In doing so, Cisco has engineered the next generation of its network management products in the form of networks based on intent. Meanwhile, as the growth of hardware sales slows down due to the workloads that change the public cloud, the company considers the Internet of things and computing as new frontiers for revenue growth.
"If you look at HPE, Dell, IBM and Cisco, all those companies are trying to reinvent themselves for this IoT world in the cloud," says Forrester's network analyst, Andre Kindness. "The traditional way of doing things is dead, they are all big enough so they do not disappear soon, but they may also have to find something else to boost them in the future, for Cisco, maybe it's IoT, maybe it's software." .
From a business perspective, Cisco is still fine. The company earned revenues of $ 49 billion in 2015 and 2016 and $ 48 billion in the fiscal year that ended in July 2017; Switching sales decreased 5% in the fiscal year, while service revenues increased 3%. Below are some of the key technology areas that the company hopes to drive a new era of network innovation in 2018 and beyond.
Networks based on intention
While the main network advances in recent years have focused on software-defined networks, in mid-2017 Cisco launched a new intent-based network (IBN) strategy that is expected to model the future roadmap for network management of the company. What is IBN? Users dictate policies and network orchestration software automatically configures and maintains the desired state of the network. In 2018, we expect the theoretical advantages of IBN to become reality as the proof-of-concept implementations are deployed.
Brad Casemore, an analyst at IDC, says Cisco also has to reconcile its somewhat unrelated IBN strategies. When Cisco launched IBN, it did so in the context of the campus network team, based on its Catalyst hardware line and the DNA Center software. Cisco says it has been doing IBN for years, although it does not call it that in the data center with its Nexus 9K router package, Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Tetration analysis. "I think you'll see Cisco talking more thoroughly about how the intention-based network will extend through its portfolio, in the data center, on the campus and across the WAN," says Casemore. "I think they try to unite these narrative threads."
Kindness, the Forrester analyst, says he would not be surprised to hear Cisco apply the intention-based moniker to other management systems: intention-based security, intent-based data centers, etc.
The transition from Cisco to SaaS
In announcing their new IBN strategy, Cisco executives made a key point: they are selling the software that runs IBN in a new way. Traditionally, software running on Cisco network hardware has been sold in perpetual licenses. DNA Center, the company's IBN platform for its campus switches, can be purchased as a subscription or SaaS model.
"It's pretty obvious they're in a transition from focusing on hardware to focusing on software, and that comes with its challenges," says Amy Arnold, a Cisco user and network engineer working in the public sector in Texas. As Cisco launches its new products as DNA Center and Tetration through the software, it points out that hardware is still important. "We will still have many switching plate counts, but maybe not many," he says. Arnold says that if better software can improve uptime, reliability and allow network engineers to be more agile, then she is in favor. Casemore notes that financial investors will also be closely monitoring this transition.
The Internet of things
As traditional network hardware sales begin to stabilize, the broad Internet of Things market is an area in which Cisco expects significant growth. Cisco has already invested heavily in creating robust hardware teams that can run on IoT devices, as well as on software platforms to control IoT implementations. In 2016, Cisco purchased the IoT Jasper administration provider for $ 1.4 billion. In 2017, Cisco launched Kinetic, an IoT operations software platform that allows users to automate connections to IoT devices, extract data from them and route them for analysis. Expect Cisco to aggressively promote itself in the IoT market, both in hardware and software.
The most recent Cisco cloud strategy
After a handful of pivots, Cisco is ready to test its latest strategy in the cloud. In the past, Cisco tried to build Inter-cloud, its cloud network powered by Cisco, but surrendered in that in 2016. This time, Cisco is partnering with Google Cloud Platform to offer a hybrid cloud platform based on the code software open Kubernetes for running application containers. Cisco will allow your server's hardware systems to run Kubernetes, while offering integration with the Kubernetes service based on Google's cloud. Meanwhile, Cisco's partnership with Google is not exclusive, so it will also help customers manage connections with other public cloud providers. Because VMware is associated with AWS, Google and IBM, Cisco seems to have felt the need to establish a friendly relationship with a public cloud provider, and chose to do so with Google. In 2018, clarification could be reached about exactly what this partnership will be like and the general strategy of the Cisco cloud.
