Cisco Live 2025: Day 1 Keynote Announcements

As any network engineer/consultant/solution architect will tell you, the next 3 days (11-13th Feb) are filled with anticipation, analysis, and learning. Yes it's Cisco Live EMEA time! For those of who don't know, Live is where Cisco announce their newest technologies and network innovations and this year is no different already.

Oliver Tuszik, Cisco's SVP and EMEA president, set the stage for this year's opening keynote titled 'Go Beyond'. Informing the Amsterdam audience, and us watching on the broadcast from our desks, that Cisco promised to continue to invest into their certified professionals and experts, while also acknowledging the company's 40th birthday. He also highlighted the 3 major market challenges that Cisco were seeing across their customer base:

• A drive to AI readiness

• A drive for operational efficiency

• A requirement for increased resilience

  
  

Whilst explaining these challenges he made an important link. "In a world where all businesses rely on tech, and all businesses are technology businesses - business resilience and IT resilience are the same thing." This is by no means a new idea but does highlight other unpleasant trends. Businesses are being forced into looking at resilience and increased security due to malicious state actors (attacks by foreign countries) - This is the world we are living in.

Oliver also discussed the importance of Cisco's Silicon One why Cisco will continue to utilise this across their entire stack. A topic covered in more detail as the keynote went on. But this was just the introduction. Jeetu Patel, Cisco Chief Product Officer, took to stage next to give us 90 minutes of discussion, demos and product announcements.

Jeetu covered a wide range of topics and solutions, some of which may not be relevant to you the reader (or me, collaboration - urgh!). The rest of this post will give a brief overview of Jeetu's key points and announcements, with some of my personal thoughts added in.

C845A M8 AI Workload Servers

AI Workload Servers that grow with you. Cisco have announced their new UCS C845A M8 AI rack servers, based on the NVIDIA MGX reference architecture. This is Cisco's ultramodern addition to their AI server lineup to deliver enterprise AI workloads. This is the ideal fit for enterprise data centre environments due to its highly scalable, flexible and customizable-delivering powerful AI capabilities to mainstream PCIe servers.

These servers allow businesses to scale their servers are they grow; this can be done because the server is based on the NVIDIA MGX design which support two to eight NVIDIA PCIe GPUs. These servers are ideal for the following uses:

• GenAI training & fine-tuning

• high-performance computing (HPC)

• Data analytics & visualization

• hyperscale cloud applications

• Design & simulation

• Language processing

• Conversational AI

• Graphics & rendering

• Virtual AI workstations

Smart Switches In the Data Centre

A security processor and a network processor in a single device. Cisco have announced their new N9300 series "Smart Switches". These are a new family of data centre switches featuring programmable DPUs (data processing units) that can embed stateful services directly into the data centre fabric at scale and speed.

Powered by Cisco's Silicon One E100 ASIC, these devices offer high speed connectivity, rich telemetry, line-rate encryptions and power efficiency for modern data centre workloads. The AMD powered DPUs unlock a diverse set of network and security services, such as:

• Stateful Segmentation

• Large-scale NAT

• IPsec Encryption

• IDS/IPS

• Event-based telemetry

• DDoS protection.

  
  

Tom Gillis, Cisco's SVP and General Manager, joined Jeetu on-stage for this announcement and summed up the role of the DPUs with a single phrase - "...can take a firewall function, put it into software and sprinkle it everywhere" It's clear from this that want to help enterprises put controls around every process in their environment, and these switches will be integrated with Cisco Hypershield to do just that.

Hybrid Mesh Firewall & Univeral Zero Trust Network Access

Transition from Firewalls to Firewalling. Customer environments are becoming more complex, with increasingly fine-grained distribution of applications along with a distributed and mobile workforce, gone are the days where enterprises can afford to only consider security at the perimeter.

Cisco see two emerging areas of innovation come into play: Hybrid Mesh firewall and Universal ZTNA. The first thing to understand about both of these areas is this - these are not single point solutions. These are an eco-system of complementing and integrated solutions that provide the necessary capabilities of an architecture or approach.

Checkpoint or Fortinet (etc) may want to rollout their "best of breed" firewalls when it comes to security and while they will want to talk about features, form factors, and other buzzwords, the Hybrid mesh firewall approach is more mature in its undertaking. It considers security holistically, across everywhere within your environment.

