SAN JOSE, California – Cisco made its bones in networking, and despite a more recent push around AI, cloud, and security, Chief Product Officer (CPO) Jeetu Patel expects those networking bones will remain the central framework to Cisco’s future growth.

“The core networking business is actually central to the success,” Patel told SDxCentral during a one-on-one interview at Cisco’s headquarters in San Jose. “I anticipate it growing at a very aggressive pace.”

Patel explained that “everything attaches to the network. Security is baked into the fabric of the network. AI is connecting GPUs (graphic processing units) across clusters in a data center and across data centers. What we are providing is a low latency, high performance, energy efficient network, optics, security, observability, and a data platform. That's what we're doing.”

Network as a central collaborator for Cisco’s other services hit an inflection point in mid-2024 when the vendor made the bold move to merge its networking business into its security and collaboration teams under Patel, a move that also saw the exit of long-time Cisco networking chief John Davidson. Patel has since also gained oversight of Cisco's Common Hardware Group (CHG) following the departure of former segment head Martin Lund.

That merging was part of a broader corporate restructuring that CEO Chuck Robbins at that time said would focus the vendor’s operations around three primary growth segments: AI, cloud, and cybersecurity.

“Looking ahead, we remain laser focused on growth and consistent execution as we invest to win in AI, cloud, and cybersecurity,” Robbins said during an earnings call. “To focus on these key priority areas, today we announced a restructuring plan to allow us to both invest in key growth opportunities as well as drive more efficiency in our business.”

Analysts at that time applauded the move.

“It always struck me that the security business group was at odds with the networking business group,” Mauricio Sanchez, senior director of enterprise security and networking at Dell’Oro Group, said. “When it came to the intersection between networking and security, there was overlap, there was replication, there was product positioning that was getting messy because you had Catalyst on one side and you had the firewall and Meraki on the other. It was starting to get confusing to me. Hopefully, that will start leading to a greater amount of product reconciliation and position reconciliation, which hopefully will make life easier for Cisco.”

Others pointed specifically to a growing industry focus on AI that was expected to provide Cisco with new growth opportunities.

“Overall, we find that Cisco’s portfolio consolidations focused on bolstering its AI, security, and cloud capabilities pave the way for Cisco to better capitalize on the AI megatrend and the prioritization on organization-wide security implementations, including full integration of hybrid and multicloud defense,” The Futurum Group noted in a report. “The portfolio realignment and organizational restructuring underpin Cisco’s return to growth path in 2025 across the burgeoning AI era.”

Robbins bolstered that point by stating Cisco was “shifting hundreds of millions of dollars into AI, into AI networking for cloud, into AI infrastructure, silicon, and cyber. It’s a meaningful shift, but we feel like the market’s moving so quickly, we have to do it.”

Despite that push, Cisco’ networking business has continued to flourish. That segment posted a 21% increase in revenues for its most recent fiscal quarter compared to the previous year, and accounting for 54% of Cisco’s total revenues for the quarter.

Robbins touted that segment as having produced its sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, going back coincidently to Cisco’s operational restructuring.

Patel echoed that growth enthusiasm, noting again how networking plays into Cisco’s ability to offer a platform integrating AI, cloud, and cybersecurity, but also more traditional network opportunities.

“We've got a fully refreshed lineup in our campus and branch networking, so we've refreshed every single device,” Patel said. “That's tens-of-billions-of-dollars of refresh opportunity for us.”

Competitive, collaborative when needed

Cisco’s network enthusiasm comes as other big players have begun to stake their claim in the space, with the most prominent being Nvidia Networking SVP Gilad Shainer.

“We are probably the No. 1 networking company in the world today,” Shainer told SDxCentral, before then referencing the company’s $11 billion in quarterly networking revenue and that its related revenues are “probably more than Cisco and Arista combined.”

Patel downplayed that competitive notion, instead pointing to Cisco’s willingness to work with partners regardless of competitive leanings.

“Our neutrality of being multi-GPU, our neutrality of being multimodal, multicloud is actually a huge asset for customers, and we operate at scale,” Patel said. “Think about the largest at-scale network infrastructure that's multimodal, multi-GPU, multicloud, a tremendous amount of value in using us to build out the infrastructure in the right way with these companies,” Patel said. “And we're being very open in the way that we approach this. I think the big cultural shift that happened at Cisco is we are completely comfortable at this point in partnering with our fiercest competitors and being completely comfortable that there's a small area that we actually compete with in some cases with someone, but that should be totally fine. Our biggest partners might have a competitive element, and that's OK. We'll just focus on the areas where we can collaborate.”