Summary Bullets:

• Cisco’s efforts to further integrate ThousandEyes across its solution portfolio offers a powerful tool as it aims to grow as a leading cloud-networking platform provider.

• While ThousandEyes offers great visibility into the entire stack, Cisco could offer deeper integrations in areas like WAN optimization to make the most of its investment.

During the Keynote at this year’s Cisco Live 2022 APJ, in Melbourne Australia, Cisco executive VP and GM of security and collaboration, Jeetu Patel stated that providing a vendor-neutral platform for cloud-networking was core to the company’s strategy. More specifically the company hopes to abstract the security and networking layers away from the leading hyperscale platforms, and to provide a unified platform for networking services and security that allows traffic to flow securely to any cloud platform. This is a lofty goal, and Cisco has a long list of competitors in the networking, monitoring, and security space. The hyperscalers are growing their WAN offerings While Cisco remains one of the leaders in networking and is growing stronger in security, the company needs to develop as many points of differentiation as possible to achieve this goal.