Cisco Live - Amsterdam 2025! 

Cisco Live kicked off in Amsterdam this month and the platform vision that started two years ago is starting to really take shape and show how the connected value will help organisations tackle the growing technical complexity of the digital age. Cisco have such a broad portfolio in 2025 that this wont be a complete review of every announcement so I am going to focus on the elements that relate to building a Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure.  

Stephen Faulkner will cover the security announcements, and Tim Russell will be covering the modern workspace updates to complete more of the picture. 

Keynote Summary 

AI has turned the world upside down! This was the opening video’s headline statement. The last two years have been 'WILD' with an unprecedented pace of change. None of this new technology can function without the network, and Cisco is ready to power, Protect, and Connect the AI company of the future.  

Building on 40 years of innovation, Cisco started its platform journey around 2 years ago now with a core mission to bring simpler management and operations for all customers. The network is the frontline of defence against modern threats as well as the core of all digital services. It was calculated that 65 million people have collaborated on Cisco innovation over these 40 years; Oliver Tuszik (President, EMEA) said it took him two hours to calculate this manually, but only 2 minutes with the power of AI! This is the value on the table to optimise how we do business! Today, Cisco believes over 3 million people are working with Cisco technologies, and since CCIE was launched in 1993, over 71,000 people have been certified! 

Three statistics are driving the Cisco strategy: 

• Gartner stats suggest the EMEA technology market will be worth 1.3 trillion and is growing at over 10%, outstripping global stats. This will place massive pressure on reducing complexity and driving efficiency to meet this demand. This will be compounded by the talent challenges in the networking space and the expected retirement of a large portion of the expertise over the next 3-5 years.  
• 85% of organisations expect AI to be core to competitive advantage over the coming 18 months, but in Europe, only 7% believe they are ready to achieve this! Skills, Data Health, security, and platform readiness are core challenges for most in unlocking AI. As with most revolutionary technologies, AI is overhyped in early life, but its value is underestimated in the long term.  

• The Global 2000 lose over 400billion per year due to downtime! This is a crazy statistic to consider, but the reasons are not hard to contextualise; the hybrid world has become complex and challenging to manage. I have always loved this Cisco diagram really highlights the complexity of a modern Hybrid Platform Ecosystem! We must build more robust architectures to strengthen resilience 

These market trends define the three areas of focus for everything Cisco have been and will be doing with it technology:  

One Team, one strategy aligned to the above, is driving Cisco's reinvention across core technologies like Networking, Datacentre, Security, and Digital Resilience. Forty years of switching and routing leadership combined with a resurgence in Security and AI Operations make the Cisco Platform future ones to keep a very close eye on. Now that we understand the why, let's dig into a few of the announcements that relate to Hybrid Platforms. 

At a high level, the goal is to bring the power of the network together with security, observability, and collaboration. This will be driven by three pillars of technology, AI-ready data centres, Future Proofed Workplaces and Digital Resilience (observability & Security) 

Now that we understand the why, let’s examine a few of the announcements related to Hybrid Platforms. 

AI-Ready Data Centre 

Late in 2024, we had the announcements for AI PODS (Full stack AI platform) and the new UCS C885A servers built for the Nvidia GPU architectures, enabling customers to build integrated local training and inferencing needs on a complete Cisco architecture (Go explore Cisco HyperFabric when you get 10 mins )   

At Live this year we get to see the C845A M8 UCS Server join the portfolio. Support a flexible and modular (Nvidia MGX) architecture that can allow you to grow GPU Power as your AI use cases mature and grow. As you would expect, this also brings consistent management as part of the UCS ecosystem. Exciting to see the rapid innovation from Cisco as they join the GPU-enabled compute market. More details on the C845A can be found here. 

Speaking to customers on a weekly basis about AI needs, I can certainly see the appeal of the modular design, which allows a lower entry point with simple scale. 

All this new computing demand will need a change in the networking paradigm; performance, manageability, and security integration will be critical. The announcement of the DPU-enabled Smart switch is another step towards meeting this requirement. 

The two new models shown below combine the power of Cisco Silicon One and AMD DPU to allow the convergence of the Network and security to allow some interesting use cases. Firstly, Secure Cloud Edge removed the traditional FW bottleneck for cloud on-ramp, and secondly, DPU, DPU-enabled services in the ToR, can allow every port to become an L7 FW. This change allows for embedded distributed security powered by the network. All are controlled and orchestrated by Cisco Security Cloud, which can also work with third-party solutions to allow easier transition over time.  

When we combine this with the Cisco Hyper Shield technology, we can see how we start to build the vision of the networking-powered secure enterprise. When combined with new AI-powered dual data paths, we can start to remove the day to operational challenges that many network teams face. Think about a solution that can self-qualify updates and ensure consistent operations. Live, real-world traffic is replicated between the primary and the shadow data planes, essentially a digital twin running in every enforcement point within the environment, not in a lab or a simulation. This is going to be game-changing. 

 Full details can be found here on the new N9300 switches.

Attention turned from the underlying hardware platforms to support AI to the challenges of operating and adopting AI safely and securely. The potential challenges from coworkers using AI and from running your own models are complex, and a platform to help ensure compliance is needed. Cisco AI Defence was announced as that platform! 

