Cisco data center SVP on AI, cloud evolution and competition

In the quickly developing artificial intelligence arms race, networking giant Cisco is betting on continued demand as customers look for ways to capitalize on AI's potential for productivity gains and other advantages. 

The company's willingness to go all-in on AI seems to be paying off; ahead of its fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, analysts expected to see increased earnings and sales. Those gains would build on Q3 results that saw revenue of $14.1 billion, an 11% year-over-year increase. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins credited AI-fueled demand. 

The company announced a slew of AI-laced offerings during its Cisco Live event in June, with new tools for data center customers including a multi-agentic framework, unified dashboard, expanded AI point-of-delivery products and new optics for network transitions.

In this Q&A with Informa TechTarget, Kevin Wollenweber, Cisco's senior vice president and general manager for data center and internet infrastructure, discusses the company's AI-fed strategy, enterprise AI adoption, market competition and more.

Can you give us an idea of where Cisco is heading with the new agentic AI offerings and other infrastructure trends? 

Kevin Wollenweber

Wollenweber: Obviously, we're heavily involved in the infrastructure part of AI. … Where we're spending time now is how we take the infrastructure that we built with a lot of the large hyperscalers and model builders and neo clouds, and pivot that into the usage of AI inside enterprises. And how do we use AI for troubleshooting and understanding what's happening in network infrastructure? How do we bring more direct inference and authentic workflows to the enterprise that puts those solutions on-prem?

What we're preparing for is what this pivot toward the workflows looks like and what that does, not only to the network infrastructure, but to all the aspects of what we do. Now, applications could be anywhere in the network, either on-prem or in the cloud.

What are you seeing out there on the customer side? Enterprises have been racing to adopt AI, and the big question seems to be about the ROI and finding the right use cases. Are you seeing traction from their perspective? 

Wollenweber: We are. But I would say the direct adoption of AI inside the enterprise is probably a little bit slower than we expected. I think a big piece of that is just the pace of change. If you look at the GPU side of things, you're going through new GPU generations every 12 months. Enterprises are thinking about the right time to jump on the train and not wanting to jump on the train at the wrong time and be at the tail end of an investment curve. But we're seeing a pretty interesting spread…

You've got a set of customers who are pushing into this pretty quickly. With ROI -- they don't know exactly what the killer use case is yet, or they're starting to use these tools now but don't have the infrastructure and capability. The investments we're making now  … we want to be able to drive some standardization, because we do think there's going to be this world of agents that are going to have to communicate effectively. 

During the pandemic, there was a big push to move into the cloud. Now we're starting to see more hybrid approaches and cloud repatriation. How is that changing the cloud market, and what are you doing to meet customers' changing needs? 

Wollenweber: Even those who aren't really ready for enterprise AI or on-prem AI infrastructure deployments just having the conversation and thinking through the problems is important.

We're seeing a lot of people move toward modernizing their existing data center infrastructure … so that if they have to start deploying AI infrastructure in the future, they have a much more modern data center, and they can free up power and cooling and other things for some of these higher-power GPU-based resources.

With the HPE/Juniper Networks acquisition, the industry looks like it will undergo considerable consolidation. How will you stay competitive when your competitor has suddenly become much larger? 

Wollenweber: I've been doing this for almost 30 years, and I've seen a lot of consolidation in this industry and a lot of competitors coming together. I don't focus on the competitors themselves, but I look at what we have from a portfolio perspective and the breadth of portfolio we can offer.

Shane Snider, a veteran journalist with more than 20 years of experience, covers IT infrastructure at Informa TechTarget.