Analyst(s): Nick Patience
Publication Date: February 16, 2026
Cisco Live EMEA 2026 saw the networking giant reposition itself as a full-stack AI platform company, with key announcements centered on sovereign critical infrastructure, the AI Canvas unified interface, and Splunk’s ambitious expansion of its Data Fabric platform. The event highlighted a major cultural and organizational shift toward platform integration, underpinned by strong Q2 FY2026 financial results, but risks are concentrated in the execution timeline for the Data Fabric component.
What is Covered in This Article:
- Cisco’s repositioning from a networking vendor to a full-stack AI platform company
- The sovereign critical infrastructure portfolio and its commercial availability
- AI Canvas, Data Fabric, and the platform integration thesis
- AI Defense and the emerging agentic security market
- Energy and power delivery as an under-recognised infrastructure differentiator
- Cisco’s Q2 FY2026 results
The Event — Major Themes & Vendor Moves: Cisco Live EMEA 2026 took place in Amsterdam, February 10-12, bringing together 21,000 customers, partners, analysts, and press for three days of executive briefings, product demonstrations, and strategy sessions. The event’s central message was Cisco’s repositioning from a networking equipment vendor to what it calls a full-stack AI platform company.
Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel organised the narrative around three structural gaps: an infrastructure deficit driven by AI’s compute and energy demands, a trust deficit constraining enterprise AI deployment, and a data gap between operational telemetry and business decision-making. This framework was echoed consistently across every session and briefing we attended.
Several product developments reinforced the direction. The sovereign critical infrastructure (SCI) portfolio, first announced in September 2025, was described as weeks away from commercial availability in Europe, priced at a 15-25% premium on five- to seven-year terms. AI Canvas, Cisco’s unified analyst interface built on a proprietary small language model (SLM) trained on 30 years of networking data, was positioned as the integration surface for cross-domain operations. Data Fabric, which extends the Splunk platform for federated cross-domain data management, entered alpha. AI Defense continued to gain traction, with Cisco reporting rapid purchase-order cycles from CISOs who see AI security assessments as an accelerator for deployment rather than a brake. And Cisco announced a comprehensive update to its AI infrastructure portfolio at, headlined by the Silicon One G300, which we have covered in detail here.
Organisationally, Patel described a shift from a holding company that’s made about 250 acquisitions, operating as separate fiefdoms, to a functional structure with four GMs, where integration into the platform is the metric that matters most.
Cisco Live EMEA 2026: Can a Networking Giant Become an AI Platform Company?
Analyst Take: The internal alignment at Cisco Live EMEA was striking. Every executive we spoke to – and there were a lot compared to some other vendor events we attend – worked from the same framework, used similar vocabulary, and connected their product area to the same platform narrative. For a company that has historically operated as a loose collection of semi-autonomous business units, this represents a meaningful cultural shift under Patel’s leadership. Of course, words are just words; the proof will be in actions taken by Cisco over the next few years.
Sovereignty Is Well-Timed
The sovereign critical infrastructure play is timely. The Berlin summit declaration on European digital sovereignty, made in November 2025, physical threats to undersea cables and growing unease about cloud dependency have created a demand environment where Cisco’s 40-year track record of on-premises, air-gapped deployment a genuine asset. The legal commitment to perpetual licensing in crisis scenarios is a differentiator that cloud-native competitors cannot easily replicate. Indeed, Cisco is in an unusual position, having cloud hyperscalers as major customers while also being in a strong position to supply on-premises equipment to those who want more control.
AI Defense Is Finding Its Buyer
AI Defense appears to have found product-market fit through an unusual buying motion. CISOs and line-of-business leaders, rather than network architects, are driving purchase decisions, according to Cisco executives. This expands Cisco’s buyer base in a way the traditional networking portfolio could not. The framing of security as an accelerator for AI deployment, rather than a compliance requirement, is resonating with enterprises that have agentic applications ready but lack confidence to move them to production.
