What does it truly take to unify a vast technology portfolio into a seamless, AI-powered advantage?
At Cisco Live 2025, hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman sit down with Jeetu Patel, President & Chief Product Officer at Cisco, to explore how Cisco, a titan in networking and security, is now leading the charge in AI innovation, building a comprehensive, unified platform that redefines enterprise technology.
Key takeaways include:
🔹Cisco’s Unified Stack from Networking to AI: Jeetu Patel reveals Cisco’s bold transition, showcasing how the company integrates AI with cutting-edge security features across its entire stack—from silicon and network infrastructure to compute, security platform, data, models, and applications with observability. It’s a testament to their powerful, unified platform approach.
🔹The Power of Portfolio Integration: Discover how Cisco has masterfully transformed its extensive portfolio into an unparalleled asset. This strategic evolution dramatically reduces the marginal cost of technology integration, unlocking compounding benefits and amplifying the value of existing technologies.
🔹Cisco’s Unique Silicon Advantage: Learn why Cisco’s silicon technology stands apart. Jeetu explains its programmability and run-to-completion capability, enabling tailored solutions for diverse use cases without hardware changes—a key factor in Cisco’s bolstered position in the hyperscaler market.
🔹Strategic Investments in Megatrends: Gain insights into Cisco’s astute investment decisions. Jeetu discusses the crucial difference between megatrends and hype cycles, illustrating how Cisco’s early and strategic investment in its own silicon aligns with the industry’s shift towards customized, scalable solutions.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On The Road here in San Diego. We’re at Cisco Live 2025. Daniel, it’s great to not be in Las Vegas. We’re talking about AI here in San Diego. We’re seeing networking, security, observability, brand new AI features, AI on security. Security for AI.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, there’s a lot going on now in a bit of a lighter hearted moment. I do like being where I can get outside. You know, anyone that’s been to enough events in Vegas knows fake light doesn’t work inside. I like to see the sun. San Diego, there is all day long. Having said that though, you got to miss the restaurants and the, and the gyms in Las Vegas. Especially you because you’re kind of like, you know. But no, it’s great too.
Patrick Moorhead: Are you kidding?
Daniel Newman: Whatever. But no, it has been great. I mean, this entire event, like I said, the last year has been such a coming out for Cisco and this event was really kind of like that moment, you know, we saw at the summit, AI summit. They had the AI defense launch, right. Very powerful. But you’re starting to see it all put together. You’re seeing it at the compute layer. We’ve talked about the silicon layer. Of course, networking has always been a big part. But observability software, the company’s gone to plus 50% of its revenue now being recurring. I mean, it’s doing all the things right. And I think this was kind of a. You and I like to talk about victory laps.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s right.
Daniel Newman: There’s a bit of a victory lap. And I think, there’s an opportunity to talk to someone who maybe has the biggest opportunity to do a victory lap.
Patrick Moorhead: There it is, a man who was pretty much we saw the entire day off and on stages. Jeetu Patel. Great to see you.
Jeetu Patel: It’s good to see you. And thank you for having me, gentlemen.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it’s great to see you.
Jeetu Patel: Thank you for being here.
Daniel Newman: You want to do that victory lap.
Jeetu Patel: Just straight away, you know, as a product person, you’re always slightly dissatisfied and you want to move on to the next thing fast.
Daniel Newman: Man, we should talk about that. You know, just like endless, persistent, pervasive dissatisfaction. You got to keep going, but you’re rolling. I mean, really, we’re having fun. To your credit as analysts, our job is to be critical. I mean, sometimes we will give credit where credit’s due. I know over the last year we were very. We challenged you, we challenged you, we challenged your team. You know, we said it’s time to sort of need a new Cisco to rise. So coming straight out of the event here, I mean, you’ve obviously, you know, you delivered the big keynote. You know, you hit on security, you hit on compute. You had a big moment in networking. Pat and I couldn’t help ourselves with what you’re doing with some of the programmable silicon for networking. Give us the quick rundown of just the biggest sort of moments for you, the biggest announcements that you’re most excited about leading the company’s product.
