Cisco Live: Todd Nightingale

Todd Nightingale, Cisco’s executive vice president and general manager of enterprise networking and cloud, outlined recent changes to Cisco’s networking portfolio.

Cisco announced on Tuesday that customers can now manage their Catalyst switches through the Cisco Meraki cloud portal. In addition, they can manage their Nexus data center switches through a cloud-based portal.

These changes reflect an added emphasis Cisco is making on agility.

“For years, to be honest, I’m not sure that we as an industry or even Cisco were focused on agility as much as we should have. As an industry we delivered more and more power and sophistication every step of the way, as we built faster feeds and speeds and more complete feature sets. As we built more sophistication, we unlocked things we never thought were possible. At the same time, too often we passed the burden of complexity onto you, the IT teams,” Nightingale said.

Shahid Ahmed of NTT agreed.

“We all need to start simplifying, not making things complex. I think with this added technology, things have become really really complex,” Ahmed told Channel Futures. “But if you look at your Apple phone, it has become really simple, and we want to go in that direction. Even the most complex technologies can be made very simple.”