Cisco Systems, Inc. (Cisco) designs and sells a broad range of technologies that help to power, secure, and draw insights from the Internet.
The company is integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into its product portfolios across networking, security, collaboration and observability to simplify how the company’s technology is delivered, managed and optimized and to help customers maximize the business value of their technology investments and accelerate their digital transformation.
The comp...
Cisco Systems, Inc. (Cisco) designs and sells a broad range of technologies that help to power, secure, and draw insights from the Internet.
The company is integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into its product portfolios across networking, security, collaboration and observability to simplify how the company’s technology is delivered, managed and optimized and to help customers maximize the business value of their technology investments and accelerate their digital transformation.
The company conducts its business globally and manage the company’s business by geography. The company’s business is organized into the following three geographic segments: Americas; Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and Asia Pacific, Japan, and China (APJC).
The company’s products and technologies are grouped into the following categories: Networking, Security, Collaboration and Observability. In addition to the company’s product offerings, the company provides a broad range of services offerings, including technical support services and advanced services, also known as lifecycle services. The company’s customers include businesses of all sizes, public institutions, governments, and service providers, including large webscale providers. These customers often look to the company as a strategic partner to help them use information technology (IT) to differentiate themselves and drive positive business outcomes.
Strategy and Priorities
Across the globe, businesses and organizations of every size are leveraging Cisco technology to transform and drive better outcomes and experiences. The company also help customers navigate emerging technological shifts. The company’s strategy is to securely connect everything to make those desired outcomes and experiences possible for the company’s customers.
The company’s customers have three key priorities: building modern and resilient infrastructure; protecting against the cyber threats of today and tomorrow; and harnessing the power of AI and data.
These customer priorities are central to how the company innovates and develops its technology. First, the company provides the underlying network connectivity for the company’s customers, whether they are connecting traditional branch offices, data centers, smart grids, video devices, electric vehicles, or other devices. Second, the company help protect those network connections and the underlying technology architecture against cyber threats. Third, through the visibility the company has into data across the network, connected devices and applications, the company provides context and insights to the company’s customers about what is happening in their technology architecture, not only in their on-premise infrastructure and private data centers, but also their cloud infrastructure. The company’s ongoing innovation is delivered, managed and optimized through a combination of hardware, software and subscriptions, in line with the flexible consumption models the company’s customers request.
Cisco can help customers connect, protect and draw actionable insights from their technology. The company does this in service of delivering the digital resilience the company’s customers need for today’s complex and unpredictable world.
Customer Priorities
Modernize Infrastructure
In an increasingly digital and connected world, where each new connection to the Internet puts more demand on the network, the company’s customers are looking to modernize and transform their infrastructure, including through automation to manage and monitor each connection in real time.
The company continues to transform its enterprise networking portfolio by bringing together several technologies to form an integrated architecture.
The company’s Observability offerings collect and process daily measurements from customers’ owned and unowned networks, providing automated insights, proactive recommendations, and closed-loop operations tailored to customers to enable them to reduce mean time to resolution of issues and improve IT productivity and user experience.
For the data center, the company’s strategy is to deliver multicloud architectures that bring policy and operational consistency, regardless of where applications or data reside. The company continues to make significant investments in the development of software, silicon and optics, which are the building blocks for the internet for the future.
As part of modernizing their infrastructure, customers of every size are also looking for solutions to help them communicate more effectively with their customers and to connect their employees more efficiently for productivity. The company’s collaboration portfolio, which includes interoperable devices and the company’s cloud contact center, provides those solutions, and serves as a key component of smart buildings, powered over ethernet, that will define the workplaces of the future.
Improve Cybersecurity
The company’s differentiated security strategy is based on three pillars: moving from point solutions to a platform comprehensively integrated with the infrastructure; infusing security into the fabric of the network; and harnessing the depth and breadth of telemetry data from Cisco and with the company’s acquisition of Splunk Inc. (‘Splunk’) to prevent, detect, and respond to sophisticated attacks.
Harness the Power of AI and Data
The company provides network infrastructure to power AI training and inference workloads for both webscalers and enterprises. The company helps to scale its customers’ network infrastructure with high-density routers and switches, improved network management, and high-performance optics. The company is reinventing data center operations for its customers by simplifying the configuration, monitoring, and maintenance of fabrics, compute, networking and storage.
Products and Services
The company’s products and services are grouped into the following categories:
Networking
Networking consists of the company’s core networking technologies of switching, routing, wireless, and servers. These technologies consist of both hardware and software offerings, including software licenses and software-as-a-service (SaaS), that help the company’s customers build networks, automate, modernize and transform their infrastructure. It is critical for the company to deliver continuous value to the company’s customers.
