LAS VEGAS – Cisco remains bullish on its 5G plans, but noted that its focus in the space has started to change toward the growing push around private networks.

Michael Beesley, CTO for service provider networking at Cisco, explained during an interview at this week’s MWC Las Vegas event that the vendor has seen the market slowly evolve over the past several months, and Cisco’s embedded position in a lot of carrier and enterprises sets it up to take advantage of this evolution.

“It's an area that we think is a nice intersection of both our abilities and where we see the market need and customer need,” Beesley said. “Certainly, as we engage with enterprises, both the IT and the OT sides, the fact that Cisco's already a significant partner, we already have significant technological portfolios in these accounts, both direct and through partners, the ability to offer and service a private 5G offering that is fully integrated with the enterprise systems, fully integrated with WiFi policy, visibility, security, we think that's a key attribute that we bring to the table.”

Cisco’s private 5G push gained significant momentum earlier this year when the vendor launched its Private 5G platform at the MWC Barcelona event. The as-a-service platform integrates with existing enterprise systems and WiFi, is billed on a pay-per-use basis, and supports open RAN principles, which helped it land a deal with the aspiring greenfield open RAN operator Dish Wireless for private enterprise networks.

“The technology, in combination and integrated with the rest of the technology stack, can really solve significant customer problems,” Beesley said of that momentum. “So we're bullish on the space and we continue to invest or even accelerate our investments.”

Beesley also backed Cisco’s decision to provide the platform as a managed offering, which was touted as lowering the complexity barrier for enterprises.

“Today, we're adamant that was a correct call and we're very happy about that,” Beesley said.

He explained that Cisco’s model is designed to take into account the need of a managed services or systems integration partner to help the customer deploy and manage a private network.

“It will be hard to cite one example of an enterprise that felt that they could do the DIY model lock, stock, and barrel,” Beesley said. “We’re very happy about that both toward our managed service provider partners and the end customer. It just hides an awful lot of complexity and simplifies and reduces that cost that gets them to a pay-as-you-grow kind of model.”

This mindset is becoming increasingly common among some private network vendors that are hearing similar needs for simplicity.

Beesley also noted that Cisco’s differentiation in the market is based on its history of working with many of these end users. This includes Cisco’s broader portfolio stack and networking services.

“Our focus and all the investment that we have made and continue to make with regard to integrations between the private 5G offer and the more traditional stack that we provide into enterprises across everything from wireless, routing, switching, WiFi, all of the controllers, they're in the automation, policy, identity, security, audit, visibility,” Beesley said. “The fact that we chose to go down the hard path of doing integrations between that stack of technology and the private 5G offer, we feel that differentiates us, satisfies a clear need for the customers that we're talking to, and can really facilitate a WiFi-plus-private-5G kind of view of the world going forward.”

Beesley did note that there is minimal component overlap between Cisco’s legacy systems and its private 5G work in terms of equipment and the data plane.

“We offer basically an appliance to our enterprise customers and that appliance goes on their network,” Beesley said. “The fact that many times that is both our Cisco LAN and Cisco WiFi network, it helps with regard to integration and interoperability. That said there's not an opportunity really to leverage any installed equipment already. It's not like you can add the 5G user plane function to the WiFi controller. It's different technology plus the sizing of that equipment, there’s not spare capacity.”

Cisco can find greater integration capabilities with automation, policy, identity, security, analytics, and insight where it can leverage automation systems, policy engines, and “provide interesting capabilities in a better together manner between the control plane of the private 5G and the control plane of the traditional enterprise infrastructure,” Beesley added.

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