Cisco is the dominant vendor in enterprise networking, operating under CEO Chuck Robbins, who continues to introduce significant changes.
Its latest major acquisition was the $28 billion purchase of Splunk, a strategic move that expands its revenue streams in observability, data analytics, AIOps, and genAI. In the realm of security, Cisco is enhancing its enterprise security platform with new developments like its Hypershield AI-native architecture. Moreover, Cisco navigates the fluctuations of the tech industry by managing supply issues, layoffs, and restructuring efforts.
Stay updated with the latest news and analysis on Cisco.
Sept. 20, 2024: Cisco’s ongoing layoffs are impacting workers in California. As reported by the state’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) system, which requires a 60-day notification for significant layoffs, 842 employees affected by the company’s current restructuring efforts are from the San Jose-San Francisco area. Additionally, there are unconfirmed rumors that Cisco might close some of its headquarters buildings.
Aug. 30, 2024: Cisco is now offering its AppDynamics application management suite as part of Microsoft Azure cloud services. Through the integration with Azure, Cisco’s AppDynamics platform can manage the performance of applications, virtual machines and other resources hosted on Microsoft’s cloud platform.
Aug. 27, 2024: Cisco announced plans to acquire Robust Intelligence, a security startup with a platform designed to protect AI models and data throughout the development-to-production lifecycle. It’s paying an undisclosed amount to acquire the company, which Cisco has previously invested in through its Cisco Investments portfolio.
Aug. 14, 2024: Cisco is cutting 6,000 jobs in its second round of layoffs this year and combining its networking, security and collaboration groups into one unit led by Jeetu Patel. Cisco wants to use this restructuring to pump more resources into three growth areas: AI networking, security and collaboration.
Aug. 09, 2024: A round of layoff announcements at Dell and Cisco are a result of both companies currently losing core market share to new industry competitors: Arista Networks for Cisco, in their core networking business, and low-cost PC manufacturers like Acer for Dell, an analyst said.
July 31, 2024: When companies increase IT/OT integration, they can simplify operations, boost security and streamline decision making, according to Cisco’s industrial networking research.
July 11, 2024: Cisco’s Talos security intelligence group analyzed ransomware groups to identify common techniques and offer recommendations to help security team better protect their businesses.
July 09, 2024: With new leadership, key acquisitions, and an AI-driven, platform-based vision, Cisco is betting big on security. Its dominance in networking and telecommunications products and services is well established, but its role in cybersecurity is less cemented.
June 07, 2024: Cisco announced a new certification program it says will empower IT pros to design infrastructure for AI and machine learning. The company’s new Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE) AI Infrastructure certification is a vendor-agnostic, expert-level certification that will equip IT professionals with the ability to design modern AI/ML compute and networks now and as they evolve, says Par Merat, vice president of Cisco learning and certifications.
June 07, 2024: Integration initiatives have commenced involving Splunk, AppDynamics, and ThousandEyes, as Cisco enhances its observability suite. During the latest Cisco Live conference, representatives from both Cisco and Splunk shared their strategy to develop a “unified observability experience” designed to aid clients in managing applications across various environments including on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud.
June 05, 2024: At its recent Live event, Cisco showcased AI as a pivotal theme, presenting new products in networking, management, and security. CEO Chuck Robbins remarked on the rapid advancements in AI, comparing it to an accelerated cloud transition. Robbins emphasized the importance of identifying practical AI applications for those already exploring or implementing this technology.
May 30, 2024: In spite of facing some challenges recently, Cisco sees significant growth prospects. Following the $28 billion acquisition of Splunk, which enhances Cisco’s revenues by $4 billion annually from its established $55 billion, the company is poised to exploit revenue opportunities in various burgeoning sectors including security, observability, data analytics, AIOps, and genAI.
May 30, 2024: Cisco Meraki has introduced new 5G fixed wireless access gateways, with AT&T planning to deploy them for a novel service aimed at business branch offices. The Meraki MG cellular MG52 and MG52E gateways, which are the latest high-end models in Meraki’s cellular gateway lineup, deliver an impressive 2 Gbps/300 Mbps throughput, doubling the capacity of previous top models.
May 22, 2024: IT leaders need more help managing and securing their distributed networking environments, Cisco asserts in its Global Networking Trends Report. “Network architectures are more sophisticated, more complex, and spread across more multi-clouds and multi-vendors than ever. IT leaders are also besieged by rising cybersecurity risks, increased demand from new app and workload types, and vastly distributed workforces and infrastructures,” said Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco networking.
May 16, 2024: Last year, Cisco killed its Hyperflex platform and essentially turned over that business to Nutanix. Now, Cisco and Nutanix have significantly expanded their alliance with new management capabilities, AI components and networking extensions for their integrated hyperconverged infrastructure package.
May 10, 2024: A new virtual appliance for Cisco’s AppDynamics observability platform will give enterprise customers more deployment options as well as AI-driven capabilities for anomaly detection and root cause analysis, application security, and SAP monitoring.
May 07, 2024: Cisco has added a variety of new AI-based security features to its cloud-native security platform that promise to help customers more quickly spot and remediate threats. The features extend the vendor’s Panoptica platform, which is designed to secure cloud applications from development to deployment with a focus on protecting containerized, microservice applications running on platforms such as Kubernetes.
May 03, 2024: Cisco and Red Hat are expanding their 15-year-old strategic partnership, this time to bolster networking, AI and cloud integrations. At the Red Hat Summit 2024, the two vendors will demonstrate how tightly integrating Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) with Red Hat’s OpenShift can help customers improve their network operations.