The company’s Switching portfolio encompasses campus switching, as well as data center switching offerings. The company’s campus switching offerings provide the foundation for converged data, voice, video, and Internet of Things (IoT) services. These switches offer enhanced security and reliability and are designed to scale efficiently as the company’s customers grow. Within campus switching are the company’s Catalyst 9000 series of switches that include hardware with embedded software, along with a software subscription referred to as Cisco DNA. Cisco DNA provides automation, analytics and security features and can be centrally monitored, managed, and configured. Also, within campus switching the company has a range of Meraki cloud-managed switches for customers who prefer ease of management in lean-IT environments. The company’s data center switching offerings, led by the Nexus 9000 series, provide the foundation for mission critical data centers with high availability, scalability, and security across traditional data centers and private and public cloud data centers. The company continues to add greater visibility and analytics across its networks and applications, enabling the company to deliver better experiences for its customers.
Internet Infrastructure primarily consists of the company’s routed optical networking solutions. The company is focusing on transforming connectivity to the Internet and the cloud environment by efficiently meeting the growing demand for low-latency and higher speeds. The company’s routed optical networking systems and the company’s pluggable optic solutions, allow the company to transform the economics of building and operating networks for the company’s service provider customers, including the company’s webscale customers. Cisco Silicon One is the company’s single, unified, and scalable networking silicon architecture which the company has expanded from a routing-focused solution to one which addresses the webscale switching market through the combination of its high-performance, feature-rich, and low-power characteristics. The company’s Cisco 8000 series routers, which are based on the company’s Silicon One, provide broad capacity in high-density designs, allowing the company’s customers to reduce operational footprints, lower carbon emissions, and transition to more efficient network architectures.
The company’s Enterprise Routing portfolio interconnects public and private wireline and mobile networks, delivering highly secure and reliable connectivity to campus, data center and branch networks. The company’s routing solutions are designed to meet the scale, reliability, and security needs of the company’s large to small customers.
The company’s Wireless portfolio provides indoor and outdoor wireless coverage designed for seamless roaming use of voice, video, and data applications. These products include wireless access points and controllers that are on-premise and cloud managed, and which, combined with the company’s Switching portfolio, delivers a converged access solution that is powerful, yet simple.
Security
Security consists of the company’s Network Security, Identity and Access Management, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and Threat Intelligence, Detection, and Response offerings. Security is a leading priority for the company’s customers, regardless of size or industry. The company continues to invest in resources across the company’s security portfolio focused on cloud-based offerings, AI-enhanced threat detection and end-to-end security architectures. The company’s Threat Intelligence, Detection, and Response offerings incorporate the technologies of Splunk to prevent, detect and respond to sophisticated cyber attacks. This product category includes the Splunk Platform and Splunk Security offerings after the acquisition of Splunk, although the Splunk Platform has use cases that can also be applicable for Observability offerings. With the company’s acquisition of Splunk in the third quarter of fiscal 2024, the company has begun to integrate the company’s solutions, starting with Cisco Extended Detection and Response (XDR) and Splunk Enterprise Security. Additionally, the company continues to invest in expanding the company’s SASE architecture by delivering combined network and security functionality in a single cloud-native service.
Collaboration
Collaboration consists of the company’s Webex Suite, Collaboration Devices, Contact Center and Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) offerings. The company’s offerings within the Collaboration portfolio consist of software offerings, including perpetual licenses and subscription arrangements, as well as hardware. The company’s Collaboration strategy is to reimagine employee and customer experiences to be more inclusive and engaging by providing technology that enables distributed teams to collaborate effortlessly. The company offers end-to-end collaboration solutions that can be delivered from the cloud, on-premise or within hybrid cloud environments allowing customers to transition their collaboration solutions from on-premise to the cloud. AI and machine learning capabilities are embedded across the Webex portfolio to help improve productivity. The company’s CPaaS is a cloud communications platform that integrates communication channels and existing back-end business systems together to help enable the orchestration and automation of all customer and employee interactions.
Observability
Observability consists of the company’s network assurance, monitoring and analytics and observability suite offerings. The company’s Observability offerings are designed to bring together and provide end-to-end visibility of the company’s customer’s environments across applications, networks, multi-cloud infrastructures and the Internet, to help deliver full stack observability for modern environments and drive relevant real-time insights. These offerings enable organizations to see, understand, and improve every digital experience and assure seamless connectivity for their modern digital environments. The company’s network assurance offering, ThousandEyes, is a network intelligence platform that provides in-depth visibility into network and internet performance. The company’s Observability Suite offering, including Splunk Observability and AppDynamics, provides complete visibility across the full stack from infrastructure to applications, as well as the digital customer experience.
