Cisco (not so) Live Amsterdam - a retrospective wrap on the firm's EMEA gathering with "a whole new Cisco" on show

There are several reasons for Cisco to have a spring in its step and they were highlighted at the recent Cisco Live event in Amsterdam. 

The company has a significant refresh opportunity over the next two years around its last day of support kit in its installed base. A platform refresh is thus in focus amongst many customers, and Cisco has what it describes as a full stack platform ready for them, from silicon through to the data center, via its networking, security, observability, cloud and AI capabilities. 

Suffice to say the company is feeling bullish about its prospects. As Jeetu Patel Cisco’s President and Chief Product Officer puts it:

This is a whole new Cisco.

The Apple of AI infrastructure?

Patel’s vision for Cisco is bold: to become the default infrastructure provider as enterprises move to adopt generative, agentic and physical AI. As he says:

We have extreme clarity on being a platform company instead of looking like a holding company.

The sheer force of personality and relentless energy needed to get a big complex company to start breaking down its product silos and acting as a unified company selling a platform vision cannot be underestimated and Patel seems to have copious amounts of both.

Patel is a soundbite delight and his keynote was peppered with memorable phrases. When talking about the new Cisco Unified Edge device he proclaims: 

Edge is not the fringe, it is the front line.

Upon agentic ops we were told there will be:

A human in the loop and an agent in every loop.

Speaking with analysts he explained that with observability:

The AI Supply Chain becomes for agents like the HR department for humans.

He is also managing to align Cisco’s engineering teams behind the platform concept. He is raising Cisco’s prospects by articulating a confident, assertive narrative, both internally and externally.

However, the challenge now is the gap between what the market associates the Cisco brand to be (the dependable, trustworthy networking incumbent) and where Patel is pitching it (the Big Tech company of AI Infrastructure). Marketing stretch is great, as long as it doesn’t create too big a credibility gap between strategic goals and actual market reach.

Cisco is doing well in servicing the hyperscalers and the neoclouds with AI infrastructure. The stretch lies with enterprise AI Infrastructure sales, to which point it is pertinent to mention that the vast majority of Cisco’s channel to market is via partners who are typically networking resellers. More on this in a companion article.

Enterprises are not AI-ready

In the tech market there is, when it comes to generative and agentic AI adoption, a pregnant pause. This is impacting all vendors and is feeding into the talk around an AI bubble about to burst. As I have noted previously Cisco is fairly well insulated from the impact of this, since it has a big installed base to refresh. So, whatever the marketing whim of the day, enterprise buyers will need robust secure operational networks and will be looking increasingly to invest in the edge. Cisco has these bases covered alongside its AI positioning.

Cisco also has a deep well of engineering expertise to draw on to reassure enterprises that it has their back, whenever they are ready to invest in AI infrastructure. For example, speaking a lot of sense to analysts at Cisco Live, Raj Chopra, SVP, Chief Product Officer for Cisco Security, observed:

Building with AI is easy, doing it well is really hard.

His assessment is that the pacesetting companies adopting enterprise AI are creating centres of excellence based on experiential evidence rather than standards, concluding that:

The spark of AI goodness tends to come from a very small group of people. A lot of enterprises are running AI hackathons, but you always need a core group to get started.

For Will Eatherton, SVP, Data Center, Internet & Cloud Infrastructure Engineering at Cisco, his view is that agentic AI will create:

...some really big fiascos because implementations are chaotic rather than planful, as arm-wrestling takes place between lines of business and tech teams.

This type of honesty is really important in building trust with enterprises as they prepare themselves for AI adoption.

EMEA wants sovereign critical infrastructure

Last September, Cisco announced that it would provide fully air-gapped infrastructure under perpetual licence agreements for customers that require complete operational independence — including the ability to run with no connectivity back to Cisco if operating in a country at war. While initially positioned as a targeted offer for Europe, demand has accelerated rapidly. 

Ahead of Cisco Live EMEA, Gordon Thomson, President of Cisco EMEA, described early but growing interest. By the second day of the event, however, he reported that a majority of CIOs in the region were actively prioritising sovereign infrastructure as a strategic requirement.

This shift reflects a broader movement across EMEA toward sovereign critical infrastructure, systems that can operate autonomously, remain insulated from geopolitical disruption, and comply with tightening national regulations. Unlike many competitors focused solely on sovereign cloud services, Cisco’s model extends to on-premises infrastructure, enabling full-stack sovereignty. The sovereign agreement is offered at a premium, with pricing determined by contract length and specific operational terms.

Speaking at Cisco Live, Ulf Schade, Chief Digitalisation Officer for Computacenter AG, explained that his company was working with Cisco to take a:

...risk-based consulting approach as sovereignty for each customer means different things, so we have to create specific risk profiles with the emphasis on protecting data rather than its resting place.

Albi van Zyl, Head of Technology Solutions for NTT DATA in the UK&I said she was pleased that:

...partners like Cisco are thinking this through because those customers that are choosing sovereignty first for infrastructure are now moving very quickly.

My take

One of the common phrases you hear from Cisco executives is that they meet their customers where they are. At the moment the vast majority of customers in EMEA, according to Cisco’s own research, are not AI-ready. Many of them are more concerned about managing risk over control of technology that is largely not developed or managed in region. 

One of the corollaries of this is that there is an increased interest in localisation at the edge, driven by a mix of performance, regulatory and sovereignty requirements. For example, Cisco has new capabilities ready here with its Unified Edge Server, and it also has its sovereignty licensing poised for delivery for this regional need, and it is putting a strong AI infrastructure play in motion that may take a while to be embraced. 

Cisco’s confidence in its ability to meet its customers where they are is deserved. It just needs to mind that gap between setting out its AI infrastructure position, and what its enterprise customers actually intend to buy over the next couple of years.