Welcome to the Cisco Live! 2025 live blog.
That was a lot of news packed in to one keynote. Take a look at all of the latest updates below!
I'll continue to bring you all the news from Cisco Live! 2025 as it happens.
It's a wet and windy start this morning at the RAI in Amsterdam, with some sporadic snow overnight.
We’ve got two and a half hours of news to look forward to - kicking off with the keynote this morning - so stick with me as I try my best to listen, transcribe, analyze and type my way through Cisco Live! 2025.
As is standard for tech events, we're eagerly waiting the start of the keynotes with some upbeat techno to keep us entertained.
A few last minutes interviews are taking place around the event hall with just 15 minutes until everything kicks off!
I'm currently rubbing elbows (quite literally) with some of the global press in attendance today. It's a bit of a squeeze with everyone trying to type.
Luckily, there are walking, talking coffee dispensers making their way around the hall.
Oliver Tuszik, President, EMEA, is opening today's event, talking about the impact and disruption of new technologies on the world. Cisco is also celebrating its 40th birthday, which gets a big round of applause.
Tuszik is walking us through 40 years of Cisco innovations that powered big data, IoT, and cloud computing - emphasizing the importance of Cisco’s networks in accelerating all of these technologies.
“Every business in this world will become a technology company,” Tuszik says, noting that each company will face three challenges in this journey:
- Unlocking the power of AI, especially as we move out of the ‘hype cycle’ of AI, with companies now seeing tangible, real world efficiency and productivity gains using the technology. However, only 7% of European companies are AI ready, Tuszik says.
- Killing complexity. “Everything is growing fast” as companies scale and grow their technologies in the face of the skills shortage.
- Strengthening digital resilience.“Digital resilience is business resilience,” especially if every company is to become a tech company.
Jeetu Patel, EVP and Chief Product Officer, is up next! After complementing Tuszik’s dancefloor endurance, Patel is walking us through his philosophy: Build products people love; quality is priority zero; and think ‘10x’.
“Every organization needs to lay the groundwork for AI,” Patel says, predicting that the world's workforce will be “supplemented” by AI agents, apps, robots and humanoids - moving the world away from its current 100% human workforce.
Here comes today’s first new product. The Cisco UCS C845A M8 Rack Server - a modular rack with flexible GPU scaling.
Patel also unveils two N9300 Series Smart Switches, with Cisco’s Silicon One E100 chips, AMD Pensando DPUs, and Cisco Hypershield (more on that shortly, I expect).
Patel explains that Cisco Hypershield will be embedded on the new switches, meaning that protection can be scaled for zone segmentation, micro segmentation, and distributed exploit protection - with a centrally managed firewall distributed throughout the datacenter at the service level.
The Hypershield firewall essentially acts “as millions of tiny firewalls” distributed around each web server, application, and Kubernetes cluster, Patel explains. The whole thing will be managed by an AI agent that can ‘self-update’ its policies, while also checking for potential disruptions in firewall policy changes.
DJ Sampath, VP of Product, AI Software and Platform, is now demonstrating Cisco's AI Defense application which was announced towards the end of January. Patel highlights that the application allows businesses to validate a new AI model in a matter of minutes - significantly down from the several weeks many are used to.
Time for another demo - Caitlin Lacey, Director of Global Product Marketing, Collaboration Devices, is showing us the new Webex AI Agent that can be used to build autonomous AI chatbots for customer support. The models aren't just text based, as voice based agents with 'lifelike' voices and low-latency responses can be built for phone support to cut down the time customers spend waiting on hold.
We're moving on to the juicy security stuff now. Colin Bannon, CTO at BT Business is explaining how Cisco has helped implement security policy in the infrastructure BT provides to its customers. "The network is now the computer," Bannon says, as he talks about the implications of introducing AI models to a highly complex infrastructure, and defending against shadow AI.
More distributed edge switches have been announced - the Cisco 8000 series with Silicon One-based routing optimized for AI.
Patel has also unveiled Coherent Pluggable Optics - tiny USB sized switches designed to replace transponders, with the 400G optic capable of connecting applications up to 3000km apart.
Back to digital resilience now. Patel has just announced a new traffic insight functionality for ThousandEyes - giving network administrators greater observability and the ability to pinpoint disruptions within networks.
Patel has also just announced Meraki integration with Cisco XDR to power "the SOC of the future."
The keynote is now coming to an end, and as Patel gives a short re-run on all the innovations Cisco has unveiled today I've realized I've missed a couple while furiously typing. I'll provide some extra details shortly, so bear with me!
Just to recap on the product news from the keynote today:
N9300 Series Smart Switches
- Cisco unveiled a new line of Smart Switches with Silicon One E100 network processors, AMD Pensando Data Processing Units (DPUs), and Cisco Hypershield.
- Cisco Hypershield will effectively give every single service micro-segmentation with a self-updating and self-healing firewall.
- From what I have managed to gleam from some of the execs here, each firewall will have two versions - an active and shadow version. New updates will be introduced on the 'shadow' which then becomes 'active', and vice versa, with monitoring taking place over a several day period at a highly granular level to ensure the update works as intended.
- The millions of individual firewalls around each service can be centrally managed through the Nexus dashboard.
Hybrid Mesh Firewall
- This new AI optimized firewall combines Cisco Firewall Threat Defense, new AI Defense capabilities, and Security Cloud Control into a single management system.
AI Defense
- Ever wanted complete observability over how AI tools are being used within your network, down to the exact prompts that are being entered? Now you can.
UCS C854A M8 server
- A highly modular server built on Nvidia's MGX reference architecture, giving businesses of all sizes highly scalable infrastructure for AI deployments.
- Can hold 2-8 GPUs.
Meraki integration with Cisco XDR
- Cisco XDR now supports the Meraki dashboard, allowing users to see incidents and threats as they emerge across their network infrastructure.
Universal ZTNA
- Cisco's Zero Trust Network Access now supports hybrid private access to help protect data and identities as businesses return to the office.
Expanded ThousandEyes Traffic insights
- Network administrators now have greater insight into potential network disruptions through traffic insights on owned and unowned infrastructure.
Coherent Pluggable Optics
- New pluggable optics compatible with deployed 100G ports and new 800G ports that can connect applications up to 3000km apart.
