Highlights & Analyst Takes from Cisco Live! 2025 (with Maribel Lopez)

After two extremely dense and informative days of Cisco's analyst program at Cisco Live! 2025 which too place in San Diego, Leonard Lee of neXt Curve and Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research sat down in the analyst forum plenary ballroom to tape what was supposed to be a greeting video to Jo Peterson, a mutual friend who has been on the neXt Curve podcast. Hi, Jo!

The analyst relations team at Cisco put on a fantastic program this year to give analyst the opportunity to engage with the Cisco executives who were amazingly generous with their time. Maribel and Leonard provide share highlights from two-days of session, roundtables, 1-on-1 briefings, and announcement-packed keynotes. 

Maribel and Leonard hit on the following topics:

➡️ Everyone is talking about AI. How is Cisco talking about it? (2:20)

➡️ Network and security convergence (4:00)

➡️ Platformization - the value and the challenges for Cisco (6:18)

➡️ Balancing of consolidation and integration on the road to pjatformization (9:21)

➡️ The great hope and the great threat of agentic AI (12:05)

Connect with Maribel Lopez on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/maribellopez. You can also follow her on X at @maribellopez, and at www.lopezresearch.com.

Please subscribe to our podcast which will be featured on the neXt Curve YouTube Channel. Check out the audio version on BuzzSprout - https://nextcurvepodcast.buzzsprout.com - or find us on your favorite Podcast platform.

Also, subscribe to the neXt Curve research portal at www.next-curve.com for the tech and industry insights that matter.

Transcript

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Mirabel Lopez 0:06

Next curve.

Leonard Lee 0:09

Hey everyone, this is Leonard Lee, executive Analyst at Next Curve. And I am here in San Diego. Yes. Refreshingly, I don't have to travel. This is really great. Yeah. Attending. Cisco Live 2025 and I'm here with Abel Lopez of Lopez

Mirabel Lopez 0:26

Research. Lopez Research. Yes.

Leonard Lee 0:28

Yeah, right on. that was founder Harmony

Mirabel Lopez 0:29

criminalist of Ype Research.

Leonard Lee 0:30

Yes. And, so before we get started, we want to give a shout out to our good friend, Joe P. Peterson.

Mirabel Lopez 0:36

Miss you.

Leonard Lee 0:37

Hi. How's it going? Yeah, we're here. Miss you much. And so, what I wanted to do is, spend a little time with you to get some of your thoughts on the event this year, as well as some of your key takes. What is it that you thought. Really wowed you and, maybe what are some of the things that you thought Fell short of expectations, before we get started, do you want to, do you want to introduce yourself to the next curve audience? Like formally beyond just next? Yeah, I mean, all I know is that everyone at Cisco loves you, so you're like a superstar.

Mirabel Lopez 1:12

So I'm a That's great category. Thank you. Um, I'm a technology industry analyst, so I help IT leaders, move in the next. Waves of technology. it started a long time ago with networking. We're still doing networking and telecom, and we've added ai. so here we are. Everything's ai and I'm doing a lot of AI for security, AI for customer experience, and really excited to be here. So, yeah.

Leonard Lee 1:35

Yeah. And we're on calls occasionally, right? Yeah. We spend

Mirabel Lopez 1:38

a lot of time together actually. Yeah.

Leonard Lee 1:39

Yeah.

Mirabel Lopez 1:40

little two inch. Cubes so much time together virtually.

Leonard Lee 1:46

Yes. And here's the thing, if, if you don't follow her, you should, because she asked really, really good questions during the analyst session. So, and that, that's a trademark of, we didn't let

Mirabel Lopez 1:55

em off easy this year. We asked them lots of questions. We had lots of great executive support. I will say that's one thing that's been really fabulous about this event. we've seen and had the opportunity to talk to all of the. Key leaders here and, they were very forthcoming and nice. And that's one of the things that, really made the event a great event, I think. Yeah. But at any rate, and just where do you wanna start?

Leonard Lee 2:14

Well, let's start with what are some of the things that really, impressed you this year or

Everyone is talking about AI. How is Cisco talking about it?

Leonard Lee 2:20

some of the key takeaways that you, got out of the discussions and the sessions that we've had with the Cisco executives and maybe even what you saw at the keynote.

Mirabel Lopez 2:31

Yeah, it's actually a pretty simple story in some ways, right? everybody on the planet's doing ai, so you expected to have some AI discussion happen, how it changed networking, how it would change everything, basically. one of the things I thought was really interesting about this year versus last year is. You to see the progression of them actually moving to a platform, because everybody says when they have a lot of products, it's like, oh, well we've got a platform play. Well, really you have a lot of products that aren't integrated yet. So I think we've seen some real meaningful progress on the integration that's been talked about For years. it's starting to look and feel a little more like there's a platform opportunity with Cisco security It just continues to be a much larger focus than what we saw in the past. They've always talked about security, but it's definitely a broadening in terms of how to think about it and how to do that in an AI world.

3:23

Mm-hmm.