May 02, 2024: Cisco is part of a group that backed security startup Corelight with $150 million in Series E funding. The new funding will enable Corelight to further develop its technology, which transforms network and cloud activity as well as packet capture into evidence that security teams use to proactively hunt for threats, accelerate response to incidents, gain network visibility, and create powerful analytics results, according to the startup.
April 18, 2024: Cisco announces AI-based Hypershield, a self-upgrading security fabric that’s designed to protect distributed applications, devices and data.
April 03, 2024: Data centers are notorious energy hogs, and the increase in heavy-duty networking and compute power required to handle AI workloads is only going to exacerbate the sustainability issue. But there are efforts underway to address the growth of AI and ML in data centers while keeping energy efficiency, cooling and performance in mind.
March 27, 2024: There has been a decrease in security preparedness amongst organizations over the past year, contrasting with a rise in confidence among these organizations. The gap between the levels of confidence and security preparedness suggests that companies might be overrating their ability to handle potential security threats, according to a recent Cybersecurity Readiness Index released by Cisco.
March 27, 2024: In its recent study on hybrid workplaces, Cisco discovered that while 72% of workers feel positive about returning to physical offices, they desire more adequately equipped work environments and advanced tools for collaboration. Current office layouts in many firms are overly suited to solitary tasks rather than fostering environments that promote teamwork, social interactions, and innovative thinking. This survey included responses from 14,050 employees and 3,800 employers across 19 different countries.
March 25, 2024: Martin Lund has been appointed to lead the team at Cisco responsible for the development of key elements like silicon, optics, and hardware for the company’s essential switching, routing, and wireless products.
March 21, 2024: Cisco and Intel have deepened their collaborative efforts with the aim to enhance Wi-Fi connectivity and introduce new features suited for applications that are sensitive to latency.
March 20, 2024: The acquisition of Splunk by Cisco and the collaboration with Nvidia underline Cisco’s dedication to enhance its data-center network capacity to support AI and ML operations. Learn more about Cisco’s data-center ambitions.
March 18, 2024: Cisco has officially acquired Splunk for $28 billion, which is anticipated to bring forward innovation in security, observability, and AI within its product range. Integrating Splunk’s technology, network security professionals will now have improved oversight over network activities, including firewall operations and intrusion detection.
March 07, 2024: As Cisco identifies, advanced persistent threat (APT) attackers are not just infiltrating networks but are also establishing a base to harvest data and plan further attacks which threaten older network infrastructure and edge devices with significant security loopholes. Cisco discusses the mounting danger of post-compromise tactics especially prevalent on out-of-date systems that lack recent security updates, as noted by Nick Biasini from Cisco’s Talos.
Feb. 29, 2024: Cisco’s latest strategy includes a detailed outline for closer partnership collaborations to produce combined networking and software solutions that integrate IT with IoT and OT components.
Feb. 14, 2024: After considerable anticipation, Cisco has revealed a restructuring scheme which involves eliminating 5% of its workforce, totaling around 4,200 positions from its total of 84,900 employees. This move is part of its continued emphasis on critical growth areas such as AI and security.
Feb. 08, 2024: Cisco introduces a generative AI assistant aimed at enhancing customer support related to security for cloud-native applications. This AI helper, integrated into Cisco’s Panoptica platform, is designed to help companies organize, prioritize, and address risks and misconfigurations across multi-cloud environments, said Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president of Cisco’s Outshift advanced development group.
Feb. 07, 2024: Cisco has rolled out a cloud-based solution that provides businesses with a centralized platform called Motific for managing AI components. This service aims to assist in the efficient creation, implementation, and management of generative AI-driven applications for enterprises.
Feb. 06, 2024: Cisco and Nvidia have broadened their collaboration, now offering a unified suite of software and networking hardware. This collaboration is intended to facilitate the setup of support infrastructures for AI applications. It strengthens both companies’ strategies to increase the use of Ethernet networking to handle AI tasks in business settings and enhances mutual access to each other’s sales and support networks.
Jan. 31, 2024: Cisco and Hitachi Vantara have unveiled the first fruits of their partnership, signed last year, that aims to bring managed as-a-service offerings to enterprise customers with hybrid cloud environments. The joint offering, Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud, includes a range of converged infrastructure services that meld compute, networking and software technologies from Cisco and storage capabilities from Hitachi.
Jan. 26, 2024: Cisco AppDynamics rolled out a new management product that aims to take the pressure off operations teams tasked with maintaining a growing raft of application and infrastructure agents. Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics can help customers spot and update out-of-date software agents as well as quickly on-board and manage new agents through a centralized user interface, Cisco stated.
Jan. 25, 2024: Kyndryl’s new managed services incorporate Cisco’s Secure Access platform, which includes zero-trust network access, secure web gateway, and firewall as a service.
Jan. 24, 2024: Cisco and T-Mobile have teamed to offer a managed 5G-based connectivity service for remote branches and small offices. The T-Mobile-managed package, called Connected Workplace, will make use of Cisco Meraki 5G cellular gateways as well as its network and visibility management platform. The Meraki software includes cloud-managed security features and a central Meraki dashboard for network management support. Together with T-Mobile’s unlimited nationwide business internet service, the offering will allow organizations to network everything from end users and IoT devices to point-of-sale systems and video installations.
Jan. 22, 2024: While core quantum networking technologies such as repeaters and photonics are being developed, it is security applications that are likely to be the first real-world developments that come out of the lab, according to Liz Centoni, executive vice president, chief strategy officer and general manager of applications at Cisco.
Jan. 17, 2024: Cisco’s acquisition of startup Isovalent, developer of open-source tools Cilium and Tetragon, underscores the potential of the popular eBPF kernel technology for multicloud networking and security.