Jeetu Patel: I think if you think of our entire stack, from silicon to the network infrastructure, to the compute to the security platform, to the data to models to applications with observability and security and safety, we literally play in every single one of those areas. And so there’s very few companies that actually have that level of breadth. Historically though, that breadth has been a liability for us, not an asset, because we had not tied our pieces together well. And that’s what we did over the course of the past year is we’ve really made sure that these things operate like a unified platform. And so when you have a platform, your marginal cost of ingestion goes down for every new piece of tech. Every new piece of tech you buy is not just good for the piece of tech that you buy, but also for the piece of tech that you already have. And then there’s a compounding effect. And so that was pretty cool. The other thing that’s a hidden gem for us, frankly, is our silicon. If you think about our network ASICS that we build, they are before programmable, run to completion. And what that means is that you can actually program those chips for different use cases rather than having to do a special tape out every single time in silicon, every single time you do a tape out, that’s a long time. You have to go back to TSMC and they actually go out and get the chip manufactured and send it back to you, and you have to see if it works. There’s a long process, but if you have a chip but through programmability, you can, through software, change the behavior of the chip to be optimized for things like load balancing, things like security being etched into the chip, those kinds of things can have a meaningful upside potential. And I think we’ve got that. That’s one of our kind of hidden gems in our business, frankly, we wouldn’t have a hyperscaler business if we didn’t have our own silicon.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, in 2019, when we were at the original Silicon One event, it was pretty clear that Cisco wanted to play in all of the infrastructure, regardless of where it is. A lot of the hyperscalers were doing their own switches with ODMs, but if you had the right architecture and the right chip for them, they would come. It first hit with the CSPs and now you’re moving to the hyperscalers. But it seems to work. And then the benefit that I feel like doing your own chips gives to your enterprises is around upgradability. There were certain features that typically would require a different chip that you had to upgrade the software, the SRAM on the chip to do that. And there’s a lot of value in that. I mean, you probably could have sold more switches, but instead you made them upgradable. One question I have though is when it comes to trade offs, you can build new things like new chips, but you can also invest that money into things like Canvas, which is pulling it from left and right. How do you make those investment decisions? What’s your guiding light on what makes it, what gets the engineering dollar?
Jeetu Patel: You know, the thing that we look at often is what is the megatrend in the industry that is bound to happen and use a rule to never fight it, always use it as a tailwind. And I think a lot of times companies don’t get this right because what they’ll do is they one, they can’t tell the difference between a megatrend and a hype cycle. And sometimes it’s hard, but you have to be able to have enough conviction and judgment that this is.
Daniel Newman: Metaverse hype cycle, AI Megatrend.
Jeetu Patel: Kind of or at least in the Metaverse case, it might have been a little too early. And timing wise, it might have not been quite right, but Web 2.0 was much more of a hype cycle anyway. So the first thing that you do is identify the megatrend. The second thing we have to do for balancing resources is I think you have to get very good at understanding the problems the customers have rather than taking feature requests from customers. Yeah, I think this is the thing that also sometimes gets crosswired, where you ask the field team and the field team will say, hey, our customers want you to build this feature. I’m like, no, that’s my job. My job is to decide what features we’re going to build. The customer’s job is to tell us the problems they’re facing. Because I might think of a more creative way to solve that problem than the way that they’re telling me to solve it. And so that’s a pretty important dimension. And then the third one is, I think, having small, highly efficient teams where you just push the teams to say, go harder and go faster. Great software, specifically in software, great software doesn’t get built by large teams. It gets built by a team of six to eight people. Now, when you have to scale it, of course you have to get it larger, but you don’t build great software with 150 people. And so whenever someone comes to me and says, Jeetu, I need 150 people for this, this thing, it’s a no-op. It’s a bad question to begin with because even if I gave you 150 people, what would happen? You would have to now go out and open up Rex for 150 people. You’d have to have job descriptions written. You’d have to go hire 150 people. That’s going to take you nine months. Then you have to ramp them up and it’s going to take you another six months. Like we’ve lost the window, right?
Daniel Newman: Agents.
Jeetu Patel: Yeah. So you have to compress the time within which you do it. And I think the last thing is what Daniel just said, which is I think this wave of agentic AI is going to be so profound and it’s going to change so many things. But one of the things I’m most excited for it to change is it is going to provide a sidekick for every engineer, a partner for every engineer. But we will be able to kind of 10x the capacity of every engineer by having autonomous agents. And we are the first design partner with OpenAI on Codex, which is their automated software engineer. Unlike an IDE that can actually write you some snippets of code for an individual developer, an agent or a group of agents, you can tell it to say, go solve this really hard problem for me and it’ll go out and start solving the problem. Imagine a problem like making the next generation chip for me.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Jeetu Patel: I think in the next couple years we’ll be able to have a chip that’s going to be made with a software agent rather than human agent. And then you can have a very different kind of clock speed and a cycle time for these things.