Mirabel Lopez 3:24

I think the shock and delight moment was the DJ Sand Path demo. we got to see one of those demos and he did the same demo on stage Live demos, not for the light of heart. No. there's so many things that could go wrong and it was, not just that the demo didn't go wrong, but it was more that you could see there was some interesting insights and ways to do work differently when you had the demo. at that point I'm gonna stop and say, how about you? What'd you say?

Leonard Lee 3:52

Yeah, I will pick up on the. What you mentioned about the network and security

Network and security convergence

Leonard Lee 4:00

and how security is becoming more of a, a thing and under these convergence topics. Right, right. We saw, actually, Cisco approach it not only from, what we traditionally see with boxes and the network, We saw them go all the way down to the devices and silicon. Yeah. Right. And so what really stood out for me was the concept of the, the smart switch. Yeah. And converging security with network. And that kind of tied in, I think in a box, a lot of this platform, perspective that I think they're trying to. Promote and, platform in terms of not only the integration of the various services and, products that they have, but also with this idea of converging things from a network and security perspective. And I think we had some really cool conversations about how it is kind of conflict, right? Between the CISO and the CIO, right? One of the challenges, I think, the industry all, all industries face right now are cyber threats. It's ridiculous, right? Coming out of it's getting worse. Yeah. Yeah. RSAC it is just truly frightening, even, especially in this age of agent ai, where I think there's growing concerns. Unknown concern, things that are unknown that you should be concerned about, that have yet to be addressed or yet to be realized. And so this convergence of the network, the platformization is going to actually be essential. one of the unique positionings that. Cisco has, is, they are in the network play as well as the security play, For the industry, There is gonna be that challenge of how do we bring things together, whether it's in a platform or through integration, middleware, standards, what have you, to get to a higher degree of convergence and integration, especially around telemetry data. because if you don't have that, it's gonna be really difficult to counter a lot of these emerging threats that we're going to see coming at us, if not are already here.

Mirabel Lopez 6:17

It's true. I

Platformization - the value and the challenges for Cisco

Mirabel Lopez 6:18

think there are two sides to any coin, right? Yeah. In general, everybody understands that it's an extremely complex environment. Yeah. Particularly in security. We have too many tools. We've always had too many solutions. People are double digits. 40, 50, 60 different security products. one of the challenges with platforming. There's, if, if you do it right, you can sell into an organization at a strategic layer, So, senior buyers that are looking at who are gonna be a select number of partners that I'm gonna do business with that are gonna provide me with enough that. You know, I will have several platforms, right? in SaaS. Maybe that's your Salesforce or your ServiceNow in infrastructure, it could be a Cisco or Dell and cloud. It might be, Google and Microsoft and IBM and AWS. Right. The challenge is they're all different buyers, So the platform play is really cool. But to your point, when you said like an IT OT thing. And then there's, security operations and there are different individuals or different buying centers. I think the thing that you picked up on, it's so important that might drive that change is all that data and what's the platform that helps people leverage the data across the whole stack from devices through networking, through, Security and cloud. it's a lot of data. in a lot of different systems, That you have to pull together, collect, correlate, come up with some interesting, useful insights. and that's where their whole Splunk, platform comes in. But, all of this is a. It's expensive. People already have stuff they need to migrate to stuff, so I think the messages are really resonating, but I don't underestimate the challenge of how an organization gets from here to over there where oh, I've got this wonderful unified platform and you should buy one too. It's not like you pick it up at the grocery store and you're done.

Leonard Lee 8:07

Right, right, right. But so what did Tom Gillis tell us?

Mirabel Lopez 8:11

Which thing? Tom was like very insightful. One of the things he talked about was the CISO. And rip and replace. Oh yeah. The rip. And he was like, no, rip and replace. Right? Yeah. and that was a big, and it makes sense because if you walk into somebody and I've just spent millions of dollars on a different type of infrastructure, I'm gonna sweat that for a couple years, right? Yeah, absolutely. And so then it's like, how do you do a controlled migration? And this is one of the most, yeah. Under appreciated skill sets that there is. Not just how to do a controlled migration, 'cause we always talked about that, but how to do a controlled migration in a rapidly evolving environment.

8:54

Sure,

Mirabel Lopez 8:54

sure. Companies come to us all the time and they're like, Hey, is this message differentiated? Is this product category differentiated? And you're like, well, for three months it is. And then your competitor's gonna come out and announce something and they'll be differentiated for three months. So yeah, it's a really fluid dynamic, difficult but high opportunity time.

Leonard Lee 9:15

Yeah. And I think you, the buyers also need to think about, just having

Balancing of consolidation and integration on the road to pjatformization

Leonard Lee 9:21

A balanced strategy between consolidation and integration. Right. Yeah, because I think the winning play at the moment, given that as you're alluding to platformization, it's nice that you can say that, but making that large shift, you're probably not gonna see this monolithic shift Good set up

Mirabel Lopez 9:38

behind us. Oh, okay.

