Catching the Next Wave of Innovation in Routing and Automation

The ocean has plenty of waves but catching the perfect one requires serious thought and planning since we know water is never predictable. Surfers need to time it right with precision and use a balance of strength and endurance to paddle, pop up, and ride the wave without wiping out. Having the skills and the right board makes all the difference for an ultimate surfing experience.

At Cisco, we’ve been catching many waves over the years. Waves of innovation, that is.  Years ago, we thought the networking industry wave would move in a particular direction. So, while we had many technologies and intellectual property in-house, we decided to make acquisitions with market-leading companies (such as Acacia, Leaba, and Sedona) for coherent optics, routing and switching silicon and multi-layer automation.

As a result, we were able to catch the convergence wave, where market-moving transitions, such as Routed Optical Networking and Converged Transport, redefine cost structures and operational paradigms for our customers. The good news is that we are building momentum with this wave and seeing the industry validating our vision, such as with pluggable coherent optics and the shifts in Metro networking.

With our best-of-breed organic and acquired investments, our surfboards have gotten much stronger and purpose-built to take on new, exciting waves that we have long spotted but are only now getting attention from others.

Looking at the horizon ahead, not only do we see the before-mentioned trends continuing to play in our favor, but there is another wave of innovation and inflection points to capture in areas such as Web, Metro, and 5G.

Web

We have made a long-term bet to capture the transitions in the Web/Hyperscale segment. A key takeaway from these industry transitions has been that one size does not fit all. The same use case might require different architectural choices that mandate design flexibility from both a system and software perspective for an optimal and viable solution to be productized. The unique value proposition offered by Silicon One and Cisco 8000, by virtue of software and hardware integration flexibility, enables the continuous innovation that fuels this market segment. Different operating systems like IOS-XR, SONiC, and FBOSS can now be onboarded on the same hardware substrate. Network design can now leverage the untapped potential from this system and software unified flexibility. The advent of tunable long reach optics like ZR and ZR+ further simplify and optimizes network architecture by converging IP and Optical layers. Innovation of this pedigree caters to problems that exist today and can also be leveraged to design the networks of tomorrow.

This thought and product leadership has enabled Silicon One and Cisco 8000 to be deployed into diverse use cases across multiple hyperscale customers.

In Web, we will continue to invest in the distinct value that Silicon One and Cisco 8000 offerings bring to address multiple upcoming inflection points. One such transition is happening in the back-end networks for AI and Deep Learning (AI/ML) applications where traditional solutions are sunset in favor of Ethernet, sharing the very same characteristics that we have seen drive disruption in many other areas:

• Favorable cost-bandwidth at 400G, 800Gand beyond
• Open and standards-based
• Mass-volume economies of scale, supply, and ecosystem
• Convergence of back-end machine learning (ML) and front-end network stacks

Metro Evolution

The Internet is shifting from being a network-of-networks to becoming a network-of-data centers. As a result, applications are becoming more dynamic –requiring differentiated user experiences and optimizing distributed compute and decomposed network resources in places where power and space are constrained.

While this is nothing new, and we’ve evolved our routing portfolio to address this inflection point across software capabilities and compact form-factors, other trends now contribute to an accelerated transition.

First, the ecosystem around connectivity and its participants is changing. For example, in the middle-mile space, new disruptive market entrants and cloud providers are making inroads. We are also seeing a trend with structural separation of traditional Communication Service Providers (CSPs), where previously integrated entities with very different objectives are split. More importantly, new revenue streams are expected to come from emerging services hosted at regional, edge, and far edge locations. As a result, the center of gravity and point of service delivery is moving further out – driving very different architectural and operational incentives.

We continue to lead this transition through relentless simplification, automation, and multi-dimensional convergence – the outcomes being unparalleled cost-effectiveness and operational ease, new areas of monetization, and a consistent, high-quality experience. The same must hold true when we consider broadband and content delivery amid growth happening globally as hybrid work is here to stay, and ambitious ($in the US alone) investments are made in infrastructure and rural fiber to help close the digital divide.

Second, we also recognize that broadband requirements have evolved. Subscribers now consume far higher bandwidths, have different traffic distribution characteristics, and can be served by simplified profiles on distributed subscriber gateways. Add to that mix technology enablers in the form of control and user plane separation (CUPS) and standardized specifications of interfaces and protocols such as TR-459, which makes it the right time to disrupt the dynamics and economies of broadband delivery.

In combination with Cisco Edge Cloud for Content Delivery, we can reduce the cost per subscriber, increase quality, and create new revenue opportunities for our customers.

5G Transport

We know extensive investments in 5G are happening globally, such as US operators spending around $100B on mid-band 5G spectrum auctions.  However, given the significant opportunities for CSPs to create new business models, innovative new revenue streams, and lean operational efficiency, they can achieve a more profitable set of offerings and robust business.

But a few areas need to evolve, such as the transport networks, to deliver mobile broadband experiences cost-effectively while meeting the scale requirements for the massive Internet of Things (IoT) and the ultra-low latency requirements for real-time applications. Low latency and bandwidth intensive applications will require integrating regional data centers and distributed compute seamlessly at the edge to deliver quality experiences closer to the endpoints in the network.

While 5G is still far from fully deployed, since operators globally have been focusing on enabling eMBB services, uRLLC use cases & network slicing are still on the horizon. We’re building momentum with ORAN /vRAN, such as at DISH Wireless. As the 4th largest national 5G provider in the US, Dish Wireless is the 1st O-RAN-based Greenfield network in the country. They are a cloud-native service provider focused on container-based applications and mobility network functions in a hybrid cloud.

As part of the evolution, we have refreshed our converged transport strategy to be the “Ubiquitous Connectivity Enabler” for hyperscalers, middle mile providers, and CSP. “Cloud-ready Converged Transport” will provide the end-to-end programmable transport using a service aware forwarding plane (SRv6). It will connect digital assets across hybrid & multi-cloud with service assurance, segmentation & automation.

With the Cloud-Ready Converged Transport, we can address the exploding bandwidth demands (e.g., 5G Massive MIMO Radios), massive logical scale, and the incredibly low latency needs of new applications and services in an efficient, automated, programmable manner.

As the first in the industry, Cisco has delivered hybrid cloud transport for Telco workloads (User Plane Forwarding & RAN centralized unit) hosted in AWS in the Dish network.

In summary…

We address these strategic areas with our Converged SDN Transport solution across Metro, Core, and Data Centers. Common software, including IOS XR and Crosswork automation, is a critical piece of the architecture to drive operational simplicity. Analogous to the flexibility of a surfboard portfolio, with our “quiver” of solutions, customers can build and run simplified networks and get the economical, sustainable, and flexible benefits for a better operational experience.

While some in the industry may have started entering the water and watching the waves, we’re meeting our customers where they are, in the line-up to surf the barrel.

Stay tuned to hear more on our perspectives in the Web, Metro Evolution, and 5G Transport space.

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