Cisco unveiled what it admitted was one of its largest device refresh cycles of the past decade, launching new data center switch and network equipment riding the vendor’s growing artificial intelligence (AI) focus and countering similar moves by rivals.

The batch of updates sweep across Cisco’s portfolio, including its network equipment powering campus, branch, and industrial networks. Broadly these include new smart switches targeted at campus networks; secure routers for SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) needs; expansion of its Wi-Fi 7 access point portfolio; and ruggedized switches for industrial use cases.

Management of these new devices is being simplified through a single cloud-based Meraki-based management platform that includes the ability to control Cisco’s Catalyst devices. This platform includes an infusion of Cisco’s ThousandEyes observability and Splunk security components to further bolster management.

Anurag Dhingra, SVP and GM for enterprise connectivity and collaboration, said the updates are Cisco’s “biggest refresh” of the past decade.

“The reason we are refreshing all parts of the portfolio, whether that is wired or wireless, switching or routing or Wi-Fi, and even industrial … is because you really need a full architecture approach to make organizations ready for all of the amazing capabilities that AI is bringing,” Dhingra said. “When you think about deploying digital workers at scale and empowering every human with new capabilities, you can't just focus on one part of your infrastructure. You need a full architecture.”

Cisco is not taking this full architecture approach lightly.

“You have to actually come up with some foresight about what is about to happen, because this infrastructure gets put in for many, many years,” Dhingra added. “These are capital-intensive projects that our customers put in. If you're refreshing your network today, you can't afford to do that again in two years when suddenly a new capability shows up. We have to build these devices, this infrastructure, to be flexible and scalable.”

Cisco maintains AI focus

The latest updates also continue Cisco’s AI infatuation. This includes tapping Nvidia to power a new secure AI architecture, its own work on a quantum network chip, and plans to use OpenAI’s latest Codex AI coding agent to squeeze 10-times increase in productivity from “the human workforce.”

This focus is being fueled by a robust revenue surge. Cisco reported it had hit $1.3 billion in AI-related revenues through the first three quarters of its current fiscal year, which was well ahead of its original forecasts.

The vendor’s most recent sales numbers were parsed out as being roughly two-thirds from Cisco-branded networking systems and one-third from silicon and optics. That break out was more networking heavy than initial AI-related sales, which were more evenly split between those two operating segments.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins explained that this mix change showed “the growing importance of our technology to web-scale customers for their AI training use cases.”

“With agentic AI, the network is fundamentally constrained and will require ultrafast, low-latency, energy-efficient networks, which we can deliver,” Robbins added.

Cisco’s push has other company executives breathlessly touting the AI opportunity.

“It is definitely one of those times where I don't think any one of us … have actually operated at this intensive level,” Cisco Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel said of his team during the vendor’s briefing on the latest news. “I don't care if you worked at a startup, you worked at a large company, this is as fast as we've ever run, and no matter how fast you're running, you're probably running slightly slower than you need to, so you need to go even faster.”

Dell’Oro Group is predicting the high-end router market will see a 4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years, hitting $12.7 billion in sales by 2029. The firm noted that growth will be driven by higher-speed routers designed to handle expected AI workloads.

“Our long-term view of the routing market remains positive, especially for high-end routers,” Dell’Oro Group VP Jimmy Yu wrote. “At the end of the day, bandwidth demand continues to increase. There are of course times when the market contracts when network supply exceeds current needs, like it did last year in 2024. But overall, demand for more bandwidth has always gone up and we do not see that changing any time soon. This brings greater need for denser, more efficient networks, especially routers that have 400 [Gb/s] and 800 [Gb/s] ports to fill the future bandwidth gap.”

Rivals needle Cisco

Despite that speed, Cisco rival Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has been pointed in taunting what it perceives as Cisco’s tardiness to the smart switch soiree.

“We're welcoming Cisco to the party,” John Gray, head of global marketing for HPE Aruba, explained to SDxCental in a recent interview tied to that vendor’s own new product launch. “They just announced something, although they're not shipping anything yet, and when they do ship it, my understanding is it's not going to have anywhere near the functionality that what we have been shipping for the last couple of years. It's only going to be zone-based firewalling with the need of a Hypershield license on top of that to enable the DPUs. It'll be interesting, and we welcome the competition.”

That “something” was Cisco’s recently launched N9300-series smart switches that also use AMD Pensando DPUs.

Cisco can probably brush aside some of that wit as it was recently feted by Gartner as one of the data center switch market’s “leaders” alongside rivals Arista Networks, Huawei, and Juniper Networks. HPE was located in Gartner’s “challengers” box with Nvidia.

Gartner in its report added that organizations continuing to use legacy data center switching equipment to support their new generative artificial intelligence (genAI) and AI workloads “will waste at least 30% of the processing capability.” This is set to drive growth across the data center switching market.