As enterprises join tens of 1000’s of websites, a whole lot of 1000’s of individuals, hundreds of thousands of units, and an rising ecosystem of AI workloads and brokers, operational simplicity has turn into a vital superpower for enterprise development.
We sat down with Austin Lin, Vice President of Product Administration for the Cisco Networking platform, to unpack how Cisco powers the world’s largest enterprise networks at world scale.
Cisco has the {industry}’s largest networking platform. What does that scale appear like, and why does it matter for IT groups?
Right now, our networking platform manages over 38 million units and connects greater than 1 billion shoppers.
This large set of real-world information fuels AgenticOps. It’s our subsequent evolution in AI-driven networking to ship intelligence and suggestions for easier community operations and quicker troubleshooting, powered by Cisco Deep Community Mannequin. With the Cisco AI Assistant and embedded agentic Workflows, we’re transferring past conventional AI automation and enabling groups to generate AI-powered workflows to automate complicated duties throughout Meraki, Catalyst Heart, Cisco Identification Companies Engine (ISE), and Nexus Dashboard.
By unifying cloud and on-premises administration right into a single platform, clients can cut back complete value of possession (TCO) by 60%, velocity up decision occasions by 80%, and cut back website visits by 75%.
Our platform information additionally drives digital resilience. Cisco Assurance from ThousandEyes gives full visibility throughout owned and unowned networks, serving to groups proactively resolve points and cut back imply time to decision (MTTR) by over 90%. And with self-healing capabilities like AI radio useful resource administration (RRM), networks can forestall points from taking place within the first place.
Cisco differentiates itself by embedding safety instantly into the community cloth, integrating applied sciences like identity-based entry management, microsegmentation, and SASE to ship a complete Common Zero Belief Community Entry (UZTNA) resolution. This method leverages our scale and AI-powered risk intelligence to scale back threats by as much as 98%, outperforming the {industry} common by 25%.
All of this powers among the world’s largest deployments. Our cloud platform scales to assist any dimension enterprise, with enterprise clients managing over 500,000 community units in a single surroundings.
It’s the mix of intelligence, safety, and assurance that lets groups run with far much less friction and much more influence.
What makes the Cisco Networking platform trusted by world enterprises?
Clients persistently inform us they worth Cisco not simply as a know-how supplier, however as a associate who’s invested of their long-term success.
We’re targeted on outcomes, not simply options. This implies bringing collectively our know-how, world ecosystem, and experience to assist clients clear up robust challenges and transfer their enterprise ahead. For us, reliability, built-in safety, and world-class assist are desk stakes.
We all know that our clients, together with over 95%[1] of the Fortune 500, depend on us to maintain their operations working and their programs safe.
Our Cisco Networking clients embrace 100% of the highest 25 retailers, prime 15 healthcare organizations, and prime 15 know-how firms; 90% of the highest 25 producers; and 80% of the highest 25 monetary companies corporations and prime 10 hospitality manufacturers. And it’s not simply enterprises. One of many largest public schooling programs in Brazil depends on our platform to attach over two million college students throughout 1000’s of college websites for uninterrupted studying.
That degree of belief is earned. The Cisco Meraki cloud platform delivers a 99.99% uptime service degree settlement (SLA)—the best within the {industry}.
Cisco additionally has the {industry}’s largest networking app ecosystem. What does that allow for patrons?
We constructed our platform API-first, so clients and companions have an open ecosystem for automation and integration.
Right now, we assist greater than 2,000 utility programming interface (API) endpoints and see over 15 billion API calls per 30 days. Along with the {industry}’s broadest performance and scale, we even have an award-winning developer expertise with Finest API recognition by Postman, the {industry}’s most generally used API platform.
Our app market brings this ecosystem to life with 350+ apps for automation, safety, AI, and assurance. We’ve got built-in integrations with industry-leading IT, safety, and observability platforms, together with ServiceNow, Ekahau, Datadog, and PagerDuty, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) suppliers like Terraform and Ansible. Market companions like Splash Entry, Boundless, and EveryAngle construct on this scale to ship highly effective visitor connectivity experiences.
This flexibility is a large a part of why clients select Cisco Networking. They get a platform that extends into their very own programs and third-party instruments at world scale.
Talking of large-scale deployments, which enterprise capabilities does the platform now present?
Cisco powers the world’s largest and most complicated environments, and extra of our enterprise clients are transferring to a cloud working mannequin for his or her campus networks.
We’re making it simpler for big websites to securely roll out cloth segmentation at scale over current infrastructure from the cloud.
We’re additionally offering superior options for Catalyst 9000 Sequence Switches proper from the Meraki dashboard. This consists of superior routing protocols, corresponding to digital routing and forwarding (VRF), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and routed ports, and high-availability options like StackWise Digital and in-service software program upgrades (ISSU).
Throughout industries, we’re seeing world retailers use cloud-managed cloth for safe operational know-how/info know-how (OT/IT) separation in warehouses, whereas Okay–12 faculty districts can ship constant connectivity throughout dozens of campuses with small IT groups.
As extra enterprises transfer to cloud-first operations, Forrester’s Complete Financial Impression (TEI) report on Cisco Networking confirmed spectacular outcomes. What stood out to you?
Forrester’s Complete Financial Impression™ (TEI) report of Cisco Meraki cloud-managed networking places exhausting numbers behind what our clients have been telling us for years.
A couple of outcomes stood out: clients that deploy Cisco Meraki break even in simply over a yr and ship an extra 89% ROI on prime of their authentic funding over three years, practically doubling their funding. This comes from simplified operations, reliability, and assurance capabilities which end in a 40% discount in community downtime and a 90% discount in time spent on configuration adjustments after switching to Cisco.
These aren’t simply statistics; they symbolize time, cash, and assets given again to world IT groups. Once you automate routine duties, standardize insurance policies, and achieve world visibility, you’ll be able to focus much less on firefighting and extra on driving enterprise outcomes.
Are you able to share how clients are attaining success with the Cisco Networking platform?
Two clients come to thoughts: Decathlon and Purdue College.
Decathlon, one of many world’s largest sports activities retailers, connects its warehouses, workplaces, and 1000’s of shops throughout 79+ international locations. With Cisco wi-fi, switching, routing, and API-driven automation that handles 2.5 million API calls per 30 days, they’re rolling out new shops quicker and with fewer errors at an enormous scale.
Then there’s Purdue College. They modernized campus connectivity for greater than 70,000 college students and school with a extra dependable and safe community. Together with Splash Entry for seamless Wi-Fi log-in and Splunk for observability, Purdue reduce assist tickets by 80%, improved uptime by 28%, and noticed 4x quicker wi-fi efficiency.
Completely different industries, however the outcomes are related: higher visibility, quicker troubleshooting, and safe networks that merely work.
Wanting forward, what’s subsequent for the Cisco Networking platform?
The subsequent chapter is all about making life simpler for IT groups at any scale by means of unified administration, enterprise capabilities, and AgenticOps.
With World Overview, we’re advancing our journey towards a unified platform expertise by bringing Meraki and Catalyst Heart collectively in a single dashboard for streamlined operations.
Quickly, Cisco Cloud Management will convey networking, safety, collaboration, and observability collectively beneath one AI-native administration platform. It will reimagine how organizations handle, function, and optimize their IT infrastructure. On the coronary heart of it is going to be Cisco AI Canvas, a generative person interface (UI) workspace constructed for multiplayer, cross-domain groups to maneuver past reactive monitoring to autonomous, closed-loop remediation.
That is solely the start as we redefine what’s potential in community administration.
[1]In accordance with Cisco information