Services
In addition to the company’s product offerings, the company provides a broad range of service and support options for the company’s customers. The company’s support and maintenance services help its customers ensure their products operate efficiently, remain available, and benefit from the most up-to-date system and application software. These services help customers protect their network investments, manage risk, and minimize downtime for systems running mission-critical applications.
The company also provides comprehensive advisory services that are focused on responsive, preventive, and consultative support of the company’s technologies for specific networking needs. The company is investing in and expanding advisory services in the areas of software, cloud, security, and analytics, which reflects the company’s strategy of selling customer outcomes. The company is focused on three priorities: utilizing technology advisory services to drive higher product and services; assessment and migration services providing the tools, expertise and methodologies to enable the company’s customers to migrate to new technology platforms; and providing optimization services aligned with customers’ business expectations. The company is also embedding AI assistants and automated functions into the company’s services to drive productivity.
Customers and Markets
The company’s customers primarily operate in the following markets: enterprise, public sector and service provider and cloud.
Enterprise
Enterprise includes businesses that are large regional, national, or global organizations with multiple locations or branch offices, or mid-market and small businesses. Many enterprise businesses have unique IT, collaboration, and networking needs within a multi-vendor environment. The company’s mid-market and small business customers typically require the latest advanced technologies, but with less complexity. The company offers service and support packages, financing, and managed network services, primarily through the company’s service provider partners. The company sells these products through a network of third-party application and technology vendors and channel partners, as well as selling directly to these customers.
Public Sector
Public Sector includes federal, state and local governments, as well as educational institution customers. Many public sector customers have unique IT, collaboration, and networking needs within a multi-vendor environment. The company sells to public sector customers through a network of third-party application and technology vendors and channel partners, as well as through direct sales.
Service Provider and Cloud
Service Provider and Cloud includes regional, national, and international wireline carriers and webscale operators, as well as internet, cable, and wireless providers. The company also includes media, broadcast, and content providers within this customer market, as the lines in the telecommunications industry continue to blur between traditional network-based, content-based and application-based services. This customer market offers data, voice, video, and mobile/wireless services to businesses, governments, utilities, and consumers worldwide. Service provider and cloud businesses use a variety of the company’s products and services for their own networks. In addition, many service providers use Cisco data center, virtualization, and collaboration technologies to offer managed or internet-based services to their business customers. Compared with other customers, service providers are more likely to require network design, deployment, and support services because of the greater scale and higher complexity of their networks, whose requirements are addressed by the company’s architectural approach.
Sales Overview
As of July 27, 2024, the company’s worldwide sales and marketing functions consisted of approximately 28,000 employees, including managers, sales representatives, and technical support personnel. The company sells its products and services both directly and indirectly through a variety of channels with support from the company’s sales workforce. A substantial portion of the company’s products and services is sold indirectly through channel partners, and the remainder is sold through direct sales. Channel partners include systems integrators, service providers, other third-party resellers, and distributors.
Systems integrators and service providers typically sell directly to end users and often provide system installation, technical support, professional services, and other support services in addition to network equipment sales. Systems integrators also typically integrate the company’s products into an overall solution. Some service providers are also systems integrators.
Distributors may hold inventory and sell to systems integrators, service providers, and other third-party resellers. The company refers to sales through distributors as the company’s two-tier system of sales to the end customer. Revenue from two-tier distributors is recognized based on a sell-in method.
The company’s service offerings complement its products through a range of consulting, technical, project, quality, and software maintenance services, including 24-hour online and telephone support through technical assistance centers.
Financing Arrangements
The company provides financing arrangements for certain qualified customers to build, maintain, and upgrade their networks. The company’s financing arrangements include loans, leases (sales-type, direct financing and operating) and channel financing arrangements.
Competition
The company’s competitors (in each case relative to only some of the company’s products or services) include: Amazon Web Services LLC; Arista Networks, Inc.; Broadcom Inc.; Ciena Corporation; CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc.; Datadog Inc.; Dell Technologies Inc.; Dynatrace Inc.; Fortinet, Inc.; Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Company; Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.; Juniper Networks, Inc.; Microsoft Corporation; New Relic, Inc.; Nokia Corporation; Nvidia Corporation; Palo Alto Networks, Inc.; RingCentral, Inc.; Zoom Video Communications, Inc.; and Zscaler, Inc., among others.
History
Cisco Systems, Inc. was founded in 1984. The company was incorporated in California in 1984 and reincorporated in Delaware in 2021.
