After Jonathan Davidson's departure last year, Cisco faces challenges in maintaining its visionary edge in networking
Vikas Butaney tells FNTV how it’s navigating Industry 4.0 and AI Opportunities
The company's recent focus on enterprise AI monetization contrasts with the broader Industry 4.0 potential highlighted by international competitors
Jonathan Davidson left Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) last year after 22 years at the company and having ascended to the level of GM of its networking division. Industry scuttlebutt had it that he was pushed out after a disagreement over strategy (“People tell me,” as our new President likes to say).
I don’t know if that’s true. Davidson says it was his decision to leave. But there is no question that the visionary light that shone brightly over Cisco’s long-term strategy dimmed after he left.
Cisco’s customer event in June last year contained nary a mention of the vast Industry 4.0 opportunity that has formed a vital part of the vision Davidson shared with me in April 2024, focusing instead on repeatedly hammering Wall Street over the head seven times (7, count them) with the message that Cisco has a plan to monetize the AI revolution in the enterprise market. As an event, it was only ok and not improved by being held in America’s Gomorrah: Las Vegas.
The same mantra was echoed at its duplicate event held this month in Amsterdam (what is it with Cisco and hosting events in cities notorious for prostitution and drugs?) which led with an announcement of data center Smart Switches with built-in security that made me nostalgic for the early 2000’s when I drank heavily, and switch and router announcements were the thrilling focus of our industry.
Today, however, Sixteen-Year-Sober-Steve has seen the future of communications - and it doesn’t revolve around point products.
As an industry, we now have a new quest: to follow the money into the vast and unmapped hinterlands of digital industrialization – a world where the entire global economy is blown into fragments and then rebuilt using Industry 4.0 technologies (of which AI is just one, incidentally) to create a golden age of unprecedented profitability, efficiency, and sustainability.
Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia are all in on the Industry 4.0 adventure, embracing it at a DNA level and using their 5G incumbencies, API alliances, and burgeoning partner ecosystems as an entry point into any dialogue about digital industrialization.
In contrast, Cisco appears, at least from the outside, to be singing from an altogether different hymn book. Its enterprise AI journey feels to me like a side quest—one designed to thwart the threat from a newly combined HPE/Juniper behemoth (a deal that may now not even happen).
At a wider level, the danger is that Cisco, a quintessentially American comms company, is mirroring the trajectory of its home country—growing increasingly isolated and insular, out of touch in a world that is charging ahead without it.
Opportunity: biffed. Reputation: diminished. Empire: fading to grey.
It was with these concerns that I sat down to interview the executive in charge of Cisco’s vertical industry strategy, Vikas Butaney, GM of Cloud, SD-WAN, and Industrial IoT Connectivity.
He provided an excellent overview of Cisco’s strategy, but I suspect that, similar to some of his counterparts at other large vendors, his message about the extensive opportunity presented by Industry 4.0 has yet to be fully embraced across the enterprise-focused organization he works for.
Click here for the interview.