While the individual capabilities from the Cisco products are fantastic and standup against their competitors, the true superpower of the hybrid mesh lies in its ability to meet you where you are and evolve with your requirements over time, ensuring continuous protection. Here is a list of products that could be included in a hybrid mesh firewall ecosystem:

• N9300 series Smart Switches (discussed above)

• Cisco Secure firewalls

• Secure workload

• Isovalent Enterprise platform

• Hypershield

• AI defence

• Secure Access

Cisco CDO (cloud defence orchestrator) has been rebranded as Cisco SCC (Security Cloud Control) and will soon benefit from their unified AI Assistant. SCC will allow admins to define policy once and change enforcement points over time, expanding to cover all components of the hybrid mesh, including expanded support for third-party firewalls.

What does Universal ZTNA mean? It means securing every user, every device, and every application, at every location. Identity and intent is at the heart of Zero trust, that includes the identity of things (IoT devices, printers, phones, etc) as well as users. Cisco achieves this again using an ecosystem of solutions. Here is a list of the products that may be used for Universal ZTNA:

• SD-WAN

• VPN

• SSE (Security Services Edge)

• ISE (Identity Services Engine)

• Secure Firewalls

• Secure Access

Cisco AI Defence Demo

We were given a demo of Cisco's AI Defence platform. This product solves the following problem for enterprises:

• Enables an employee of an organisation to use AI tool securely

• Every application built using AI models have runtime enforcement guard rails

  
  

During the demo it was shown how this product integrates into Cisco's Secure Access. It was also discussed how discus used this product to evaluate the security risk in DeepSeek and other popular LLMs. I'd advise anyone with an interest in this to give the cisco blog post a read: https://blogs.cisco.com/security/evaluating-security-risk-in-deepseek-and-other-frontier-reasoning-models

Wi-Fi 7

Zero friction to Wi-Fi 7. Wi-Fi 7 is not new cisco, they announced their APs for this standard last November, however during the keynote Jeetu announced the new 9172 AP for the branch, office and campus work spaces. These were positioned alongside the recently announced Meraki MS150 switches. These are a 5Gbps Multigig capable switching series that stacks, offers 60W POE++ and flexible SFP+ uplinks.

The announcement of both of these products will certainly give customers with smaller sized environments some joy. Especially when positioned with Cisco's new unified licensing model for Wi-Fi 7, which gives customers flexibility.

Agile Services Networking, 8000 routers, Pluggable Optics, WebEx AI Agent

Here is where the presentation sped up. Jeetu had done a fantastic job up to this point but the announcements were now coming thick and fast:

• Cisco Agile Services Networking

  • Empowers Service Providers to Reimagine Networks for AI

• Routing infrastructure with Cisco 8000

  • silicon one based routing

  • new access and edge platforms

  • optimized for AI

• Cisco Coherent Pluggable optics

  • 400Gbps optics for metro/ regional/ ultra long haul (3000KM)

  • 800Gpbs optics for metro/ regional (1000KM)

• WebEx AI Agent

  • Customer Experience matters

  • Offers a 'no hold time' experience

  • AI agent will be able to answer customer questions 80-90% of the time

  • Any unanswerable questions can be forwarded to a person

Splunk, ThousandEyes, XDR, Snapattack

Again, the announcements were coming even faster as Jeetu came to the end of the keynote, doing his best not to overrun:

• ThousandEyes Traffic Insights available march 2025

  • Deep visibility into owned network

  • Instantly pinpoint disruptions

  • Accelerate remediation and automation

• Cisco Meraki & XDR integration available February 2025

  • Sophisticated threat detection

  • Simple Network operations

  • Lightning-fast incident resolution

• AI Assistant in Splunk Enterprise Security (in private preview now)

  • Guide analyst workflows and natural language

  • drive faster incident resolution

  • accelerate outcomes

• Bringing Cisco & Splunk together

  • Supercharging Security

    • Talos + Splunk security

    • XDR + Splunk security

    • Cisco User, cloud, and breach protection add-ons for Splunk security

    • Meraki add-on for Splunk security

  • Supercharging Observability

    • Unified look & feel across the portfolio

    • AppDynamics + Splunk observability

    • AppDynamics + Splunk platform

    • ThousandEyes + Splunk observability

    • Catalyst Centre + Splunk observability

  • Cisco acquisition of SnapAttack

    • will be used to accelerate Splunk's existing "detection-as-code" capabilities