In interview: Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins on AI and Splunk merger

Robbins discusses partner opportunities in security, observability, collaboration and sustainability in an exclusive interview with Gina Narcisi, senior editor at CRN US

As the leader of one of the biggest networking giants that has gone through a major transitions in recent years, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins has been busy juggling a lot.

Cisco Systems several years ago announced it would be shifting its legacy as a hardware-centric company to a software and services-focused tech behemoth.

As of its latest quarterly earnings, Cisco's total software revenue grew 17 per cent, software subscription revenue rose 20 per cent year-over-year and 85 per cent of software sales were subscription-based, highlighting that its efforts are paying off and the company is indeed becoming one the largest providers of software, according to Cisco.

Another major shift is toward becoming equally known for its security chops.

Cisco has long been known for its networking portfolio, but the company had a number of point security solutions that have been unified under a platform approach — Cisco Security Cloud — to the security market over the last year and a half. Now, Cisco is attributing its increasing strength in security to its unified approach to security management and its platform play.

But that's not all. Now, there's a whole new set of priorities on top of the company's existing efforts around AI, sustainability, and the impending Splunk acquisition.

Robbins sat down with CRN during the Cisco Partner Summit 2023 to talk security, full stack observability, the opportunity for partners around AI, and of course, what the imminent $28bn Splunk deal — Cisco's biggest acquisition yet — will mean for the company and what partners can expect.

The following is an excerpt from the conversation with Gina Narcisi, senior editor at CRN US

During your keynote, you stated that 95 per cent of businesses said they wanted an AI strategy, but only 14 per cent actually felt ready for AI. What can partners do to capture that opportunity?

"First of all, I think that's actually a very natural place for our customers given the state of the technology. I think technology companies like Cisco and others, we've been able to move pretty quickly on it.

"I think there's a huge opportunity for partners to just consult with customers around how to use AI to be more efficient in their operations to engage with their customers more effectively. And then also, what is the underlying infrastructure required to actually do these inference models or gain insights from different AI models, as well as, what are the security implications? What are the things you need to think about?

"So, it feels like it's a broad-based opportunity that I think is going to just continue to evolve. I think we're going to learn more and more about what that opportunity looks like over the next year."

Continue reading to find out how the Splunk acquisition will help Cisco's AI plans...

In interview: Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins on AI and Splunk merger

Robbins discusses partner opportunities in security, observability, collaboration and sustainability in an exclusive interview with Gina Narcisi, senior editor at CRN US

Do you see Cisco, with Splunk, competing and winning over customer perception in the security space?

"Oh, for sure. I had several partners this week telling me that if you look at the innovation that we've been delivering over the last nine months, and then you combine that with Splunk's Platform, and then our platform will top, it's going to give us a real differentiated solution.

"I think most importantly, though, our customers need it. We talk about the competitive differentiation and all that stuff, but the reality is that customers are really struggling with the amount of data, the number of vendors, and some of our biggest customers have been telling me for two to three years: 'I can't throw more people at this. I can't. And I can't correlate all this information fast enough, I have to get to a platform.'

"And so, it's really important for the industry to come together and actually agree that we're going to feed threat intelligence into different platforms. And I thought that was one of the big breakthroughs with XDR.

"While we have a ways to go to get more and more data sources into it, it was great to see even some of our competitors acknowledged that this is good for the industry, it's good for our customers. Splunk already has a huge head start on getting all that data ingested, so we think it's good for customers."

How can partners help tie together security and networking into a cohesive message for their customers as a differentiator in the market?

"We've seen this transition with customers over the years when we integrated voice onto the IP network. The voice organisation and the network organisation were completely different and there's always this cultural clash that occurs.

"I think, in today's world, though, it's much more feasible. And it's much more understood by customers when these things are happening, and especially when security is involved.

"So, I think customers are naturally going to bring us stuff together, but I think partners can absolutely help them. I think as we continue to integrate our security and networking capabilities into solutions for customers, I think it's going to become more obvious to them that they'll have to be together as opposed to what we've seen historically."

Up next: Cisco's platform story...

In interview: Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins on AI and Splunk merger

Robbins discusses partner opportunities in security, observability, collaboration and sustainability in an exclusive interview with Gina Narcisi, senior editor at CRN US

With Cisco Security Cloud, Networking Cloud, and now, the Cisco Observability Platform, is Cisco trying to tell a platform story across its entire product line?

"It's a big move for us. You've got the Networking Cloud, you've got Security Cloud, you've got effectively an Observability Cloud. Ultimately, what we'll do is we'll just continue to bring those together with a single interface and a single capability.

"[With] Networking Cloud, the first iteration of it is an easy to navigate, single sign on access to multiple platforms that exists today, and we'll just continue to consolidate those over time so that it becomes simpler and simpler, but it's certainly a lot better today and it's going to give our customers a lot of insights and the ability to really look at their infrastructure more holistically."

How important are partners to Cisco full-stack observability vision?

"They're incredibly important because if you think about what customers are doing with their applications today — I shouldn't go there, but I was writing code in the 80s, and the fundamental architecture of applications is not different than what it was back then.

"But instead of being completely integrated, in that case, in an IBM mainframe as an example, now, all these different modules are just distributed across your infrastructure. So, the security and the observability needs for customers — you've got API risk, where's the performance problem? What what's causing my customers to actually abandon their carts because something's going on in the infrastructure? Where's that problem and I have to get there quickly.

"I think first of all, Liz [Centoni, EVP and GM of applications and chief strategy officer for Cisco] and the team have done an amazing job with AppDynamics and really bringing it forward, as well as integrating it with Talos [Cisco's threat intelligence team] and ThousandEyes And over time, you'll see it's going to just be a big play because the network insights and the ThousandEyes insights and Catalyst and Meraki and all that stuff coming together, particularly when Splunk comes on board, we will have the ability to monitor and identify challenges with applications, much like we were talking about with cybersecurity, faster than anybody else.

"And customers need to understand how to how to get that rolled out. And so, getting started today, I think is a huge opportunity for partners. Again, we talk about these five big areas that we think we can help customers — we being our partners and Cisco — and that application observability is one of the biggest ones we think, and this is going to be there for years. There's a multi-year journey for customers to rebuild their entire application architecture."

In interview: Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins on AI and Splunk merger

Robbins discusses partner opportunities in security, observability, collaboration and sustainability in an exclusive interview with Gina Narcisi, senior editor at CRN US

Cisco has weighed in on recent wars, conflicts, and social justice issues. Why is it so critical to Cisco's mission to go beyond technology and to also encompass these initiatives?

"Our purpose is to power an inclusive future for all and if you step back and say: 'Why do companies need to care about our communities and all these things?' The world needs companies that care today.

"We need to be responsible relative to how we use technology, and I mean every tech company. So, we need to start with that. And we need to think about the societal implications of all of our technology.

"And then further to that, when you think about powering an inclusive future for all, it's just simply, we want people to have opportunity. And our fundamental conductivity layer brings people into the global economy.

"So, there's billions of people all around the world who still aren't connected. As we get them connected, you can then educate them, you can deliver some aspects of health care, some cases, they may be able to do their jobs from where they are, remotely.

"And so, we think that this is good for everybody — it's good for society. And I think a lot of the challenges in the world over the last 5-8 years had been a result of people feeling left out and feeling like they haven't had an opportunity, so to the extent we can help bridge that divide, I think we should. It's less about the names of these initiatives. For us it's about creating inclusive opportunities for everybody."