Cisco again had a busy year, filled with acquisitions, integrations, changing competitive dynamics, job cuts, executive exits, and a complete operational reorganization that changed its focus to new growth opportunities.

Much of that busyness was tied together as Cisco closed on its Splunk acquisition that provided the networking giant with a new security toy to play with. That toy, along with the industrywide push around artificial intelligence (AI) backed Cisco’s move late in the year to focus more efforts on those opportunities.

Casualties of that new focus included thousands of jobs, the exodus of high-profile executives, and concerns over Cisco’s core networking focus moving forward.

SDxCentral posted exhaustively on these events all year, digging into insight from executives, rival firms, analysts, and end-users to shed light on the moves and their broader impact on the market. Below are the five Cisco-related stories that drew the most attention from readers in 2024.

HPE-Juniper, Cisco networking chaos has enterprises nervous Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) pending acquisition of Juniper Networks and Cisco’s recent corporate restructuring that de-emphasizes some of its legacy operations is causing a run of chaos across the networking ecosystem that has some enterprises pausing investments as they wait out the storm. It’s also opening potential conquest opportunities for rivals. Read more

SIEM shakeup: IBM retreats, Splunk sold and the fate of the rest The security information and event management (SIEM) market is now a major battleground with more than 20 vendors included in Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant report. However, amid the cloud transformation, vendor consolidation, and competition and integration with extended detection and response (XDR), the future is increasingly uncertain. Read more

Cisco’s enterprise firewall receives ‘caution’ rating from CyberRatings In a recent independent test by CyberRatings, Cisco‘s Firepower 2130 Threat Defense v7.3.1 firewall received a “caution” rating, a stark contrast to the “recommended” status earned by seven other market-leading enterprise firewall products. Read more

Cisco CFO claims HPE-Juniper deal causing WLAN ‘uncertainty’ Cisco CFO Scott Herren claims that Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s pending $14 billion purchase of Juniper Networks is causing “uncertainty” in the enterprise WLAN market that could be benefiting Cisco, though Cisco’s own efforts in that space could themselves cause some customer concern. Read more

University of Denver ditches Cisco, HPE Aruba for Nile NaaS The University of Denver (DU) tapped Nile for its as-a-service approach to campus networking in recognition of the fact that networking is no longer the strategic differentiator it was in the past. Read more