Leonard Lee 9:40

Cool. Yeah, we're live. I mean this, like, we're live, we totally live. Yeah. Yeah. Actually,

Mirabel Lopez 9:44

we, we hijacked the room when no one was looking. Here we're,

Leonard Lee 9:49

we have a special guest, like any good analyst would

Mirabel Lopez 9:51

do. We're like, we can make this happen. Yeah,

Leonard Lee 9:53

exactly. What was I, yeah. We were doing consult. Yeah. No. Providing some of that. Middleware in terms of your products having a sense of, plugin, play, ishness, modularity. 'cause that, that's something that G two mentioned a couple times up on stage is that Yeah. We do also look at things in, as our products as being modular in a sense. Yeah. That can, mix and match with other vendor solutions, but having that backbone, right? Being able to at least have that, proposition that you can bring to the table to your customers and say, Hey, look, we can help you stitch this stuff together from the data all the way on up. So I think that was one of the things that I thought was cool because, those are talking points that were in the messaging and how they were talking about their strategy as well as their product.

Mirabel Lopez 10:43

so, you know what's interesting? so we both worked with Cisco and followed them for a long time, and one of the things I'd say has changed is as Cisco has moved more towards delivering security, the. Security is a village problem, right? Security takes a village. There's lots of different threats. There's lots of different companies. The security vendors they all compete, but they all acknowledge that you probably need more than one thing, right? Yeah. So if you like do the pull through of that, like the pull through that ethos of there's gonna be more than one thing in the environment. I think. Some of that thinking has been really helpful in terms of Cisco looking at the totality of the portfolio and saying, okay, we, how do these integrations work? How does consolidation work? How do migrations work? how do you do it in a way that, acknowledges it's gonna be a heterogeneous environment? Largely, No matter what happens, there's still gonna be, that's

Leonard Lee 11:44

heterogeneity that's so important.

Mirabel Lopez 11:45

so given that, I think there's, because then you start to build. Things that matter. Things that allow you to share data, to collect data to action in other platforms, or be able to send actions to other platforms. And I think you mentioned a agentic earlier. Okay, we're super early.

The great hope and the great threat of agentic AI

Mirabel Lopez 12:05

That was really obvious, through all the discussions I had here, which was refreshing by the way. yeah. It was kind of over agentic and everybody making it sound like you were just gonna hit the easy agentic button. I think we had a lot of reality of what that means here. And I think part of the reason we had that reality is it's around like, well, we've gotta secure those things, right? Yeah. We've gotta collect data from those agents and, exactly that, that really makes you think a lot. Anyway, there you go.

Leonard Lee 12:27

This is what I told, DJ and Anand, who is VP, who works under him, and I met him at RSAC. That is like the great opportunity though. Oh yeah. Because the thing is the threats are now, yeah. The threat actors are not stopping. They're not wondering, Hey, how do we make this stuff safe? They will use it. And so to be able to help. organizations defend themselves is a huge frontier for innovation. Yeah. And that's the way I look at it. I think, it then becomes a great opportunity for Cisco and their peers in the marketplace that recognize the challenge and then, you know, put some dollars into portfolio. Yeah. Because the threats are there. Opportunity.

Mirabel Lopez 13:09

The bigger your portfolio, the more opportunities you have to shell in a broader platform. Yeah. so I, I think they had that going for them. Yeah. And it, the keynote was a little bit of an onslaught yesterday.

Leonard Lee 13:19

it's a G two show.

Mirabel Lopez 13:22

and I do think that was important, right? 'cause in the past we had absolutely here's this group, here's that group, here's the other group. And I think what they were trying to demonstrate was. G two talking about the entirety of the portfolio. Pretty much the most of the portfolio, but it was a lot of stuff. And it was really hard to parse. Like in any given group, there was something really interesting that happened.

Leonard Lee 13:44

Absolutely. But you heard about

Mirabel Lopez 13:45

all of them and you were just like,

Leonard Lee 13:46

yeah.

Mirabel Lopez 13:47

At some point I'm like, enough End the keynote please.

Leonard Lee 13:51

Yeah, I can't

Mirabel Lopez 13:52

take any more announcements.

Leonard Lee 13:53

Yeah. So speaking of ending, we're always supposed to do this for five minutes. She just wanted to say hi to Joe and say, Hey, Joe, how's it going? Hey. But you know, it turned into this, which I think is we'll get a whole podcast. Really, really. And we've gotta go to a keynote speaking. A keynote.

Mirabel Lopez 14:06

So,

Leonard Lee 14:07

hey everyone, thanks for tuning in, and we hope that, this discussion, with Maribel has been, informative. I learn from her all the time. she asks great questions. We have a great community.

Mirabel Lopez 14:16

we learn a lot from each other,

Leonard Lee 14:17

that's great. Yes. And so, hey Maribel, tell our audience how they can get in touch with you.

Mirabel Lopez 14:22

so on. I'm, I'm at Maribel Lopez on x Maribel Lopez on LinkedIn, but since there's so many, you have to find the one is that Lopez Research. There really are a lot of Maribel Lopez's.

14:33

Yeah.

Mirabel Lopez 14:33

Yep. Okay. there's AI with Maribel Lopez, which is my podcast, which you can find on all the normal channels. And then Lopez research.com. Thank you for having me.

Leonard Lee 14:41

Yes, absolutely. And remember to like, share and subscribe to the next curve research portal@www.next curve.com, and we will see you next time. Thank you. Bye.