Cisco’s Bold Network Refresh Strategy: Built for an AI-Powered Future, Podcast

“The AI-powered enterprise is here—and it demands a network that can keep up.” — Aruna Ravichandran, SVP, Cisco

In a conversation recorded live at Cisco Live 2025 in San Diego, Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, sat down with Aruna Ravichandran, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Cisco’s Enterprise Connectivity and Collaboration division. The discussion centered on Cisco’s major announcements aimed at future-proofing enterprise networks to meet the growing demands of AI, automation, and increasing security threats.

Ravichandran explained that Cisco is preparing for a massive transformation in the global workforce—one where AI agents will soon outnumber human workers. With billions of devices and agents expected to be actively communicating, Cisco predicts massive increases in both east-west and north-south traffic, pushing legacy networks to their limits.

To meet this challenge, Cisco launched a suite of new solutions including:

• AI Canvas: A collaborative dashboard powered by a Cisco-trained large language model (LLM), offering cross-domain data visibility, telemetry integration, and AI-driven diagnostics. Integrated with a conversational AI assistant, it enables NetOps teams to resolve complex network issues in seconds instead of days.
• Agentic Ops: A new paradigm using AI to simplify network operations, empowering NetOps professionals to do more with shrinking budgets.
• Smart Switches and Secure Routers: Featuring dual CPU architecture (one for networking and one for security), these devices are post-quantum ready and built to support Cisco’s Hypershield initiative.
• Wi-Fi 7 Access Points: A first in the industry, offering high-performance wireless connectivity for AI-heavy environments.
• Live Protect: A breakthrough feature enabling live patching of switches without downtime, reinforcing Cisco’s three-layer security model across infrastructure, connectivity, and applications.
• Unified Management: Merging the Meraki and Catalyst dashboards into a single control plane to streamline administration.

Ravichandran emphasized that all new technologies are backward compatible, ensuring customers can modernize without disrupting ongoing operations. However, she strongly encouraged enterprises still relying on aging infrastructure—like CAT 9200 and 6K series—to begin refreshing now to leverage these capabilities.

Finally, Ravichandran reinforced Cisco’s strong commitment to its partner ecosystem, noting that the company has built extensive enablement plans for channel partners to capitalize on this refresh wave.

For more, visit: https://www.cisco.com