As it moves from a product culture to a platform culture, Cisco Systems Inc. is also reshaping a common perception of the 39-year-old firm as purely a networking business.

It is playing a broader role in key elements of the enterprise, from silicon development and hybrid work to security and application deployment in the cloud.

“Everybody thinks, ‘Oh, switches, routers, blah, blah, blah,’” said Bob O’Donnell (pictured), president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research LLC. “They’ve evolved quite a bit over the years. They are inherently involved with the creation and the delivery of applications. This stuff happens all over the place, and it’s making those network connections happen and then monitoring them … that is really their key to success moving forward.”

O’Donnell spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at Cisco Live, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed key areas where Cisco’s business may not be fully understood and impressions of the Apple Vision Pro headset.

AI and silicon

In addition to supporting the application experience, Cisco has been focused on enhancing its Webex solution for video conferencing and online meetings as hybrid work has become the norm in a post-pandemic world. The company made several announcements during Cisco Live surrounding the use of AI for enhanced telepresence.

“It’s demonstration of innovation,” O’Donnell said. “They can put a 4K camera in, and then they can split it up intelligently. They’ve got some AI stuff in the background figuring this out, how to split up the view so that they can concentrate on the activity.”

Silicon is another important area in which Cisco has played an active role. The company’s Silicon One processors support the building of modular and fixed routers and switches for large enterprise and telecommunications networks.

“The Silicon One stuff that they’ve done has primarily been about moving data bits around and across networks,” O’Donnell said. “If there is a mechanism by which they can help enable the creation of devices that can do inferencing on the edge, it becomes interesting. They are an Arm licensee; they can absolutely leverage that.”

Building for the edge

Development of technology for the edge represents a prime opportunity for Cisco. The firm has built momentum in the telecommunications market and is positioned to have a significant voice in the deployment of future edge computing strategies, according to O’Donnell.

“They’re hungry, that is the telcos, to figure out an edge strategy, because they know they have the physical point of presence that nobody else can touch,” O’Donnell said. “If Cisco can help somehow enable that for them, that I think is one of the calling cards for them to drive that.”

The security field has become an important part of Cisco’s business. During the conference in Las Vegas, the firm unveiled Cisco Secure Access, a security offering designed to provide features such as zero-trust network access, secure web gateway, cloud access security broker, firewall-as-a-service, DNS security and remote browser isolation. Secure Access is also integrated with Cisco’s ThousandEyes network intelligence software, so users can identify and resolve any network performance issues that occur.

“They are already starting to combine, and this came up today, this notion [that] security and observability are both going to leverage the same set of data,” O’Donnell said. “They’ve got this data from monitoring the network stuff. They can leverage that both for security purposes as well as observability purposes.”

Apple’s new headset

Along with the areas mentioned above, another part of Cisco’s business that may not be fully understood is its partnership with Apple Inc. and a recent rollout of the Vision Pro spatial computing headset. The device’s operating system will feature a number of apps including Cisco Webex.

O’Donnell noted that Cisco executive Jeetu Patel briefly mentioned the collaboration with Apple during his keynote without providing much detail.

“We heard Jeetu this morning in the day two keynote say, ‘We’re going to have Webex on Vision Pro,’” O’Donnell said. “And that’s about all they said, but they did say it.”

During the interview, O’Donnell described his opportunity to test the latest Apple product during the announcement event.

“The screen is incredible,” he said. “It’s a face computer … and the problem is it just gets a little overwhelming. I describe it as it’s hyper-realistic, and your brain can only handle so much visual information.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s editorial coverage of Cisco Live:

Photo: SiliconANGLE