Cisco is returning to its roots and betting on its core networking business. This transformation is being driven by ‘the customers and rapid digitisation,’ said Sameer Garde , president, Cisco India and SAARC, in an interview. The networking major, whose machines form the backbone of the Internet, is building products with the help of its India engineering team for the local and global markets. Excerpts:
Could you share insights about the transformation that Cisco is going through?
It is about Cisco falling back in love with the network, but it’s been driven by customers. The reason is rapid digitisation, the amount of data that is flowing... the number of devices that get connected to the network, is a lot more than what it was six years ago. In fact, with IoT [Internet of Things], probably a million new devices get connected to the network every hour. Third, you are a lot more mobile as a user [compared] to 10 years ago.
Now you work from multiple devices… mobile phone, iPad, laptop, desktop... from five different locations. The network needs to transform to manage that change and software becomes very important. We’ve been working on this very hard for the last five years. It came to fruition last year with the platform called ‘Catalyst 9K’... along with our ‘DNA Center’ where you’re able to now see the entire network in a single pane of glass, manage policies, automate overnight and get things done.
Amid competition from new-age players and price battles, what bets is Cisco making?
There is a massive opportunity for network modernisation over the next three years. We believe that there is probably upwards of a $4 billion opportunity globally for just network refresh. If you look at a bank like HDFC... they’re looking at building, let’s say, cloud-like web-scale infrastructure for the bank on-premise, which is a data centre modernisation opportunity, which never [existed] before. The [other] big one is commercial or small and mid-sized businesses... that is likely to be a massive opportunity in India over the next 5-10 years.
What role is India playing in these bets?
We have a sales motion in India, where we are helping the government, large enterprises and SMBs. We also have an engineering back-end, upwards of 10,000 people in India, who are helping build products. We are... using talent local to India to build products for the global markets. We also have manufacturing which we inaugurated around a year ago.
What digital projects are you tapping in the country?
For smart cities, the Government of India has identified 99 cities; approximately 14 cities have already bid or have started the process. We have upwards of 80% share in these 14. So we have a lion’s share... because we have a proven technology which is based on a platform solution, it’s not a point solution. Hence we are able to help the government do this from a perspective of integrating multiple applications and use cases on a single platform with a single pane of glass to be able to see everything that’s happening and correlate things. You can correlate traffic with let’s say, lighting systems or CCTV solutions. Our whole approach has been a platform approach to smart cities. And that has been hugely successful. If you look at the Gold Rush (in California)... the people who actually made more money were the [ones] who enabled [gold hunters] dig the gold... [by providing] tools [and workers]. Our whole concept is how do we do enable the people who are digitising.
What are Cisco’s plans to invest, hire talent and expand operations in the country in the next five years?
We’ve made some tremendous amount of investments in India. We had a Country Digital Acceleration programme, which is about making investments in helping the government digitize faster, like the national broadband network, the defence networks. We committed a multi-year investment of $100 million in that. Over the last several years and going forward we committed approximately $280 million in various areas, including taking stakes in upwards of 25 companies [and] startups. Recently, we invested into venture capital funds IDG Ventures and Stellaris Venture Partners which gives us access to more start-ups and helps figure out what are the next big disruptions that are happening [and] stay close to that innovation. We had two acquisitions out of India globally. We just announced [buying] July Systems. And before that, we acquired a company called Cmpute.io. India is very important from a Cisco point of view of investments and strategically looking at how we build the startup ecosystem.
How are you using artificial intelligence, machine learning and cloud computing?
Think about smart cities. Our IoT platform integrates sensors for garbage, traffic and lighting. [It puts these] signals on one platform, analyses that and works with analytical apps on the other side and throws out a dashboard. [AI and ML], at the end of the day, is about having a lot of data, analysing that till the cows come home, building algorithms based on that analysis and do artificial intelligence.
Which better company than Cisco, which stops or analyses 20 billion [cybersecurity] threats a day? These go through our networks, our Talos engine. With that kind of data flowing, nobody but us can do better ML or AI.
Over its corporate history, Cisco has spent more than $70 billion on acquisitions. What critical role do they play?
It’s both organic and inorganic innovation that we are looking at. If you look at what we’ve done on the network, it’s mostly organic innovation...which is close to 60% of our business. However, there are areas which we got into, as we saw the networks building up [and] security becoming a big thrust area. The time to market becomes important. There are some [companies which] have innovated faster, [there is] no reason why we shouldn’t buy them.
(The writer was in Goa at the invitation of Cisco)
