At Cisco Live, Vendor Makes the Case for a Platform Identity

CISCO LIVE — Cisco is on a mission to establish itself as a platform company, and the company is preaching simplicity and integration as the path to get there.

Cisco executives have hit hard on the idea of simplicity at their annual Cisco Live conference in Las Vegas this week, and various portfolio updates have supported that ideal. For example, the vendor is working together different observability categories into its Full-Stack Observability suite and various security functions under its Security Cloud. Moreover, Meraki management portal users can use single sign-on to access Cisco’s other network management portal. And Cisco executives say security and networking will see more integration over the upcoming years.

The emphasis on simplicity accompanies another message from Cisco leaders: the goal of building platforms that customers can easily use.

“Cisco loves features. For years it’s been a feature game: feature, feature, feature, feature,” Cisco chair and CEO Chuck Robbins (pictured on stage above) said in a good-humored quip during in his Tuesday morning keynote. “But if you can’t deploy them, they’re no good. So the No. 1 feature that our teams need to continue to focus on is simplicity. Simplicity and your experience using our technology.”

Analysts attending Cisco Live have emphasized that the simplicity messaging represents a significant shift for Cisco, as well as for the IT industry as a whole.

Omdia’s Camille Mendler

“This whole discussion about radical simplification – talking about the outcomes instead of the features – it doesn’t sound like a big deal. But if you’ve been in this technology game for X number of decades as these guys have, it’s a completely different way of attacking the market,” said Camille Mendler, Omdia‘s chief analyst for enterprise services. You’ve got to be customer-focused to compete effectively in this market.” (Omdia and Channel Futures are both part of Informa Tech.)

Emmanuel Ola-Dake, who leads consulting firm and Cisco partner Molaprise, said customers are always looking for more simplicity. And while Cisco’s journey to create a single-view visibility for the technology environment and “single-play integration” is an ongoing process, Ola-Dake said partners such as Molaprise are posed to reap the benefits.

Molaprise’s Emmanuel Ola-Dake

“It looks like it will help with going to market, execution and conversion, as well as making our clients happy and providing a better customer experience. I think that’s the end outcome,” Ola-Dake told Channel Futures.

Buying and Building

Cisco executives in conversations with press and analysts touched on how Cisco’s M&A can promote platform expansion without creating siloes. For ZK Research principal analyst Zeus Kerravala, Cisco wasn’t attempting to build silos, but some of those disparities naturally emerged due to the many different companies the company purchased.

ZK Research’s Zeus Kerravala

Robbins emphasized that many of the portfolio announcements Cisco made on Tuesday came from homegrown development.

“We went out and looked at options, and we said, ‘we can actually build something better than we could buy,'” he said.

Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s executive vice president of security and collaboration, said M&A can still fit into that organic growth.

“I think for any company to be great, you have to know how to …