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The Digital Servitization Exchange Podcast
Connecting research and practice in the transformation from products to digital services.
The Digital Servitization Exchange Podast explores how manufacturers create and capture value through services and software. Designed for both researchers and practitioners, the podcast brings together academic insight and industry experience to unpack the concepts, challenges, and opportunities driving digital servitization.
Each episode delves into themes such as service innovations, subscription models, industrial IoT, digital platform ecosystems, and organizational transformation. Rather than focusing on individual voices, the podcast emphasizes relevant topics that matter across domains — offering evidence-based perspectives for academics and actionable ideas for business professionals.
By bridging theory and practice, The Digital Servitization Exchange Podcast provides a space where learning flows both ways: from research to real-world implementation, and from practice back to research.
Ideal for: academics, doctoral researchers, industrial leaders, digital transformation managers, service strategists, and anyone shaping the future of digitally enabled services.
The Digital Servitization Exchange Podcast
#27 From Networks to Recurring Value: Cisco’s Service-Led Transformation
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Description
Cisco Systems is best known for building the infrastructure of the internet. But since 2010, Cisco has been quietly reinventing itself—from a hardware-driven networking giant into a company powered by services, software, and recurring revenue.
In this episode, we unpack how Cisco turned its traditional support business into a strategic growth engine. We trace the evolution from classic maintenance services like SMARTnet to analytics-driven “smart services,” software subscriptions, customer success models, and ultimately networking-as-a-service under the Cisco+ initiative. Along the way, we examine how offerings such as Meraki, Webex, ThousandEyes, Cisco ONE, and subscription-based licensing fundamentally changed how Cisco creates and captures value.
The episode shows why services became central to Cisco’s financial stability, how recurring revenue reshaped its operating model, and what this transformation reveals about digital servitization in technology-intensive industries. Cisco’s journey highlights a key lesson: servitization succeeds when services are embedded into the product, the business model, and the customer lifecycle—not added on afterward.
Key words
Cisco Systems, Digital Servitization, Service Strategy, Recurring Revenue, Subscription Models, Software-Defined Networking, Customer Experience (CX), Networking-as-a-Service, Enterprise Technology