Cisco missed out in the first wave of cloud computing, but the company is confident that its new programmable silicon architecture and 8000 Series router will chart a new course, Jonathan Davidson, SVP and GM of Cisco’s Mass-Scale Infrastructure business, said today during an investor conference.

“We have the highest density platform in the market shipping and generally available with 14.4 terabits per slot and 10.8 terabits in a single rack unit,” he said, referring to Cisco Silicon One and its new routers that it developed over a four-year period.

“It’s not a secret that we did not do as well as we wanted to in the first phase of the web build outs. I think you can tie that back to really just not listening to what was happening in our web accounts and hyperscale customers,” Davidson said. Cisco has learned its lesson about those past mistakes, including a failure to build what hyperscalers need and not changing how products and services are consumed for a cloud-based model, he explained.

“This is not a short-term endeavor. This is a long-term transition, not only for us but for our customers as they go through and build new data centers or as they refresh their data centers. So it’s not something that you’ll see a spike in any given quarter, this is something that’s going to take time,” Davidson said.

Service providers and hyperscalers have different perspectives about modular and mixed platforms, but Cisco has innovated on both and can appeal to either framework, he added. With “most hyperscalers this concept to kind of a switch over routers was blurred a long, long time ago. What the industry would consider switches are often routers,” he explained.

Beyond hyperscalers’ data centers, Cisco is also increasingly optimistic about opportunities in 5G. The transition to 5G is making impacts around the world, Davidson said, and this requires operators to “make some big technology decisions” about which vendors will provide the mobile core, radio access network (RAN), and transport infrastructure for IP and optical networks.

“We see that there definitely are more service providers looking at virtual or open RAN enabled technologies than even 12 months ago, so we think that disaggregation and open interfaces” are becoming more standardized and beneficial for operators’ technology environment, he explained.

Cisco today also announced its first jointly-engineered Cisco Validated Design for Google Cloud’s Anthos on Cisco HyperFlex. Google tapped Cisco as a partner on Anthos, its hybrid-cloud platform based on Kubernetes, in April 2019. Anthos 1.2 with Cisco HyperFlex was made available earlier this year.

“This [validated design] provides a blueprint of design and deployment best practices for foundational elements of the hybrid cloud architecture that we announced last year,” Aniket Patanker, principal product manager of HyperFlex, explained in a blog post. As a result of this development, customers with Google Cloud and Cisco can now deploy Kubernetes-native applications at scale on Cisco HyperFlex, he added.

Finally, Cisco today revealed some new equipment tailored for bandwidth-heavy IoT applications. The venor announced its new 10 gigabit Cisco Catalyst IE3300 Rugged Series switches to extend the benefits of intent-based networking to the IoT edge, and the IR1101 Integrated Services Router that is in the final stages of FirstNet certification for reliable connectivity over a dedicated LTE band.