Daniel Newman: And we’ve done some evaluations and some think tank conversations about the fact that chip design in the future may be completely different and AI will completely,
Jeetu Patel: Not just chip design, software design, hardware design, everything.
Daniel Newman: No, but just chips is really interesting because it’s been so profoundly iterative with density and the way we’ve kind of focused on transistors that the idea of starting with a blank slate and doing it the way AI might do it could be so different.
Jeetu Patel: Very, very different.
Daniel Newman: Now I want to ask you because you kind of started alluding to agents and I want to kind of zoom out into this kind of macro. So everything about AI is new. So Cisco is a company that really had its sort of identity built on kind of the CPU era networking for the compute era. Applications were mostly databases with files and blocks and storage and everything was sort of well understood, you know, infrastructure converged. And now you have AI. You know, you’re partnered with Jensen and Nvidia. You got AI factories, you got GPUs, not CPUs. Now I know you can run some things on CPUs, but the efficiency largely is gonna be GPU on their data mostly unstructured. Now it’s like there is structured data but most of it’s gonna be unstructured. So the entire rails of doing everything is different. You got an era where software will be developed largely by machines with, like you said, the help of an engineer, not the other way around. And then in the end you’ve got abstractions where all the software we’ve ever used could come down to nothing more than a prompt. And it may not even be on a device like the ones in front of us. It may be on some sort of pervasive wearable that you have on your face or a pin on our necks. I’m just kind of curious, how do you think about being in charge of making sure that Cisco stays relevant? Because there’s a lot of what you’d launched this week that gives me that kind of warm and fuzzy feeling. But I’m still looking at an app, I’m still using the same productivity tools, I’m still on the same phone in five years. Maybe I’m a futurist at heart, maybe I’m completely nuts, but I actually think this, like you said, profoundly different. I think in five years everything is going to be massively different. And maybe I’m too fast.
Jeetu Patel: I think in 24 months you’ll have a massive, massive kind of step function change. Not even five years.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I don’t even know about analysts. No, but seriously, how are you thinking about that problem? Because everything is still sort of linear. Even though it’s going really fast. People sort of see it linear. At some point it feels like it’s going to go exponential.
Jeetu Patel: It is already going exponential in a lot of areas. Here is a really good example. If you look back at November 30th of 2022, when ChatGPT came out and you said, at that point in time, let’s fast forward two and a half years. What would make it look like complete magic at that point? Where we are today would look like complete magic. But right now, we’ve all normalized to it so quickly. So quickly, right? And in fact, it’s the example I give. Like the first time you said no waymo, you’re like, oh, my goodness, this is like magic. The car is driving itself. How bonkers is this? The second time you start doing text messages. Third, you’re complaining about your seat. It’s become completely normal. I think humans have this amazing capacity to normalize whatever the new norm is. The clock speed of these things is moving at a much faster pace than we realize because we’re normalizing pretty fast. How do we stay relevant is I think you have to figure out what are the biggest architectural shifts that are occurring. And based on those architectural shifts, what specifically are you going to do as a company to stay relevant in that architecture shift and stay extremely paranoid? This is Andy Grove’s kind of only the paranoid survive. But I feel like it’s a super important characteristic of a company. Every company is always only 18 months from being irrelevant. No matter how good your business is in 18 months, you can get to irrelevance. The beauty about tech, though, is if your business wasn’t doing well in 18 months, you can actually get it to be doing amazingly well as well. So the reversible nature of the business is also pretty fascinating. And you’ve just experienced that with Cisco. We are a different company now than we were 18 months ago, and in another 18 months will be unrecognizable for the better. And it happens because you change the culture, you change the tempo, you change the clock speed of the company. There’s a spring in the step and people, and they’re now excited to innovate. And once you start innovating a little bit and people start responding to it, then you get a little bit more juice in the system and you feel like doing it again. And so that thing kind of snowballs and compounds on itself. And right now, if you look at the entire team, we’ve got 27,000 engineers. I mean, I’ll tell you this, I’ve never seen a collective group of people so excited about doing the next thing.
