Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins talks about having a leg-up over HPE-Juniper, cross-selling Splunk opportunities, Cisco’s bullish AI strategy and his thoughts on the U.S. economy in 2025 with the upcoming presidential election.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins is confident that his company’s longtime networking leadership will continue regardless of new competition from HPE with its pending Juniper Networks acquisition.

“You look at the combination of networking and security and the importance of those two coming together—which they (HPE) do not have—and you look at data center infrastructure, you look at campus networking with wireless, with all of the observability, the security and everything that we have—I mean, we have more technology that brings more value to our customers in the infrastructure layer than anybody else,” said Cisco’s Robbins on stage at the 2024 XChange Best of Breed Conference today in Atlanta.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri said at the conference this week that with HPE’s upcoming $14 billion acquisition of Juniper that “we are becoming a networking company at the core. Something that probably Cisco has forgotten now for a little bit.”

When asked for a response, Robbins said with a smirk: “Well, we forgot more about networking than they’ll probably know about networking.”

[Related: Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins: Moving Fast To Win The AI Battle]

Robbins also spoke about Cisco’s $28 billion blockbuster acquisition of Splunk in terms of its channel partner and integration strategy.

“Well, when you spend $28 billion dollars, you want to be a little careful that you don’t screw something up,” Robbins said. “So we are being thoughtful about it. You have to get through the core fundamentals. It’s like playing sports: you got to get all the foundational and the fundamentals right before you start doing a lot of fancy things. So what we implemented this year is we have a bonus program in place for the Cisco sales force to simply open the door and introduce the Splunk sales team to the CIO of any customers that aren’t using Splunk.”

Robbins also chatted about the upcoming 2024 U.S. presidential election and the potential impact on the economy.

“I think our system is built in a way that restricts radical policy shifts,” said Robbins.

In an interview at XChange with CRN’s Jennifer Follett and Steven Burke, Robbins talks about Cisco networking besting HPE-Juniper, Cisco’s AI strategy, the Cisco-Splunk strategy and AI’s future.

What is the biggest difference between the Cisco-Splunk networking story and the HPE-Juniper networking story?

I did read the article. Look, the difference is we didn’t need [to buy] a networking company, but what our customers are looking for is they’re trying to make sense of all the data they have.

And given the footprint that we have and the platform that Splunk has, if you think about all the insights that can be delivered from networking devices, all the threat intelligence that we get from Talos, all the intelligence we get from technologies like from ThousandEyes—and if you put all that together with all the log data and everything else that Splunk currently sees, then you apply a layer of AI on top of it—we think we can give our customers greater insights about what’s happening in their infrastructure, what’s happening with their applications, what’s happening in their security, and the security of their infrastructure.

We think we can do that more effectively for our customers better than anybody else. That’s what it really brings to us.

[Robbins’ answer continues into next slide.]

What is the biggest difference between the Cisco Splunk networking story and the HPE Juniper networking story?

[Robbins’ answer continues from previous slide.]

So Splunk really brings all of those insights to life. If you contemplate the use of AI by the bad actors around the world, from a security perspective, if we aren’t as good or better at leveraging AI on the most comprehensive data set that you can possibly have of threat intelligence that’s going on—and we see billions of threats every day—if you’re not using AI to actually correlate all these disparate things that are happening in your infrastructure, then you’re going to lose.

As we always say, it’s clichéd but they only have to be right once.

So I think all of that together makes Splunk a great deal for us.

So far, the integration is going incredibly well. We’ve integrated our XDR platform with SIEM (security information and event management) already. We actually are filtering high fidelity alerts out of our Talos threat intelligence and putting that in Splunk already.

There’s some stuff we’re going to talk about at our partner summit in a couple weeks, and we’re just going to keep rolling with the innovation. So it’s good.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri mentioned when he was here that he believes Cisco may have forgotten that it’s a networking company at heart. What is your response to critics who say you’ve taken your eye off the networking ball?

Well, we forgot more about networking than they’ll probably know about networking.

I thought it was interesting that [HPE CEO Neri said] Juniper excelled into campus, and they have 2.6 percent market share in campus. HPE actually has more.

So I guess they think more of Juniper campus portfolio than they do their own.

But look, we have the most comprehensive portfolio, whether you’re looking at cloud infrastructure today, AI infrastructure under training models, the technology that we’re going to deliver for an end-to-end stack for how our enterprise customers are going to deploy AI applications with HyperFabric.

You look at the combination of networking and security and the importance of those two coming together—which they (HPE) do not have—and you look at data center infrastructure, you look at campus networking, with wireless, with all of the observability, the security and everything that we have—I mean, we have more technology that brings more value to our customers in the infrastructure layer than anybody else.

Cisco’s gone through so many evolutions as a company. So what is the elevator pitch of what the Cisco identity is today?

If you really think about it, we are the only company who can bring networking, observability, security to our customers—all integrated together.

We think that all of those things coming together are more important than they ever have been, and that’s what we’re going to deliver: a secure networking company that actually delivers incredible capabilities—whether it’s a AI ready data center, future proof workplace, or an underlying layer of digital resilience that we’re going to deliver.

With the Splunk acquisition, you brought in former Splunk CEO Gary Steele. What changes are you looking for him to make, and what impact do you want him to have on the combined Cisco-Splunk sales and channel strategy?

Gary’s great. Gary is an operator. He did a phenomenal job of running Splunk for the two years before we actually completed the acquisition. He’s done an amazing job.

He really excels at simplifying things. So our partners will appreciate that.

The teams are working on evolving our partner program right now, which we’re going to talk about at Cisco Partner Summit in a couple of weeks.

He’s looking at simplifying our coverage models, simplifying the engagement model and really trying to help our teams just spend more time actually with partners and customers on a monthly basis. That’s what he’s focused on. I think he’s going to make a ton of progress this year.

