Cisco in 2022

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Cisco’s newly minted Managing Director, Hana Raja, had her first official interaction with the media during Chinese New Year 2022, to talk about Cisco’s plans for the new year.

Besides sharing about the overall strategic direction for the company, she confessed she is personally interested in its M&A strategy. “You will see a lot of really exciting new acquisitions which have a lot of AI and data analytics and machine learning, that is really strengthening our portfolio.”

This is expected to complement the overall transformation towards a software recurring revenue strategy.

The focus themes which Hana mentioned includes:

• Future of work which is hybrid – How to transform companies and have that future work experience whereby employees work from anywhere and the experience would be seamless – seamless, protected and secure access to applications that are on-premise, or in the data centre, or even in the cloud

• How to manage the hybrid cloud transformation seamlessly, infrastructure-wise and software-wise? It is good to note here that Cisco’s value proposition is hybrid cloud offerings

• Applications – “It is the lifeline for all of our customers now,” Hana said. As a result, applications need to be always available, which gives rise to the challenge of ensuring they are always visible and performing. New acquisitions of companies with analytics, visibility, and monitoring capabilities will help Cisco address these challenges.

• Ensuring Cisco has digital inclusivity and digital education for Malaysians. Hana shared there are partnerships with over 120 institutions of higher education to offer certifications in networking.

Hana was joined by Director of the Partner Business Group, Shan Yap who added that in trying to be more relevant, Cisco has also added cybersecurity into their curriculum for education institution.

When talking to partners, she observed that they are venturing into expanding their business into the cloud and supporting their customers in moving their applications from private or public clouds to an environment that is a hybrid of both.

“And what they are saying is, that there is a shortage of talent (with expertise to do these).

“Hence we are working very closely with academia as well as with our partners (and through them), to help Malaysia build digital talent that is relevant and sought after,” Shan said.

Partner strategy for 2022

According to Shan, she has to ensure that partners are aligned to Cisco strategy.

She shared of a transformational journey that Cisco has been on with their traditional system integrator (SI) partners who are used to selling hardware technology and solutions.

This is a software-based solution, and being able to do this, without having to go to each branch location of the organisation to fix and/or deploy, requires a mindset change. The business model to do this also has to adapt to being one that is revenue recurring or subscription-based.

“You know it’s not just hardware with Cisco, but also software-defined (solutions) when you are talking about networking – when the control plane (is separated) from the data plane, so you can better control and deploy the technology from a central location.”

This is a software-based solution, and being able to do this, without having to go to each branch location of the organisation to fix and/or deploy, requires a mindset change. The business model to do this also has to adapt to being one that is revenue recurring or subscription-based.

Shan said that a subscription business will give partners a but of sustainability and that it is the company’s goal to grow this portion so that at least 50-percent of revenue comes from software subscription by 2025.