Patrick Moorhead: So the rate of change is immense. To be fair, the changes are areas where there’s less friction if you have access to the Internet and a web browser. I can do ChatGPT and that’s what a lot of the features I have, a smartphone. And the other part is code completion. If I have access to GitHub, Copilot and many others, I’m doing some good work. But if I look at what is the recommendation you give to a Fortune 500 company that is 40 years old, has a combination of mainframe, There are still minis. Legacy compute. This patchwork quilt of applications, how do they move quickly with the reality that they need to change a lot internally?
Jeetu Patel: I think none of this typically tends to be rocket science. It tends to be around: have you set the right priorities and incentives for your teams? And are your teams obsessed about making sure that they’re focused on the right metrics? And so in my mind, the metrics are very simple. Build great products that people talk to their friends and family about, because there is no product that has gotten to hundreds of millions of people with any other marketing mechanism other than word of mouth. Word of mouth is the most important kind of amplifier that you have out there. So build great products people love, get them highly adopted and understand why people come back. And number three, get to commercial relevance. And every product leader, every engineering leader has to get incentivized on those success metrics because if you do that right, then all the other things start to kind of fizzle away. What you have to also remember is don’t reward certain behaviors. Don’t reward behaviors of territory hogging. Corporate America is hardwired in saying, the only way that I get further up in the food chain is by actually owning more. No, sometimes you need to own less. But that’s not the employee’s fault. That’s because you don’t give them a promotion unless they own more. I actually personally feel like one of the big things that we changed in the product org is everyone wanted to be a GM. In Cisco, I’m like, there’s no GMs. We only care about people that are prone people. We only care about people that are engineers, only care about people that are designers, only care about people that are AI researchers. Once you take away that and say, okay, the rule book is different. How you make more money, how you get to a bigger title is not based on how much scope you have, because that just goes out and creates a political game of accumulating territory. Instead, it’s about how much growth you can generate. The moment you make it about growth, people want to shed things that aren’t growing. Well, I don’t want to touch this. I want to actually grow this thing. It’s much easier to grow it. Great, now grow that thing. And if you can grow it fast, you have a great future ahead. And if you can’t grow it fast, you’re not as good as you think you are. So work harder and we’ll continue to keep supporting you. That’s the piece that I feel we have to do. In order to make sure that the culture shift happens, you have to get the incentives right. You have to get the right kind of people, and you have to make sure that you’ve got the right true north.
Daniel Newman: You got to break down the bureaucracy and cut out all the fiefdoms that cause slow enterprise.
Jeetu Patel: But don’t put up with the bureaucracy. There are times when people. We used to do these things. When I first joined Cisco, it was actually really interesting because I said, let’s do design reviews. And like, oh, I’m not really sure if the executive vice president wants to do a design review. Jeetu, you don’t think this is worth your time? No, I want to do design reviews. I want to know where a pixel goes on every single screen in Webex, because I want to know what’s happening, what is the experience? And so what would happen is each one of the teams would talk to their boss and their boss and their boss and their boss. And by the time seven weeks would go by before I’d have a design review, I’m like, how about this? How about we all just roll up our sleeves and edit, leave our titles out of the room and just show me, from the person who’s building the product, what their thinking was when they were doing this. And so we started doing these design reviews, and it took a couple of times, and then the managers got secure enough and they’re like, you know what we’ll see the first time? And Jeetu sees it, it’s okay. And we started doing these, and it completely changed the entire culture of the team. Because now the people started thinking about, oh, what do I need to do to make this product better? Rather than what do I need to do to make it okay for my manager to see? And people stopped worrying about what the manager said. People just started worrying about how to make the product better? That’s the singular objective. If you obsess on that, everything else follows because commercial success follows, adoption follows. All of those things follow.
Daniel Newman: What a great story. What a great way to wrap this up. I want to thank you so much, Jeetu, for being part of our conversations here at Cisco Live. It’s always good to sit down with you.
Jeetu Patel: Thank you for having me.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. And thanks, everyone, for joining us here on the Six Five On The Road here in San Diego at Cisco Live 2025. Stay with all our coverage. Check out all of our other content here. And of course, across The Six Five. But for this episode, for this show, it’s time to say goodbye. We’ll see you all later.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
