Cisco Live: Meraki, Catalyst Integrations Spur Move to Cloud Networking

CISCO LIVE- Cisco is integrating two key offerings amid a larger effort to build a more agile, cloud-based networking portfolio.

Customers can now perform cloud management for Cisco Catalyst switches using the Cisco Meraki. They and their partners provision and manage existing Catalyst hardware and licenses.

“If you have a Meraki system and you have a Catalyst system, you will now be able to see both of those together in in the Meraki dashboard,” said Rebecca Stone, senior vice president of customer solutions marketing and Meraki chief marketing officer.

On a similar note, Cisco also announced that its Nexus data center portfolio into the cloud. Cisco previously merged disparate Nexus management tools into an on-premise dashboard. Now Cisco is taking another step by launching Nexus Cloud, which leverages the Cisco Intersight platform.

Cisco’s Rebecca Stone

“We believe that’s the first step on a much longer automation journey that our customers are already starting to go on today,” Stone told analysts and journalists on Monday. “…The idea is that we are going to be able to start to deliver more integrated solutions than we ever have before.”

Background

Stone and other Cisco executives are announcing a litany of product launches and portfolio updates at the company’s annual Cisco Live event in Las Vegas. Many of these changes, including the new SASE offering Cisco announced last week, aim to support businesses in their adjustment to a hybrid work era.

And one of the biggest challenges of the era, Stone told reporters, is a lack of predictability.

“There is no way to predict what’s going to be next. It’s just going to continue to be unpredictable. The problem is that we haven’t built a system that’s really ready to respond. We really need to think about becoming much more agile, resilient and productive in how those companies are developing their networks in order to be able to respond to their customers,” she said.

However, businesses face the challenge of a increasingly fragmented networks introduce more complexity and security risks.

“Our IT teams are not set up to manage that, particularly the network ops teams, and it’s making the IT experience far less scalable, far less intelligent and significantly more complex.”

Stone said the best way to address this complexity was to start with a platform rather than start with disparate end points.

Cisco also announced ThousandEyes WAN Insights, which leverages Cisco’s SD-WAN products to provide predictive automation. The company said the offering will be available to SD-WAN customers soon.

“We know that internet is the new enterprise WAN. And yet, organizations are really challenged in delivering an application experience across the networks that they don’t control,” Stone said.

Scroll through the slide show above learn more about the SASE offering as well as take a virtual tour of Cisco’s World of Solutions expo hall.