Robbins Live

Cisco Systems is a company that has grown both organically and via acquisitions. As such, the networking giant has a huge portfolio of products and services that have historically been disparate. But Cisco is working to remedy that.

The company at Cisco Live 2022 unveiled a breakthrough in network management. The very popular Cisco Catalyst portfolio can now be managed via the cloud using the simple Meraki dashboard. But that’s not the only integration Cisco has been piecing together. The company’s flagship Webex collaboration offering is now feeding Cisco’s WAN Insights engine and the security portfolio is being united, according to the San Jose, Calif.-based company. It’s music to the ears of Cisco partners who are deploying these solutions but who now have a more unified networking, security and collaboration story to bring to their end customers.

Integration isn’t the only thing that has been keeping the company busy. Cisco Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins sat down with CRN at Cisco Live to talk about how the company is on “just the first step” of its unified networking story. He also discussed the macro issues that are impacting the tech industry, like supply chain constraints and how they are shaping the selling motion of channel partners. The global supply chain crisis has created a record-breaking backlog for Cisco, and the company is doing a lot of work behind the scenes to prioritize and triage the evolving situation. And speaking of selling motions, the Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) model is gaining traction as the company released its second Cisco Plus offer earlier this month.

From the company’s simplification and integration work to supply chain and XaaS, here’s what Robbins told CRN in an exclusive interview at Cisco Live 2022.