Cisco Unleashes Deluge of AI, Networking, Security Advancements
The new AI-fueled offerings span networking, security, collaboration and observability. Plus, the expanded partnership with Nvidia that could benefit partners.
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To bring networking and security teams closer together, Cisco is introducing deeper integrations between its Networking and Security Cloud platforms. These innovations with Cisco Secure Access, Cisco’s secure services edge (SSE) solution, deliver a unified approach to networking and security management, and automated monitoring of the digital experience, providing insights from network, device and application performance metrics. These integrations are available with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and ThousandEyes.
In addition, Cisco unveiled enhanced security posture reporting for operational technology (OT) assets. Industrial organizations can now use the security posture report for comprehensive details on OT asset inventories, top vulnerabilities and highest cyber risks to help reduce the attack surface. These features are available with Cisco Cyber Vision and are available as part of Cisco's hardened industrial-grade routers, switches and firewalls.
The future of AI and the outcomes it enables for customers rests on the network and connectivity, said Cisco’s Alex Pujols.
“Quite simply, without the network, there is no AI,” he said. “Essential to this is partners' support to ensure customers are AI-ready. Complementing this are new consumption models that allow customers to make the most of these technologies in ways that make the most financial sense to them and where they are on the AI readiness spectrum.”
More than any other network provider, Cisco has “unparalleled” data and insights to help customers achieve their objectives using AI, Pujols said.
“Addressing the need to connect, secure and ensure increasingly complex applications and networks, the new integrations across our networking and security portfolios allow Cisco partners to complement our networking prowess with Cisco’s security expertise," he said.
Cisco and Nvidia, which help enterprises deploy and manage secure AI infrastructure, just announced plans to deliver AI infrastructure solutions for the data center that are easy to deploy and manage, providing the computing power enterprises need to succeed in the AI era.
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Nvidia's Jensen Huang
“Companies everywhere are racing to transform their businesses with generative AI,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and CEO. “Working closely with Cisco, we’re making it easier than ever for enterprises to obtain the infrastructure they need to benefit from AI, the most powerful technology force of our lifetime.”
Within the Cisco Security Cloud, there's more AI innovation to deliver what the company says is a "unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform." This includes new AI-backed analytics for Cisco Identity Intelligence, as well as the recently unveiled Cisco AI Assistant for Security that helps customers make decisions, augment tool capabilities and automate complex tasks.
“Our legacy as a networking company uniquely positions Cisco to address today's cybersecurity challenges, especially as we bring together our Networking Cloud and Security Cloud through our streamlined platform approach,” Pujols said. “This radically simplifies things for our customers, and with the addition of AI and our identity-first approach, we can offer – through our partners - more precise enforcement and cybersecurity protection/response/remedy capabilities to our customers."
Cisco unveiled new innovations on the Cisco Observability Platform. To provide customers with enhanced productivity as well as better visibility, insights and actions, the Cisco Observability Platform now offers a natural language interface for simplified troubleshooting. In addition, the new Cisco AIOps application now simplifies real-time business health monitoring to automate IT processes and keep operations teams productive and responsive.
Cisco announced its first SaaS product that allows for generative AI deployments in organizations. Motific provides a central view across the entire generative AI journey, allowing central IT and security teams to deliver generative AI capabilities across their organizations with control over sensitive data, security and cost.
Input from partners and customers was crucial in the development of the new technologies and capabilities, Pujols said.
“We have worked with – and continue to work with – a wide spectrum of partners and customers to bring predictive and generative AI solutions to the market,” he said. “Cisco relies extensively on partner feedback to improve existing products and develop new technology solutions. We’ve worked closely with our partners through our advisory boards, such as our partner technical executive council, on which predictive and generative AI solutions we should prioritize. There are similar customer advisory boards where customer feedback is solicited. At Cisco, partners and customers are deeply embedded in our technology development strategy. This has flourished as AI investments have amplified, and we are excited about our customers' and partners' feedback.”
Cisco unveiled new technologies to help businesses develop and optimize infrastructure to support AI. These include the new Cisco X Series Direct, which is designed for environments where customers need connectivity and compute power at the edge to support more applications with less infrastructure, and the expanded offering of converged and hyperconverged validated designs that build on the recently announced Cisco Validated Solutions and AI/ML blueprint for data center networks.
Webex by Cisco announced the availability of new AI features. The company announced the general availability and beta availability of Cisco AI Assistant features across the Webex suite and contact center, including meeting and vidcast summaries, change message tone, message translation, agent burnout detection and conversation summaries.
Webex by Cisco announced the availability of new AI features. The company announced the general availability and beta availability of Cisco AI Assistant features across the Webex suite and contact center, including meeting and vidcast summaries, change message tone, message translation, agent burnout detection and conversation summaries.
CISCO LIVE AMSTERDAM — Cisco on Tuesday unveiled several new offerings demonstrating what the IT and networking giant said is continued momentum in artificial intelligence (AI) across its portfolio.
Cisco Live Amsterdam is the company's flagship technology event in Europe, with more than 14,000 IT professionals in attendance. The new AI-fueled offerings span networking, security, collaboration and observability.
Cisco estimates that generative AI could add $4.4 trillion to global gross domestic product (GDP) each year; yet, there are challenges in place around enabling companies to get there. The recent Cisco AI Readiness Index, a survey of more than 8,000 private sector, business and IT leaders across 30 countries, found that 95% of respondents have an AI strategy in place or under development. But only 14% are ready to integrate AI into their businesses.
Cisco Live Focused on 'Immense' AI Opportunity
Alex Pujols, vice president of global partner engineering at Cisco, tells Channel Futures that the opportunity at hand in AI is “immense.”
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Cisco's Alex Pujols
“It already presents significant opportunities for partners as customers seek guidance in navigating the explosion of AI-enabled technologies and use cases,” he said. “Cisco will continue to build rich AI capabilities across its portfolio and will continue to aggressively invest in AI across our portfolio, particularly in the areas of observability, networking and security.”
One major opportunity is readying the 30 years of deployed ethernet infrastructure to deliver on the low-latency and high-throughput demands of AI/machine learning (ML) workloads, Pujols said.
“Cisco has been the leader in ethernet for nearly 30 years,” he said. “Through our work on standardizing and building the next generation of AI-capable ethernet networks, the next 30 years are going to be full of opportunities for Cisco and our partners.”
Scroll through our slideshow above for more from Cisco Live Amsterdam 2024.
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