As an integrated part of Security Cloud, AI defence's goal is to allow organisations to innovate fearlessly. The solution offers four key capabilities that help protect coworkers and organisations from various AI challenges.  

• AI Access 

Provide full visibility, control access, and apply guardrails to third-party AI apps to enforce data-loss prevention and mitigate threats.  

• AI Model and Application Validation 

Identify hundreds of potential safety and security risks with automated vulnerability assessments of AI models and applications. 

• AI Runtime Protection 

Protect production AI applications with guardrails that block adversarial attacks and harmful responses in real-time. 

• AI Cloud Visibility 

Automatically inventory the AI models and connected data sources across your distributed environment to understand usage and gauge risk. 

This is a game-changing announcement as it combines capabilities that normally require multiple tools and, therefore, increased cost and complexity. I am really looking forward to seeing this in action with our customers. 

More detail here.

Future Proof workplaces  

While Modern Workspace is not a focus area for me anymore, I like to keep in touch with my old speciality, and the innovations covered for collaboration in the Webex portfolio were interesting. If it’s your area of interest I would suggest grabbing a session from the OnDemand library. 

What is interesting is the network requirements that new working patterns bring and the need to extract value from new investments in networking technologies. WiFi 7 needs to be more than providing additional bandwidth; we need intelligence from the APs to inform wider outcomes. New APs are now including sensors and other technology to support advanced use cases like location tracking, IoT, and automation.  

Managing expanding networking (with a reduced talent pool) is top of mind for most IT leaders. Cisco is bringing AI assistants to the networking portfolio so we can start to tackle the looming talent challenge. Networking is not getting any simpler, so combining the power of Generative AI with the benefits of HyperShield and the visibility from SPLUNK is going to be a powerful combination. 

Secure Global Connect 

As we move into the world of AI agents and full-agentic AI, the possibility that enterprises could have 1000s of them distributed globally is not beyond conception. This is why Secure Global Connect and the work Cisco is doing in the Telco space is critical. Providing a secure, reliable, and performant global interconnect will be a critical part of the enterprise network backbone. These new 8000 series switches based on the Silicon One (more on this later) architecture will enable Telco providers to unlock new capabilities that are prepared to meet future demands.  

Combine this with new Pluggable optics that can deliver 800GB up to 1000KM and 400G up to 3000KM, that's 8000GB of throughput from London to Iceland or Athens in Greece! 

While the traditional enterprise may not directly acquire this technology, its existence provides two things. Firstly the knowledge that global Telco providers will be able to bring new services to market to underpin global data connectivity. Secondly, the innovation and R&D that goes into this will filter down into mainstream enterprise networking, bringing the performance and stability needed for the AI world we are moving into.  

Digital Resilience 

Resilience is a hot topic at the moment, mainly driven by escalating cyber threats, legislation impacts from the likes of DORA, and the increased demand to provide an instantaneous and always-on consumer experience. This last point is of particular interest to me at the moment; Observability and AIOps will be critical to mastering the complexity of future infrastructure and networking demands. Cisco Thousand Eyes has been a leader in providing insights into the networks that underpin these digital services, even when we traverse unowned networking infrastructure. 

Bringing deeper integration into owned networks, we saw the launch of ThousandEyes Traffic Insights with the announcement stating: 

"At Cisco Live Amsterdam, ThousandEyes is inviting customers to join its private preview for Traffic Insights, which correlates NetFlow and IPFIX with synthetic data to provide deeper contextualized visibility into enterprise network performance. In addition, Cisco is introducing ThousandEyes integrations for Splunk and Cisco Catalyst Center" 

IT will be exciting to get hands-on with this new capability and unlock greater visibility into the backbone of every digital enterprise - the network 

Taking the Observability and AIOps story to the next level, we can now see the integration of the Splunk acquisition with AppDynamics and Thousand Eyes to provide end-to-end visibility. Open Telemetry-based Observability Cloud provides deep insights into modern container-based applications, while AppDynamics continues to be developed to support those traditional three-tier environments. With IT Service Intelligence aggregating all elements (including the security parts of Splunk), we can get a business service level view that aligns with target SLOs. Having played with the solution in the Lab, it’s very compelling; being able to see the consumer transaction in the web front end and leverage the traces, metrics and logs to track back to the specific component impacting the user experience is intuitive yet detailed.  

Why Cisco 

One key message I took away from the keynote was the 'why' Cisco is the partner of choice for the core areas we highlighted at the start of the article. I believe this is something Cisco has been missing from the past: a clear, unified vision of how all their great technology combines to deliver cumulative and integrated value. 

• Platform: By building an integrated platform the intention is that each additional enhancement adds value to all the component parts. Over time, the value of such a platform ensures compound value for each new level of adoption. Each new product adds value to existing increasing value and reducing adoption time.   

• Silicon Control: By owning a programable silicon layer Cisco can own the entire stack, hardware, systems and software. The Silicon One approach has reduced complexity, allows for removal of forklift changes and bring built in observability engines. 

• AI Secure: Cisco believes they are the only AI First Secure Networking Company in the world. Plenty of AI-first security companies and AI-first networking companies, but none that combine both (cisco words) 

The combined power of these areas sets Cisco up to continue its mission and provide technologies to allow us to work, innovate and explore how technology can underpin our futures. 

Thanks for reading. It would be great to dive into the revitalised Cisco portfolio in the coming months, so please do reach out.