What does Splunk do to the overall culture of Cisco? Is there some sort of ‘Splunk-ification’ of Cisco going on as more Splunk folks come into leadership positions?

I don’t think there’s a ‘Splunk-ification.’ That’s a good word though.

What you have is the same thing you have with any leader who comes in and is looking at anything through a fresh set of eyes. (Splunk’s CEO Steele) asked questions like, ‘Why do we do that?’ Which is always healthy.

There’s a beautiful six months of ignorance when you take a new job, because you can ask any question you want and he’s done that. He’s challenged us in some areas. He’s asked the right questions about why do we do this?

He’s actually got an incredible balance.

You would think that he would come in and want to push the Splunk portfolio across the entire sales force, and he reminds us quite regularly, ‘Hey, just remember, we need these salespeople selling lots of network infrastructure. So let’s not distract them. Let’s stay focused.’ So the biggest thing that he does, though, is he brings a fresh set of eyes.

What’s your take on the cross-sell opportunity between Cisco and Splunk?

Well, when you spend $28 billion dollars, you want to be a little careful that you don’t screw something up.

So we are being thoughtful about it. You have to get through the core fundamentals. It’s like playing sports: you got to get all the foundational and the fundamentals right before you start doing a lot of fancy things.

So what we implemented this year is we have a bonus program in place for the Cisco salesforce to simply open the door and introduce the Splunk sales team to the CIO of any customers that aren’t using Splunk. So just foundational, basic stuff.

At the same time, we’re getting all their employees into our systems and all those kinds of things, and doing all the hard work of doing a big integration that’s going on at the same time. So we’re going to move as fast as we possibly can, but not faster than we’re comfortable with.

From the partner perspective of not only the Cisco side or the Splunk side, but those who aren’t working with you at all yet and are now looking at this new Cisco-Splunk combination. What is the order of magnitude of opportunity here for those partners?

I would highly encourage all of you to look at Splunk and the security integration that we’re doing. The next generation SOC and the opportunity that our customers are obviously moving towards, I mean—security is a massive data problem, and to the extent that we can help them actually leverage AI, leverage automation, to actually correlate these threats and get to the root of the problem faster, then they’re going to be more effective.

First of all, Splunk is highly concentrated in the upper end of the account base. They’re highly concentrated in the United States. So there’s a huge opportunity for us to expand.

They didn’t have a super robust partner program. They had a partner strategy and they worked with lots of partners, but it wasn’t quite as comprehensive.

This business is the services around it and helping customers get these SOCs built and get it up and running. So it’s quite good for the partners. As we continue to drive the integration across the security portfolio into Splunk, you’ll just see more and more opportunity as this evolves. And then the observability side of it as well.

Where are you going to make the investments to help partners cross the AI chasm and really deliver on this vision of security, observability and networking?

So you’re going to see this begin to roll out at the partner summit. What we have coming up from an AI perspective. We have our WebExOne event coming up. We got our partner summit. We have Cisco Live Asia. We have an AI event we’re doing in January. Then we have Cisco Live Europe and we have Cisco Live in the U.S.

We have this roadmap of product announcements across this space that are all going to be around AI that are leading with infrastructure, both compute and networking, and security. We’re obviously building in a lot of AI capabilities into our portfolio. We’re going to lay out the whole architecture at the partner summit a couple weeks.

You’ll see our incentive structure shift to align with that. Because it’s super important right now—and this is something else Gary (Steele) believes in deeply—the incentives we put in place for our partners and our sales teams—we want them to stay aligned. When they’re aligned, we do really great things together. So we’ll be focused on making sure that’s true.

Cisco is really well prepared for this AI transition. Why is that and what do you see there that’s critical to partners?

There’s a multitude of areas that we’re focused on in the AI space.

First of all, cloud infrastructure underneath the training model. So we’re deployed in three of the four as Ethernet underneath the GPU for these training clusters. So we’re doing that first and foremost. So that says we’re on the front end of this whole trend.

The second thing is infrastructure in the enterprise. We announced HyperFabric a few months back and it’s going to be available the first of year. We’re actually working with Nvidia on some features that they’re still working on for us to get that delivered. That’s going to be Cisco networking, Vast storage, Nvidia GPUs, Cisco CPUs, with a cloud-based orchestration and lifecycle management capabilities with security integrated as well. So that’s happening in the enterprise.

We want to really help our customers more easily deploy these AI applications as the use cases become more apparent. We’re focused on security. We’ve launched Hypershield. We’re working on some other technology that will actually provide a layer of security in front of these custom models that our enterprise customers may run. So there’s a whole security aspect that’s going on.

We need security for AI and AI for security, and we’re working on both of those.

We’re going to have a whole services set of capabilities to help our customers think through use cases with our partners, in conjunction with our partners as we go forward.

We understand our role in the web scale space. We understand our role in the enterprise. We understand our role in the security side of AI. And we understand our role in helping our enterprise customers understand how to deploy AI.

A great unknown for what the economy is going to look like in 2025? With this election coming up, we are going to have a new president in January, one way or the other. What are your thoughts on what the impact is going to be on the economy based on whoever gets elected?

Look, we’ve had both parties in office over the last eight years and the economy has been incredibly resilient. So I think our system is built in a way that restricts radical policy shifts.

I think that there’s so much happening right now that’s positive in the U.S. that the policies and the approach will be different depending on which administration’s in office. But the last eight years has proven that we have a very— especially in light of the inflation that we dealt with, the supply chain shocks that we dealt with, the interest rate increases, the subsequent beginning of the easing—I think we’ve just proven that we have a very resilient economy.

So I think this is going to continue to chug along. We’ll just have to deal with different issues, depending on who’s in office relative to different policy issues and how we respond to them.