This year’s Cisco Live spotlighted delivering simpler networks with more unified cloud management services. The event's themes focused on software offerings, user experience, and as-a-service, but very little on the “speeds and feeds” of its hardware that Cisco traditionally touts, Dell’Oro Group research director Mauricio Sanchez noted.

“It was very interesting to see the themes be about simplification, making the customer experience easier, and being able to purchase the solutions in different ways,” Sanchez told SDxCentral. “But it's not the classic conversations about speeds and feeds or silicon or some esoteric technology … that Cisco historically pushed.”

During his keynote, Cisco chair and CEO Chuck Robbins highlighted the network giant’s commitment to offering a unified experience and cloud-based management.

“We want to deliver a unified experience as a better customer experience for you,” Robbins said. “Our goal is to deliver cloud-based management platforms that actually have the same look and feel. We're working on the same single sign-on, things that just make your experience better.”

Those targets are in line with the network's evolution over the past few years. “We all built our networks based on applications running in a private data center in a very clear understanding of how our traffic was going to flow. None of that exists anymore,” he said. Now, “we have to really build these dynamic agile networks that have security built-in, that can accommodate any traffic pattern, any user, and any application anywhere.”

And Cisco has already taken steps toward bringing those cloud-managed network services with built-in security to fruition.

Recently, Cisco introduced the Security Cloud, which is a set of cloud-based services that provides threat detection and prevention, minimizes cyber risks, and integrates breach response and remediation with machine learning technology.

One of the key components of this Security Cloud is its unified secure access service edge (SASE) platform, now called Cisco+ Secure Connect Now, which combines its Meraki SD-WAN capabilities with Umbrella security services. 

During this year’s Cisco Live, the vendor announced it will now connect its Catalyst switching and wireless hardware to the Meraki cloud-based dashboard.

Along with the Catalyst and Meraki integration, Cisco also introduced the new Nexus Cloud, which is a cloud-based management dashboard delivered as-a-service for its Nexus data center switches.

With those moves, Cisco is trying to stitch its handful of management dashboards together and integrate its disparate services into more unified platforms. Sanchez noted that it’s a step in the right direction, and the situation is ripe for improvement.

“They recognize that customers are having a lot of trouble consuming Cisco solutions,” Sanchez said. “The problem is that every Cisco solution has its own management GUI and dashboard … having so many different UIs obviously for a person to reconcile is very difficult.”

“That's the massive opportunity that Cisco is looking to capitalize with the themes and the strategies that they announced this year,” he added.