As enterprises join tens of hundreds of web sites, a whole lot of hundreds of individuals, hundreds of thousands of units, and an rising ecosystem of AI workloads and brokers, operational simplicity has turn out to be a essential 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 international scale.
Cisco has the {industry}’s largest networking platform. What does that scale seem like, and why does it matter for IT groups?
At this time, our networking platform manages over 38 million units and connects greater than 1 billion purchasers.
This large set of real-world information fuels AgenticOps. It’s our subsequent evolution in AI-driven networking to ship intelligence and suggestions for less complicated community operations and quicker troubleshooting, powered by Cisco Deep Community Mannequin. With the Cisco AI Assistant and embedded agentic Workflows, we’re shifting past conventional AI automation and enabling groups to generate AI-powered workflows to automate complicated duties throughout Meraki, Catalyst Heart, Cisco Id Companies Engine (ISE), and Nexus Dashboard.
By unifying cloud and on-premises administration right into a single platform, prospects can scale back whole price of possession (TCO) by 60%, pace up decision instances by 80%, and scale back web site visits by 75%.
Our platform information additionally drives digital resilience. Cisco Assurance from ThousandEyes offers full visibility throughout owned and unowned networks, serving to groups proactively resolve points and scale back imply time to decision (MTTR) by over 90%. And with self-healing capabilities like AI radio useful resource administration (RRM), networks can stop points from taking place within the first place.
Cisco differentiates itself by embedding safety straight 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 strategy leverages our scale and AI-powered menace intelligence to cut back threats by as much as 98%, outperforming the {industry} common by 25%.
All of this powers a few of the world’s largest deployments. Our cloud platform scales to help any dimension enterprise, with enterprise prospects managing over 500,000 community units in a single setting.
It’s the mix of intelligence, safety, and assurance that lets groups run with far much less friction and way more influence.
What makes the Cisco Networking platform trusted by international enterprises?
Prospects persistently inform us they worth Cisco not simply as a expertise supplier, however as a companion who’s invested of their long-term success.
We’re targeted on outcomes, not simply options. This implies bringing collectively our expertise, international ecosystem, and experience to assist prospects remedy powerful challenges and transfer their enterprise ahead. For us, reliability, built-in safety, and world-class help are desk stakes.
We all know that our prospects, together with over 95%[1] of the Fortune 500, depend on us to maintain their operations operating and their methods safe.
Our Cisco Networking prospects embody 100% of the highest 25 retailers, high 15 healthcare organizations, and high 15 expertise firms; 90% of the highest 25 producers; and 80% of the highest 25 monetary companies companies and high 10 hospitality manufacturers. And it’s not simply enterprises. One of many largest public training methods in Brazil depends on our platform to attach over two million college students throughout hundreds of college websites for uninterrupted studying.
That stage of belief is earned. The Cisco Meraki cloud platform delivers a 99.99% uptime service stage settlement (SLA)—the best within the {industry}.
Cisco additionally has the {industry}’s largest networking app ecosystem. What does that allow for purchasers?
We constructed our platform API-first, so prospects and companions have an open ecosystem for automation and integration.
At this time, we help greater than 2,000 software programming interface (API) endpoints and see over 15 billion API calls monthly. Along with the {industry}’s broadest performance and scale, we even have an award-winning developer expertise with Greatest 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 big a part of why prospects select Cisco Networking. They get a platform that extends into their very own methods and third-party instruments at international 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 prospects are shifting to a cloud working mannequin for his or her campus networks.
We’re making it simpler for giant 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 contains superior routing protocols, akin 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 international retailers use cloud-managed cloth for safe operational expertise/info expertise (OT/IT) separation in warehouses, whereas Ok–12 college districts can ship constant connectivity throughout dozens of campuses with small IT groups.
As extra enterprises transfer to cloud-first operations, Forrester’s Whole Financial Impression (TEI) report on Cisco Networking confirmed spectacular outcomes. What stood out to you?
Forrester’s Whole Financial Impression™ (TEI) report of Cisco Meraki cloud-managed networking places arduous numbers behind what our prospects have been telling us for years.
Just a few outcomes stood out: prospects that deploy Cisco Meraki break even in simply over a yr and ship a further 89% ROI on high of their authentic funding over three years, almost 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 modifications after switching to Cisco.
These aren’t simply statistics; they signify time, cash, and assets given again to international IT groups. Once you automate routine duties, standardize insurance policies, and achieve international visibility, you may focus much less on firefighting and extra on driving enterprise outcomes.
Are you able to share how prospects are attaining success with the Cisco Networking platform?
Two prospects come to thoughts: Decathlon and Purdue College.
Decathlon, one of many world’s largest sports activities retailers, connects its warehouses, places of work, and hundreds of shops throughout 79+ international locations. With Cisco wi-fi, switching, routing, and API-driven automation that handles 2.5 million API calls monthly, they’re rolling out new shops quicker and with fewer errors at a large 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 minimize help tickets by 80%, improved uptime by 28%, and noticed 4x quicker wi-fi efficiency.
Completely different industries, however the outcomes are comparable: higher visibility, quicker troubleshooting, and safe networks that merely work.
Trying forward, what’s subsequent for the Cisco Networking platform?
The following chapter is all about making life simpler for IT groups at any scale by way 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 underneath one AI-native administration platform. It will reimagine how organizations handle, function, and optimize their IT infrastructure. On the coronary heart of it will likely be Cisco AI Canvas, a generative consumer 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 response to Cisco information
