Thank you for the partnership @Cisco and @splunk
Our Take
The recently concluded Cisco Live’25 event in Amsterdam, gave a glimpse into Cisco’s strategy for the coming years, has the potential to join the $1 Trillion club, with its broad reach across Networking and Security. The recent market trends around Agentic AI are ripe to act as a catalyst for this.
Key Highlights at Cisco Live EMEA
CiscoLiveEMEA earlier this month, where 17,000+ customers, partners, analysts, press and colleagues came face-to-face with Cisco’s innovations and saw how we are shaping the future by unlocking the power of AI.
Below is a summary of key insights from Cisco Live 2025, including highlights from the Partner Day keynote and main keynote addresses by Jeetu Patel, EVP and Chief Product Officer, and Oliver Tuszik, President of EMEA.
For the past 40 years, the network has been at the heart of Cisco’s technological innovations. However, AI took center stage for the first time at this year’s Cisco Live. Oliver Tuszik emphasized that the pace of innovation over the past eight months is unlike anything we have seen before, and he expects this momentum to accelerate further. He also highlighted AI’s potential to unlock new efficiencies, drive simplicity, and enhance digital resilience, all while reinforcing the critical role of the network in enabling digital transformation and powering AI infrastructure.
With growing noise around AI and the complexities of building AI-ready infrastructure, enterprises are shifting towards automation over standardization. Cisco aims to address these challenges through three key focus areas:
- Unlock the Power of AI
- Simplify & Drive Efficiency
- Strengthen Digital Resilience
Oliver Tuszik, President of EMEA, also highlighted rising IT spending, citing Gartner’s prediction that end-user spending on IT products and services in Europe will reach $1.3 trillion by 2025, growing at an annual rate of 10%.
Insights from the Cisco 2024 AI Readiness Index further underscore the urgency for AI adoption:
- 85% of organizations say they have less than 18 months to implement an AI strategy or risk negative business impacts.
- Only 13% of companies globally are fully prepared to leverage AI.
- In Europe, just 7% of companies are AI-ready.
Key barriers to AI adoption include:
- 40% – Skills and knowledge gaps
- 35% – Infrastructure limitations
- 34% – Security concerns
Additionally, Oliver highlighted research revealing that 95% of CIOs report a shortage of engineers, leading to challenges in network management and driving the need for increased automation to offset staffing shortages.
He also emphasized the importance of business resilience, noting that downtime remains a significant issue. According to the 2024 Splunk and Oxford Economics Report : The Hidden Costs of Downtime’, Downtime costs Global 2000 companies $400 billion annually.
Finally, Oliver underscored Cisco’s unique position as the only company capable of integrating networking, security, observability, and collaboration.
To achieve this, Cisco has adopted three strategic pillars:
- AI-Ready Data Centers
- Future-Proofed Workplaces
- Digital Resilience
The new framework fosters seamless collaboration between customers and partners, enabling mutual growth. Following this, Jeetu Patel, EVP and Chief Product Officer, took the stage to share his vision for developing products that customers love. He added “ Great N/W company needs to be great security company which needs to be a great Ai company which needs to be great data copy” emphasizing Data – AI – Security- networking
AI-Ready Data Centers
Jeetu Patel highlighted that while today’s workforce is entirely human, the future will integrate humans, humanoids, and AI agents, increasing workforce capacity tenfold and unlocking immense potential in productivity, efficiency, and cost savings.
Patel emphasized two key trends shaping the industry’s evolution: the DeepSeek Effect and the Operator Effect.
- DeepSeek Effect: As the cost of building AI models decreases,
- enterprises will deploy thousands of small and large foundation models instead of just a few, significantly impacting security and safety measures.
- Operator Effect: With the Operator effect,
- enterprises leverage thousands of autonomous agents for various functions operating across global data centers, often requiring robust connectivity and a solid network infrastructure.
- Thousands of agents where Test time compute – inferencing market goes up 200x
Cisco’s recent research underscores the urgency for AI readiness:
- 97% of CEOs expressed excitement about AI, but only 1.7% considered their organizations AI-ready.
Cisco AI Defense
Patel emphasized that AI introduces new risks as traditional application architectures evolve. Previously, applications interacted directly with data and infrastructure, but now, multiple AI models sit between the application and data layers, presenting significant safety and security challenges.
The goal is not just to incorporate AI into the security stack but to secure AI itself. Cisco aims to empower enterprises to use AI tools like ChatGPT without compromising data security, ensuring guardrails are in place to prevent data leakage and enforce runtime policies when models deviate from expected behavior.
DJ Sampath, VP of AI Software & Platform, demonstrated the Cisco AI Defense within the Cloud Protection Suite.
- This dashboard provides visibility into all applications and AI agents running within the environment, including the models powering them, data used for inference, and user access to third-party applications.
- Integrated with Cisco Secure Access, this solution simplifies network administration by offering real-time insights into validated and unvalidated models, allowing enterprises to validate models in minutes instead of Weeks.
- DJ Sampath also highlighted the platform’s ability to detect attacks on AI models, review prompt requests, and set guardrails for unauthorized or malicious behavior.
- Cisco’s team tested the DeepSeek model using HarmBench, a set of adversarial prompts, revealing a 100% success rate in compromising DeepSeek compared to a 26% success rate with OpenAI models. This underscores the importance of securing AI models at scale, especially as enterprises deploy thousands of models across diverse applications.
Future-proofed workplaces
Jeetu Patel highlighted that as workplaces become increasingly complex, the workplace of the future will look vastly different. To enable this transformation, networking, collaboration, and security must seamlessly converge.
Digital Resilience
Jeetu Patel emphasized that digital resilience quickly identifies the root cause when something goes wrong by efficiently correlating data for rapid remediation. Digital resilience is a data challenge at its core, requiring seamless integration with platforms that provide network assurance, infrastructure observability, and security.
Fabrix.ai @ Cisco Live EMEA 2025 – great meeting customers, partners, analysts and friends!
Fabrix.ai is thankful for the incredible support from our Splunk friends, who gave us the opportunity to present four sessions at the Splunk booth.
- Datacenter and Application Modernization with CloudFabrix & Splunk
- GenAI-driven Telco Service Assurance with CloudFabrix & Splunk
- Supercharge Your Use Cases with CloudFabrix & Splunk
- Unified Network Observability & Automation with CloudFabrix & Splunk
During these sessions, we’ve highlighted how Splunk users can tap into diverse IT, infrastructure, and network data to gain unparalleled insights and visibility across your entire ecosystem. We’ve also showcased how to harness the power of the Splunk Platform for Data Visualization.
Jeetu summarized the Partner Day Keynote with “ISV partners key to success”.
Fabrix.ai formerly CloudFabrix has been a long term Cisco Appdynamics and now a Splunk Partnerverse partner. We recently rebranded the company exactly for the market trends identified above at Cisco Live! We identified these trends early in the cycle as shared in my forbes articles Agentic AI Predictions and our vision for Autonomous Enterprise
Our visions are aligned and we look forward to an exciting partnership with Cisco and Splunk in 2025 and beyond!
