Cisco Live 2024: All the updates and announcements as they happen

This morning’s keynote, set to kick off at 9am CET, will be led by Cisco EMEA president Oliver Tuszik as he walks through some of the company's latest innovations in networking, security, AI and more! 

It is blowing a gail here in Amsterdam as everyone makes their way to the RAI exhibition for the opening keynote of Cisco Live 2024.

Here is a shot of the lobby area filling up, visitors are finally being allowed to enter the arena ready for the keynote to begin.

As we make our way to our seats we are being accompanied by a thumping bass drum courtesy of a very enthusiastic DJ. 

The music grows increasingly intense as the arena begins to fill, as stewards waving RGB glowsticks show people to their seats. 

It looks like the keynote will be slightly delayed as we pass 9am and people continue to stream into the arena, now to the sound of a slightly less bass-heavy dance track. 

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The wait is almost over, a graphic showing the keynote will begin in five minutes is being splashed on screens all around the arena.

One minute to go as the final stragglers scuttle in to the theatre. We are expecting to see Oliver Tuszik, president of Cisco EMEA, to be the first on stage to kick things off.

Here we go! We are being regaled by a very stirring live Cello performance.

Here comes Oliver Tuszik, who first welcomes the over 16,000 guests attending Cisco Live here in Amsterdam.

A specific thank you to the press and analysts goes down well in the media section!

Tuszik kicks things off by taking a whistle stop tour around some of the projects we will hear about over the course of the day.

This list includes Cisco's collaboration with Real Madrid in their renovations to the Estadio Santiago Bernabéu and the company's work with the French authorities to prepare it for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

Tuszik is speaking about common topics he hears about from customers:

'How do we upgrade our infrastructure for this new world?'

'How do we stay secure in the new world?'

'How do we create the best collaboration experience?'

'And how do we leverage all of this to transform?'

To get things started talking about the innovations Cisco is making to address these questions Tuszik welcomes Cisco's EVP and general manager Cisco Networking Johnathan Davidson.

Davidson begins with the emphatic statement: "there is no AI without a network". 

The first big announcement from Davidson is the unveiling of  ThousandEyes with Cisco Secure Access.

This will provide businesses with insights from ThousandEye's visibility of billions of measurements recorded every single day. 

Businesses will be able to use an API that is able to detect critical issues and also brownout conditions, so that customers can understand the digital experience of their user's applications and more.

The integration with Secure Access allows businesses to immediately see issues across their endpoints, wireless service provide, and all of their applications.

"How many of you would like to know that your CRM is having issues before they do?"

Cue a muffled cheer...

Davidson is now discussing how AI is being used within Cisco Meraki to manage sprawling camera networks to provide new features to improve security and observability.

Meraki cameras are now able to detect specific uniform of workers to detect unauthorized access on business premises. 

Davidson claims Cisco leads the industry in ethernet with their Silicon architecture.

Citing a Bloomberg survey that found 66% of enterprises who use ethernet  for their AI are Cisco customers.

This leads Davidson into announcing Cisco's partnership with NVIDIA in helping businesses develop, deploy, and automating datacenters to run AI workloads. 

With this collaboration Cisco and Nvidia will provide purpose-built ethernet networking based solutions, sold through Cisco's global channel, offering services and support to facilitate the deployment of GPU clusters. 

Davidson is now covering how Cisco is solving one of the barriers to optimizing networking: complexity.

"If it is connected it must be protected", and to discuss this further Davidson welcomes Jeetu Patel, EVP and general manager of Security & Collaboration at Cisco. 

Patel describes how each time a new threat vector emerges, vendors come to market with a raft of new products within their cyber security stack to address this specific threat.

Patel explains this level of complexity is untenable for businesses and the subsequent tool sprawl they suffer increases their exposure.

Patel says Cisco are seeing a major shift from customers using a vast range of endpoint  security solutions to integrated platforms. 

And this conveniently leads him to discuss Cisco's Security Cloud solution, launched 18 months ago.

Patel explains how each instance in which you connect to different applications, there are different means by which this connection occurs, which adds to the 'cognitive load' for the end user.

Cisco Security Cloud will allow users to authenticate into a system once, and then access the various connection protocols for the relevant application.

Apologies everyone, one dead laptop battery later and we are back. To catch you up, Patel introduced how Cisco is pioneering identity intelligence, powered by AI, to help businesses defend against the most persistent cyber threats.

Patel explained how the threat landscape has evolved and the majority of cyber attacks are carried out using credentials stolen from employees via social engineering attacks. 

Cisco Identity Intelligence, described as the first solution of its kind, uses AI to provide cross-domain security.

By analyzing an organization's entire attack surface including machines, services, apps, and data, Cisco Identity Intelligence is set to help bridge the gap between authentication and access, according to Patel

Next up is Ronak Desai, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Full-Stack Observability and AppDynamics, to talk about – you guessed it– observability!

Desai introduces Cisco's latest innovations in observability including Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) with Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Session Replay for cloud-native applications.

This system will provide deep insights into browser and mobile application performance for both hybrid and cloud environments and feature integrations with Cisco ThousandEyes and Accedian to offer insights into service delivery to really understand how an specific applications, network, or cloud infrastructure impact the overall digital experience.

Other additions to Cisco's observability offerings include integrations for Kubernetes workloads on the Cisco Observability Platform using a lightweight Linux kernel utility extended Berkeley Packet Filters (eBPF). 

As expected AI makes an appearance as Desai walks through how it can power a natural language interface in Cisco's observability platform. Customers can use conversational language to structure queries and quickly perform common tasks during troubleshooting.

Desai is now announcing a new Cisco AIOps application that will distil insights from real-time business health monitoring and reduce noise from events and alerts to automate more IT processes. 

This application will bring together Cisco AppDynamics, Cisco ThousandEyes, Cisco DNA Center, VMWare, Zabbix, and Servicenow. 

This system will support logs in addition to alerts, events, and metrics while also providing dynamic thresholds-based alerting on metrics, events, and multiple anomaly-detection approaches.

Jeetu Patel is back to talk about Cisco's partnership with Apple on Webex for Apple Vision Pro.

Patel says Cisco is committed to today's hybrid work environment and wants to offer people the option to work from any device and in any environment that best meets their requirements.

Today, Cisco are introducing spatial computing on Apple Vision Pro which will blend digital content with the real world.  

Patel announces the new Webex app designed specifically for Apple Vision Pro is now available on the App Store for visionOS. 

This application will provide an enhanced digital meeting experience using Personas and Spatial Audio to offer a more immersive experience for those dialling in to meetings remotely on their Vision Pro device.

Here comes another AI Assistant, this time for Webex. Patel announnces the AI Assistant for Webex with new features in the Webex Suite including AI-powered meeting summaries and Vidcast summaries.

Patel also offers a little teaser on features to come, with enhancements such as Space Summaries and Rewrite Message, which let users rephrase, change the tone, and translate messages.

Patel also adds that Cisco's video-messaging platform, Vidcast is also now available within the Webex app.

Next up is Adele Trombetta, senior vice president and general manager of CX EMEA, who is here to talk about Cisco's approach to sustainability in 2024. 

Trombetta wastes no time announcing Cisco has signed a 15-year agreement to purchase roughly 60,000 MWh per year of solar energy from Spanish renewables company IGNIS.

The commitment will enable IGNIS to build a new solar plant in the Espana Vaciada region of Aragon, Spain. 

Trombetta announces Cisco expect the plant to provide enough solar energy to meet all of the annual electricity needs of Cisco's European operations for the next 15 years.

Discussing Cisco's historic relationship with sustainability, Trombetta notes the company has been reporting on its environmental impact since 2005. In 2021 the company set a goal to reach net zero GHG emissions across its value chain by 2040. 

This goal will encompass all scopes of emissions and is approved by the Science Based Targets initiative under its Corporate Net-Zero Standard – the only framework for setting corporate net zero targets in line with climate science, Trombetta adds.

That appears to be it for the announcements, last up on the stage is chief information officer at Cisco Systems, Fletcher Previn, who wants to talk about Cisco as 'customer zero' for their learnings on data center optimization. 

Previn describes how Cisco is able take insights from its internal data strategy to inform its efforts to provide new tools and services for a new generation of energy efficient data centers tailored for AI workloads.

And with that, Previn begins thanking all the attendees concludes the presentation by applauding the work of Cisco staff for keeping the world connected and secure. 

The theatre begins to empty  and that brings the opening keynote from Cisco Live 2024 to an end.

Thanks for following ITPro's coverage of the opening keynote at Cisco Live 2024 in Amsterdam, here's a quick summary of the biggest announcements we saw:

- Integration of Cisco ThousandEyes with Cisco Secure Access

- Cisco partners with NVIDIA to help businesses deploy their AI infrastructure easily and securely

- New AI-powered features for the Cisco Observability Platform

- Webex gets an AI Assistant 

-  Cisco partners with Apple to bring spatial computing enhancements for the Apple Vision Pro for more immersive virtual meetings

- Cisco signs agreement with Spanish renewable energy company to decarbonize its European operations over the next 15 years.