Cisco continued to push its message of a more inclusive future empowered by technology during the 2021 Cisco Live virtual conference this week. And, if Cisco has its way, it will be its equipment and services powering that future.

“We are at a unique point in time where we have proven that technology can help us achieve virtually anything and each of us — all of us — have a role to play as we shape the future of the world," CEO and Chairman Chuck Robbins said in his opening keynote Tuesday.

The overarching theme of this year’s Cisco Live event was that of a smarter, simpler, and more accessible product portfolio. In a keynote not unlike what we’ve come to expect from Apple, Cisco executives extolled the virtues of its walled garden of hardware and software services, which with every acquisition — of which there seems to be no shortage — grows larger year after year.

A Lower Opex-Friendly Barrier to Entry

As the world puts the pandemic behind it and workers return to the office, Robbins said enterprises were accelerating their digital transformations. “We’re focused on helping you accelerate your growth and transformation,” he said.

One of the ways Cisco is doing this is by introducing new consumption models for its services with the launch of the Cisco Plus network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform, which makes good on Robbins' promise to grow recurring revenues.

“People need to be able to work in the most flexible way, and at Cisco we know that also means bringing our offers to market in the most flexible way,” Todd Nightingale, SVP and GM of enterprise networking and cloud at Cisco, said in his keynote speech. “That means bringing offers to market in an as-a-service notion. It can allow us to radically simplify not just the way the technology is used, but the way it's purchased and consumed.”

While software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms are nothing new for the networking vendor, the launch of Cisco Plus will open the door to delivering both hardware and software via a subscription. And to support this transition, the company is also launching a unified management and billing portal it calls the Cisco Plus Experience. While configuration and management will still be spread across a litany of dashboards, customers subscribing to Cisco Plus will be able to order new hardware and services and manage billing under a unified dashboard.

Tighter Integrations

To say Cisco has a healthy appetite for acquisitions would be an understatement. The company has spent billions of dollars annually to expand its product offerings and maintain its competitive edge.

However, at this year’s Cisco Live, the company signaled a concerted effort to more tightly integrate many of these products with the rest of its portfolio.

One integration that garnered considerable attention during this week’s event was that between ThousandEyes network and AppDynamics' application performance monitoring suite. Cisco acquired ThousandEyes last year for $1 billion, while the networking giant snapped up AppDynamics in 2017 for $3.7 billion.

“This allows you to see the entire journey of an application, and the real-time impact to the end-user as traffic crosses the internet from the end user’s PC, tablet, or phone all the way to the cloud or the app service it is using and everything in between,” said Liz Centoni, SVP, chief strategy officer, and GM of applications at Cisco. “We're helping you break down the silos between your teams with common correlated datasets and common business language to focus on what matters most to the business.”

Simplified Security

ThousandEyes isn’t the only platform getting tighter integrations. Cisco also announced a series of new SecureX capabilities alongside a new secure access service edge (SASE) architecture and passwordless identification system in a bid to make security easier to implement and manage.

SecureX, which was introduced last June, integrates Cisco’s network, endpoint, cloud, and application security products, as well as threat intelligence from Cisco Talos, in a cloud-native platform.

“Our mission in security is to radically simplify security. If you think about complexity, especially in security, it’s one of the biggest threats,” Jeetu Patel, SVP and GM of security and collaboration at Cisco, said in a press conference Tuesday. “I often joke that the most insecure system one can build is a really secure system that’s really hard to use.”

The latest update to SecureX spans email security and automated configuration for Google, ServiceNow, and Splunk. The enhancements aim to reduce dwell time for SecOps teams by automating tasks involved with detecting and remediating threats.

Additionally, Cisco announced it would be more tightly integrating its SASE with SecureX to improve visibility and security policy enforcement, and added passwordless identification capabilities to its Duo platform.

Flattening the internet infrastructure

Cisco’s efforts to more tightly integrate and simplify its portfolio didn’t stop at software either. The company discussed how Acacia's pluggable optics would play into its broader routing and switching platforms and ultimately help make connecting the rest of the world less expensive.

Jonathan Davidson, SVP and GM of mass-scale infrastructure at Cisco, opened his keynote speech by thanking the service providers that enabled much of the world to stay connected in the wake of the pandemic.

“There are still three billion people around the entire world who remain unconnected or underserved,” he said, adding that connecting the rest of the world comes down to economics, and lowering the cost of operating and managing the network.

“We've seen silos of optical and IP networks and how they really work autonomously from each other,“ he added. “We need to rethink the fundamentals of the internet. We need to simplify how networks are built so that we can close the digital divide.”

This is where Cisco’s in-house Silicon One switch and routing chips and Acacia's optics come in. Cisco announced plans to develop its own switching and routing silicon back in 2019. Since then, the company has brought nine chips to market. Meanwhile, Cisco acquired Acacia Communications for $4.5 billion earlier this year.

“It enables a new architecture that we call routed-optical networking. You take the silicon, you take the optics, you take the systems, you take the software, and you pull it all together. And what you're [then] able to do is you're able to go and take those transceivers and plug them directly into routers so that you can have a hop by hop network [that] is significantly more efficient than anything we've ever had before,” Davidson explained. “From this day forward, if you do not build with routed-optic networks you're spending 46% too much money.”

Putting People First

Finally, Cisco announced improvements to its Webex collaboration platform to help employers collect insights on their workers' well-being.

Webex People Insights aims to address the pandemic challenges of managing a remote workforce. Starting this summer, Cisco Webex will begin collecting user metrics from video calls for individuals, teams, and organizations in a bid to help workers nurture relationships and connections with their colleagues, regardless of whether they're working from the office or home.

"The future of work is hybrid ... people are going to work from home, they are going to work from the office. Workspaces are anywhere and everywhere our teams need to be," Centoni said. "Webex is now a unified application for calling, meeting, and messaging."

And with the latest update, the platform is getting a whole lot creepier. Or not, according to Patel, who claims the service won't be used to inspect how hard employees work, and instead is focused on gauging worker's well-being.

“We have to make sure that we are very, very careful on how we honor people’s privacy, and we will continue to do that across every scenario,” Patel added.