As one of the world’s most prominent networking industry players, Cisco Systems Inc. is comprised of several moving parts: from networking hardware and telecom equipment to software products, such as Webex, Jasper and OpenDNS.

The company has embarked on a journey of tying together its several business lines into a more coherent unit. A deliberate slew of announcements over the past year has served as proof of that effort, according to Jonathan Davidson (pictured), executive vice president and general manager of networking at Cisco.

“We were really careful to make sure that we actually had products that were out in the market already so that we could show proof points towards this unification,” he said. “We started hinting at it last year when we started talking about cloud monitoring for Catalyst.”

Davidson 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 the details of the unification effort, including branding strategies and customer reception to date.

A streamlined Cisco Networking Cloud resonates with end users

Cisco’s vision for its Networking Cloud is to create a coherent platform experience where users are afforded easy access to manage all Cisco networking products from one place. This effort will bring to bear rich network insights, cloud-driven automation and partner-driven innovation to drive measurable business outcomes. To date, customer feedback on the move has been positive, according to Davidson.

“The response has been phenomenal. We couldn’t have hoped for any better feedback, and the reason for that is because if we go through and we drive this unified experience, but we get there and our customers aren’t with us, there was no point in the journey,” he said. “We really want to make sure that we make this journey seamless, simple and as easy as possible for them to move along with us.”

For Cisco, the first practical step in the shift from disparate products to a unified platform was creating a coherent user interface and user experience so that users feel like every tool is functionally part of an interlinked whole.

“You need to have a single sign-on,” Davidson explained. “I always like to joke, ‘It’s in the name — single sign-on. Why do we need five?’ Getting convergence around that is really important. So I log in once I’m logged in everywhere, and guess what, even if I’m switching applications, it doesn’t feel like I’m switching applications.”

The next step is branding, with the company rethinking product names, which had become confusing over time, to make them more relatable to their intended use case. One example is the change from Viptela to Catalyst SD-WAN according to Davidson.

“There’s Meraki SD-WAN and there’s Catalyst SD-WAN, but we want to unify those experiences well,” he noted. “Think of it, if you want really fancy, intent-driven SD-WAN. We have Catalyst SD-WAN. If you want a simple, simplified SD-WAN, you can do that. But if you want to do security with it, it’s the exact same UI to add security to the Catalyst SD-WAN as it is to add it to the Meraki SD-WAN.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE