Cisco to cut 7% of workforce, restructure product groups

Cisco is bringing its entire product portfolio together as one team, Robbins said, and the combined group will be led by Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s executive vice president and chief product officer. Patel previously was Cisco’s executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration. In other leadership moves, Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco networking, will be moving into an advisory role to Robbins. 

Cisco is executing deep product integrations across its portfolio, and it’s delivering on a platform strategy for customers, Robbins said. “With the pace at which the AI revolution is moving, and what our enterprise customers need from us, and as security and networking continue to become more tightly intertwined, I just felt like it was important for us to have a single leader,” Robbins said. 

In terms of AI, Robbins said Cisco has seen about $1 billion of AI technology orders from hyperscaler customers this year, and it expects to see about the same amount next year.

“To date, with three of the top four hyperscalers deploying our Ethernet AI fabric, leveraging Cisco validated designs for AI infrastructure, we expect an additional $1 billion of AI product orders in fiscal year ’25,” Robbins said. “This momentum is being fueled by multiple use cases in production with the hyperscalers, several of which are in AI. In addition, we have multiple design wins with roughly two-thirds of these in AI over and above the webscale AI opportunity,” Robbins said.

As for AI use in enterprise environments, Robbins said there wasn’t all that much yet, but “we are beginning to see the enterprise pipeline build a bit.”

“We heard for the first time this quarter … that enterprise customers are now actually upgrading their infrastructure in preparation for AI,” Robbins noted. “And in some cases, they’re taking some of the dollars that they’ve set aside for AI to actually spend it on modernizing their infrastructure in order to get ready for that. We believe we are well positioned to be the key beneficiary of AI application proliferation in the enterprise.”