Cisco exerted considerable influence across the 5G, security, and SD-WAN markets in 2019. The vendor’s considerable berth allows it to play in those highly competitive ecosystems with its experience bringing along serious clout.
Here is a look back at some of Cisco’s biggest moves across those sectors over the past year.
5G: Opportunities and Patience
5G is opening a big window for vendors that have not traditionally played a big role in cellular networks. 5G and a confluence of transformational shifts in mobile networks is fostering a more favorable environment for widespread use of their technologies.
Cisco emerged as a strong alternative in this regard, bolstered by its extensive use in a support role by more traditional telecom vendors and carriers. Cisco is in talks with more than 100 network operators about 5G and more than 40 are currently deploying Cisco 5G solutions, including Rakuten, which is building a fully virtualized, software-defined mobile network in Japan. Cisco manages the whole supply chain and integration of vendors for Rakuten’s mobile network.
“It fundamentally alters the supply chain because you have these different radio vendors, you have the different radio software vendors, and you have this ability to build these integrated systems,” Bob Everson, global director of mobility and 5G at Cisco, told SDxCentral at this year’s Cisco Live event.
The vendor recently rolled out new silicon, software, and optics under its Cisco Silicon One initiative targeted at service providers. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said the platform includes components designed to help those operators reduce the cost of building and operating internet-scale networks, which becomes especially relevant as operators prepare massive 5G rollouts in 2020.
“The technology that we brought forward … will enable 5G to realize the potential that has been talked about for the last six or seven years,” Robbins said, adding that Cisco spent nearly $1 billion over the last five years developing the new technology.
Despite the aggression, Cisco is also approaching the space pragmatically. During a panel discussion at the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals’ Edge 2019 conference in September, Waris Sagheer, 5G principal product manager at Cisco, said that while he expects 5G to drive big changes in factory automation, robotics, transportation, and utilities, most of those use cases are still at least a couple years away. It could be 2022 before industrial IoT applications reach factories in a 5G context at scale, he said.
Security
Cisco this year continued to bolster its security efforts, rolling out numerous updates to better lock down customer data and help them move those assets into cloud environments. The vendor also focused on reducing the complexity of those security platforms, which remains a significant hurdle for enterprise customers.
Jeff Reed, SVP of product for Cisco’s Security Business, in an exclusive interview with SDxCentral as part of one of those updates cited the company’s CISO Benchmark Study that found 79% of security professionals surveyed find it challenging to orchestrate threat response in a multi-vendor environment. In an effort to simplify their environments, chief information security officers (CISO) are using fewer point products and adopting a platform approach. In 2018, the study found 21% of respondents used more than 20 vendors, and 5% had more than 50. This year saw those numbers drop to 14% and 3%, respectively.
“We’re starting to see this move to customers having fewer, more strategic vendors,” Reed said. “The [2019] CISO Benchmark Study was the first time we saw a decrease in the number of vendors relative to where they were the year before.”
Cisco’s effort also included bolstering its zero trust capabilities that piggybacked on its $2.35 billion acquisition of Duo Security in 2018.
However, despite those efforts, Cisco products were the targets of multiple attacks in 2019.
One of the more phonetically impressive was the so-called “Thrangycat” attack that hit Cisco switches, routers, and firewalls. The attack could allow hackers to remotely attack corporate networks, steal data, and attack other devices connected to the networks, according to Red Balloon Security, which discovered the flaw in May.
More recently Cisco’s Talos researchers warned about an increase in exploitation attempts against its Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Firepower Appliance tied to a vulnerability initially discovered last year. Those attempts are in the form of a denial-of-service (DoS) and information disclosure directory traversal bug that is found in the web framework of the Cisco appliances.
The bug was initially spotted by Cisco in June 2018, and given a “critical” rating. Cisco at that time recommended that customers upgrade to a “fixed software release to remediate the issue.”
One way Cisco is looking to bolster an enterprise’s security posture is through managed services that put the vendor in charge of updating software security.
“We’re seeing SD-WAN is an accelerant, but we’ve been seeing this move for years,” Reed said. “More and more customers are looking at simplifying their architecture, and using as-a-service offerings as a way to move some of the on-premises controls to the cloud.”
SD-WAN Wars
Speaking of SD-WAN, Cisco exited 2019 touting the reach of its SD-WAN services that has it wrestling for the top spot in the market. Cisco said that its Viptela and Meraki product lines counted 20,000 customers as of its first fiscal quarter of 2020.
(Cisco’s customer proclamation appeared to needle Fortinet, which countered with a claim of 21,000 customers for its FortiGate Secure SD-WAN technology.)
SD-WAN market reports consistently showed Cisco and VMware jockeying for the No. 1 spot. IHS Markit’s most recent report puts VMware at the top of the pack with Cisco close behind, while IDC says Cisco leads the market.
However, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant WAN Edge Infrastructure report took a broader view of the market in placing Cisco as a “challenger” behind market leaders VMware and Silver Peak. The report does not center on market share or revenues and instead attempts to provide something of a report card for the industry. It places vendors into four categories — niche players, visionaries, challengers, and leaders — based on the completeness of their vision and their ability to meet enterprise demands.
Gartner highlighted several challenges faced by Cisco and its WAN customers, including system lock-in, a complex licensing structure, and scalability challenges.
“Cisco has broad, separate, and overlapping SD-WAN offerings that don’t share a common management platform, hardware platform, or sales teams,” the report reads.
In a statement, Cisco rebuffed these critiques adding that its customer base speaks for itself.
“According to Gartner and IDC, Cisco is the market leader in SD-WAN,” Cisco noted in a statement on the report. “We have more than 20,000 SD-WAN customers globally, including 70 of the Fortune 100. We believe this market traction speaks for itself — our customers and partners are trusting their business to Cisco Secure SD-WAN.”
That market traction could be important for Cisco as the Gartner report predicts enterprise SD-WAN adoption will increase from around 20% today to 60% over the next four or five years.
Jessica Hardcastle, Matt Kapko, Tobias Mann, and Sydney Sawaya contributed to this story.