Data Fabric Carries the Most Risk
The risks are concentrated in Data Fabric. Expanding Splunk from a machine data indexer into a cross-domain data platform with federation, a semantic layer, a knowledge graph, and activity-based pricing is an ambitious set of bets – all currently in alpha. The thesis that Cisco needs a data layer between its infrastructure and AI applications is sound, but the execution timeline is what matters. Companies such as Snowflake, Databricks, Datadog, and Dynatrace are not standing still, although some of them may well follow Snowflake in becoming partners of Cisco in its Data Fabric endeavors.
Cisco is now competing simultaneously in networking, security, observability, and data management. The platform thesis argues that integration creates value that point solutions cannot match. History suggests that breadth of ambition and depth of execution are difficult to sustain together. Proving the Cisco AI platform thesis will require converting organisational alignment into a shipped, adopted product at a pace that keeps up with specialists in each domain.
The Numbers Behind the Narrative
Cisco’s Q2 FY2026 results, reported on February 11 during Cisco Live EMEA, which hampered what executives could discuss, lent financial weight to the platform narrative being presented. Revenue reached $15.35 billion, up 10% year over year and ahead of consensus. Core networking revenue grew 21% to $8.3 billion, and networking product orders accelerated past 20% year over year. AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers hit $2.1 billion in the quarter, matching the full fiscal 2025 total. Cisco raised its full-year revenue guidance to $61.2-$61.7 billion, implying 8.5% growth.
There were signals on the earnings call that the platform message is not just a stage narrative. CFO Mark Patterson noted that enterprise customers are refreshing their entire operational stack rather than buying individual switches, suggesting the platform bundle is influencing purchasing behaviour. CEO Chuck Robbins framed the enterprise refresh as “the top of the first inning” of a multiyear, multibillion-dollar cycle. Beyond hyperscalers, Cisco booked $350 million in AI orders from neocloud, sovereign, and enterprise customers, with a pipeline of $2.5 billion, though Robbins acknowledged that meaningful sovereign and neocloud revenue is largely a fiscal 2027 story, i.e. one that starts in the second half of 2026. The one area of drag was Splunk’s ongoing transition from on-premises to cloud subscriptions, which pulled security revenue down 4% and is expected to continue weighing on growth through the second half of fiscal 2026.
What to Watch:
- Data Fabric production deployments: The move from alpha to customer-validated production use will be the clearest signal of whether Cisco’s data platform ambition is achievable. Watch for Snowflake federation availability and activity-based pricing adoption.
- Sovereign critical infrastructure attach rates: With commercial launch imminent, the question shifts from demand validation to revenue contribution. Track contract lengths and the impact of premiums on deal sizes across European accounts.
- AI Canvas cross-domain adoption: Integration across all business units – particularly less mature ones where agents are auto-generated – will test whether the platform thesis translates into a unified operational experience.
- Competitive responses in AI security: AI Defense’s early traction will attract attention from Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and emerging AI security startups. Watch for comparable AI supply chain assessment capabilities.
- Enterprise interest in Cisco as a model-building platform: Mentions of top-10 banks exploring AI Canvas for domain-specific model development could represent an addressable market expansion worth tracking.
You can read more about Cisco’s announcement from Cisco Live EMEA on its website.
Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.
Other insights from Futurum:
Will Cisco’s Silicon One G300 Be the Backbone of Agentic Inference?
Cisco’s “End of Gold”: High-Stakes Pivot to Skills-First Architecture
AI Capex 2026: The $690B Infrastructure Sprint
Author Information
Nick Patience is VP and Practice Lead for AI Platforms at The Futurum Group. Nick is a thought leader on AI development, deployment, and adoption - an area he has researched for 25 years. Before Futurum, Nick was a Managing Analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence, responsible for 451 Research’s coverage of Data, AI, Analytics, Information Security, and Risk. Nick became part of S&P Global through its 2019 acquisition of 451 Research, a pioneering analyst firm that Nick co-founded in 1999. He is a sought-after speaker and advisor, known for his expertise in the drivers of AI adoption, industry use cases, and the infrastructure behind its development and deployment. Nick also spent three years as a product marketing lead at Recommind (now part of OpenText), a machine learning-driven eDiscovery software company. Nick is based in London.
