Cisco admittedly missed out on the first wave of cloud computing. But, according to CEO Chuck Robbins, it’s not making that same mistake again. At the company’s annual partner summit, Robbins laid out a six-step plan for success in a cloud-first world.

“Number one, we want to focus on the application experience for our customers,” he said during his keynote. “We know that they’re going to begin to build more and more of their applications in a cloud native model, and they’re going to be running in a distributed capability.”

This will require new and better application insights, visibility, security, and even networking capabilities, Robbins added. Cisco’s been investing in application experience (and startups) over the past few years, paying $3.7 billion for AppDynamics in 2017 and $1 billion for ThousandEyes in May. AppDynamics provides performance monitoring and ThousandEyes does multi-cloud network monitoring.

A month later, Cisco’s Chief Strategy Officer Anuj Kapur hinted at future application-focused acquisitions on the horizon.

During a media question and answer session, Robbins teased how Cisco will augment AppDynamics and Thousand Eyes’ technologies “over the next couple years” to help customers develop applications. “What you could see in the future is an application developer whose program would dynamically reroute itself based on insights that we are providing,” he explained. “These things are going to [be] sort of virtual overlays on the public internet. The pandemic’s going to accelerate the need and our opportunity to go deliver on those technologies.”

Cisco’s second priority involves delivering its core networking capabilities as a service.

In 2017, Cisco set a goal to have 30% of its revenue come from software by the end of 2020. And while Cisco narrowly missed that target for the full year — 29% of revenue came from software during fiscal year 2020 — it did bring in 31% of revenue from software for Q4 alone.

Robbins also noted that 51% of Cisco’s revenue came from software and services in fiscal year 2020, beating its 50% target. And also during Q4, 78% of Cisco’s software revenue came from subscription-based software, which exceeded its 66% target.

Robbins discussed this transition to cloud-delivered services on Cisco’s most recent earnings call. While the company hasn’t set a timeline for this shift to as-a-service, during the question answer session at the partner summit Robbins said it will be “a long transition,” due to a couple factors.

“Customer adoption will take a long time,” he said. “Some customers are going to want it early, and others will take a long time to get there just like any major transition.”

The other factor: it’s a lot easier to sell security products as cloud-delivered software than it is to make, say, an Ethernet switch-as-a-service.

“The third area is around our communication providers: the telecom providers, the service providers, and cable providers, the cloud companies, and looking at these big architectural transitions like 400 G, or flattening of the networks, or 5G,” Robbins said.

Right now, Cisco primarily targets three 5G domains: the standalone (SA) 5G core, transport infrastructure, and, to a lesser extent, the radio access network (RAN) via Cisco’s open RAN orchestration software. But, Robbins said, “I think you’re going to see our role continue to expand in this space. We’re looking at an integrated 5G software stack that we can deliver with our partners to our [operator] customers around the world.”

Robbins said the fourth pillar looks at the future of work. And despite WebEx’s boom during the pandemic, “we know that’s more than just a collaboration portfolio,” Robbins added. “How do we deliver the experience to that home worker, that hybrid worker so that they feel like they’re getting the same technology and capabilities that they would have in an office?”

A recent Cisco survey found that pre-COVID, only 19% of organizations had more than half of their workforce working remotely compared to 62% now. And 37% say that more than half of their workforce want to continue working from home post-pandemic.

“Fifth is how security has to evolve, and the end-to-end security architecture that we’re going to continue to build,” Robbins said. That same survey found that the pandemic will usher in long-term changes to corporate cybersecurity policies and investments — largely due to the rapid onset of remote work. Additionally, 95% of organizations indicated that some portion of these new security changes they made to accommodate remote work will be permanent. And 66% said that they will likely increase their cybersecurity investments due to the COVID-19 situation.

“Finally, around edge, we’re going to take all of our assets, and we’re going to deliver edge capabilities,” Robbins said. “Whether it’s the carrier edge, the cloud edge, or the enterprise edge, to allow the application developers in the future to truly run distributed applications, and access the data, and manage the data securely at the point where it truly does have value.”