The Gately Report: Cisco Partners to Help IT Giant Reach Security Revenue Goal

Cisco partners will play a crucial role in the IT giant’s goal for cybersecurity to reach over 25% of its annual revenue.

That’s according to AJ Shipley, Cisco’s vice president of product management for threat detection and response. This month, Cisco reported a record-setting $15.2 billion in revenue in its latest quarter, a year-over-year improvement of 11%, with profit of $4 billion. There’s a larger opportunity for Cisco partners.

Cybersecurity isn’t playing as big a role in Cisco’s overall revenue growth “as we like or as we intend it to,” Shipley said.

“And sometimes what gets lost in in the noise a little bit is if you look at the bookings and revenue of Cisco security, it’s still a $4 billion-a-year security product business,” he said. “And when you add services in, it ends up being north of $5 billion a year. We’re a $57 billion-a-year company, and so sometimes you get lost in the noise. But if you were to look at our bookings and revenue relative to a Palo Alto Networks or CrowdStrike, it actually makes us the second-largest security vendor out there behind Microsoft, which has actually done pretty amazing things in the last couple of years.”

Cisco Investing in Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity today makes up roughly 10% of Cisco’s overall bookings, Shipley said.

Cisco’s AJ Shipley

“We expect that security will be a very, very large part of the the near-future bookings for Cisco and actually could represent over time 25% plus of the total bookings that Cisco does,” he said. “And the company is investing along those lines, from Chuck Robbins, our CEO, and the board all the way down. Security is the one thing that the entire company across all of Cisco is putting all of their wood behind that arrow in order to get it to that place where it’s in the future, 25% plus of our of our annual revenue.”

Shipley is in charge of Cisco‘s email security, endpoint security, extended detection and response (XDR), network detection and response, cloud-based sandboxing and vulnerability management.

“It’s all of the products that, for the most part, we target at the security operations center (SOC),” he said. “And specifically what we focus on is when all of your preventative security controls have failed and the bad guy has gotten in, we’re focused on how can we detect as quickly as possible and get them out, and get that company back up and running.”

Enabling Cisco Partners

This effort can’t be achieved without Cisco partners, Shipley said.

“The reason for that is because a lot of those organizations just simply don’t have the people on their side in the SOC with the expertise, or can keep those people in seats long enough because they’re jumping around from job to job,” he said. “So they’re looking to outsource a lot of the management of those products and to manage workflows to partners. What we’re focused on from a Cisco perspective – potentially within my area of product portfolio – is how we enable those partners either to be VARs of these products into the SOC. But more importantly in this space, how they can be MSPs and MSSPs, and take the burden off of those end customers of having to manage this and keep people in seats so that their overall security posture stays as resilient as possible, and they’re able to detect and respond as quickly as possible when everything else is failing.”

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