoft for their meeting room technology (since Microsoft don’t make the hardware for their Teams Rooms), this could be a big advantage.
For Cisco, this also means that they don’t loose the hardware and maintainance on their room systems should their Webex customer base decide to move partly or in full to Microsoft Teams.
For Microsoft, I think this also means bringing Cisco in as more of an advocacy – protecting both their install bases from their joint competition in this collaboration and voice space – Zoom, Google and RingCentral…vendors both Cisco and Microsoft do not want to see penetrate or weave into their account base.
Is this really about CPaaS?
Cisco is betting heavily on the success of its redefined Contact Centre solution Webex Contact Centre which could become a real significant player in the CCaaS space for Teams users and not just Webex customers.
Since the partnership was announced at Ignite, just before Xmas, much of Cisco messaging has been around adding value to Teams rather than replacing it (though Cisco hope of course customers will still invest in Webex). The focus of much of the marketing is around making the user experience on Teams better by using Cisco technology.
Here’s where CPaaS comes in. This partnership with Microsoft is also a great opportunity for Cisco to leverage its broader UC portfolio to add their Webex Contact Center natively into Team, attacking the plethora and crowded market of Teams certified contact centres such as Luware, Anywhere 365 and Enghouse.
Organisations with Teams, looking to replace their contact centre solutions are continually looking at Teams Certified solutions.
The Cisco Webex Contact Centre is already a highly-regarded CCaaS solution, soon to be certified by Microsoft for Teams (maybe as soon as this week?).
Cisco Webex CC on Garner Magic Quadrant 2022
Cisco and Microsoft – Better together?
Only time will tell.. If the plan plays off Cisco should certainly be able to capitalise on market growth and their reputation and proven success in the CCaaS space. If they can secure Webex as the CPaaS of choice for Teams, this could significantly reverse the declining marketshare that Cisco has been suffering of late.
This will also help Microsoft block their other completion and prevent players like Zoom getting into their accounts. Together Cisco and Microsoft should be able to protect their join customer base making it harder for other UC vendors to eat their share.
Who might loose out to this partnership?
The Teams Room space is already well served by flexible, innovate solutions from the likes of Yealink, Poly, Neat and Logitech etc. For Teams organizations already invested in these brands, I see them sticking, but customers moving from Cisco to Teams now have the ability to reduce cost, maintain ‘brand’ and leverage thier investment and partnership with Cisco with less disruption, upheaval and change.
The CPaaS providers that develop Teams certified contact centres may be most worried by this partnership, since Cisco will now able to compete in their space which, whilst already crowded, lacks many true enterprise grade solutions like Cisco have.
