Cisco focused on reducing complexity with flexibility for customers

During the executive Q and A session at Cisco Live, Oliver Tuszik, EVP, Global Sales and Chief Sales Officer at Cisco said that customers are mainly concerned about getting rid of the complexities they face in the solutions they have.

At Cisco Live 2025 in San Diego, Cisco unveiled a variety of solutions that is mostly focused on simplifying and automating the existing capabilities and portfolio offer to customers. With businesses around the world focused on their AI journey, ensuring that network and security can be managed with minimal complexity is key as it ensures a seamless experience for everyone.

According to Oliver Tuszik, EVP, Global Sales and Chief Sales Officer at Cisco, conversations with customers reveal that complexity is something they want to get rid up because they will not have the team to manage these complexities in the future.

“When you take a look at all the announcements at Cisco Live, it was mainly about bringing it closer together, simplifying and automating the portfolio. The AI Canvas makes it very clear and its my famous product. Customers that see it for the first time immediately ask for it because it’s the answer to a lot of their real-world problems,” said Tuszik during an executive Q and A session with journalists at Cisco Live.

AI Canvas is Cisco's first Generative UI for cross-domain IT shared, intelligent workspace that brings real-time telemetry, AI insights, and team collaboration into one view.

He explained that the complexities include how customers can scale their AI engine as well as security. Customers are also worried about managing daily operations. And Tuszik believes that customers now see the advantages of the AI Canvas.

“And just to be clear, this is not limited to the Cisco portfolio. It can pull data with ThousandEyes flung from whatever system you have. A customer told me he utilized it to understand an outage that they had with a different vendor. It took him a week to find out the reason. With the AI canvas prototype, it was 49 minutes,” added Tuszik.

Reducing complexity with flexibility

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco explained that Cisco’s policy for customers is that while they have a tightly integrated platform, it is also loosely coupled for customers. This means customers don’t have to buy everything from the platform.

“We have to be very open and ecosystem friendly. We've now shown this over and over again for the past five years regarding the integration that we have with companies that might not be perceived as competitors. And so, with XDR, we've got telemetry that we suck in from Palo Alto, from CrowdStrike, and from Sentinel-1. With Microsoft, with Teams Rooms, we're able to go out and have Microsoft Teams Rooms on native VR devices. One of the things that we announced today with Security Cloud Control and the HyperShield is the Hybrid Mesh Firewall. If you have other firewalls, we will actually manage those other firewalls also from our security cloud control,” said Patel.

Cisco’s Hybrid Mesh Firewall adds hardware as well as new enforcement points and policy management capabilities in Security Cloud Control with its latest innovations. This includes Mesh Policy Engine which enables teams to define a single intent-based policy that is enforced across Cisco and third-party firewalls. Not only does this simplify day-to-day operations; it also enables organizations to change enforcement points without re-writing policy.

For Patel, the goal is to make sure that Cisco interoperates with an ecosystem that exists.

“We will never ask people to buy everything all at once as the only mechanism of actually inserting with us. In fact, if you happen to have Zscaler and you've got internet access with them, but you needed private access from us, we could actually start with that. It’s the same with HyperShield. If you've got firewalls but you need a little bit more HyperShield, we can start with that. So, these insertion points that we've created in the business are very intentional, knowing full well that the estate for security that organizations have is going to be pretty broad and it's going to be multi-vendor, and we have to fit into that ecosystem,” explained Patel.

Echoing Patel’s views, Tuszik added Cisco also doesn’t see itself just as a security company.

“We are a networking security company in the area of AI. So we bring things together that nobody else does. And talking about customers, we see more customers moving away from a zoo of security vendors to replace 80% or up to 90% of their security portfolio with Cisco. This is because we build the platform, we increase the portfolio and we integrate it,” said Tuszik.

Partners and acquisitions

According to Tuszik, Cisco’s existing partners and a lot of new partners are already starting to capture the opportunity. As Cisco is also in the midst of revamping its entire partner program, they are still focused on empowering partners.

“We empower them. We see a huge demand from them. And we adapt to clearly how we pay these partners. And just to be clear, when we talk about partners, we are also partnering with the NVIDIAs of the world, with AMDs and Intels. Because this is a kind of a new motion that we only can win if we have multiple partners in the stack to serve this need. So, I'm very positive, especially since there’s also a high demand from the partners, and we're heavily investing in this segment right now,” said Tuszik

During the session, Patel was also asked about Cisco’s acquisition plans and strategy.

“The strategy that I have for acquisitions is slightly different from what most people might think. As a company, you have to have a very clear, true north of where you're going. And if an acquisition can help you accelerate achieving that vision, then we won't be shy to apply our knowledge to it. But the strategy itself cannot be around an acquisition,” said Patel.

For Patel, it’s far too risky in the kind of certainty of an acquisition happening because there are too many variables. Hence, Patel said that whenever he gets asked about acquisition strategy, his answer would be that his acquisition strategy is to be opportunistic.

“If something comes up that we think is going to go out and further our cause, we won't be shy to deploy our balance sheet. But otherwise, we're building; we're going to be great builders first. And we will acquire opportunistically when we want to make sure that we can augment the building exercise,” concluded Patel.