cisco
Cisco’s AI Strategy: Cleaning the Garage First
Cisco didn't start with an AI feature. They started by fixing a historic mess.
Robb Boyd
@robboyd@mastodon.social
sovereignty
Air-Gapped by Design: Cisco's Sovereign Infrastructure Bet
Cisco just made on-premises expertise a growth market again. The Sovereign Critical Infrastructure portfolio runs entirely air-gapped—Cisco cannot access it, even if governments demand. For specialists who maintained air-gap expertise while the industry chased cloud? Vindication.
wwt
Behind the Research: Strategic Technology Partnerships
Your "15% discount" might be burning millions. Servers sit in boxes for 90 days. Depreciation ticks. Maintenance runs. Warranty expires. That discount? Gone before the first server boots. This is what happens when procurement is transactional, not strategic.
btr
Behind the Research: Software Spend Management
80% of your budget goes to 20% of your vendors—the ones you manage obsessively. Then there's the long tail: hundreds of smaller subscriptions nobody's tracking. Sound familiar? Your procurement team isn't failing. They're drowning in the obvious while the less obvious compounds.
cisco
Why Cisco Renamed DevNet to Automation
Cisco's DevNet rebrand to 'Automation' isn't cosmetic—it's positioning automation as a core discipline equal to routing and switching. The market already decided what to call these jobs. Cisco's certification naming finally caught up.
NFD39
Why AI Networks Fail (Even With Enough Bandwidth)
Networking Field Day 39 challenged my assumptions about AI infrastructure. The real problems? Traffic imbalance, not capacity. ROCE's sensitivity to packet loss. Why validated designs matter more than specs. Here's what finally clicked for me about why AI networks fail—even with enough bandwidth.
perspectives
Career Capital, Not Stock Options
Twenty-five years after the dot-com bubble burst, Cisco's stock finally exceeded its March 2000 high. My original shares never recovered. They expired underwater. Should I have stayed longer? The question doesn't apply—I couldn't have. What I learned and who I built with mattered more than equity.
BTA Series
The Synthesis: How the Storylines Converge in Amsterdam
After months of deep dives, the picture is clear: Cisco’s architecture is real, but the hardest parts—automation, cross-domain operations, trust—are still forming. Amsterdam will determine whether this becomes the new baseline or stays a bold hypothesis.
BTA Series
Networking Cloud: When Meraki and Catalyst Finally Speak the Same Language
Every Cisco Live for five years: "This is the year Meraki and Catalyst speak the same language." Every year, reality was messier. November 2025 brought timelines. By Amsterdam, we'll know if it's real transformation or better co-existence.
BTA Series
Security Cloud Control & Identity Intelligence: When Identity Becomes the Correlation Layer
Most companies think they've solved identity security with MFA and SSO. They've only solved authentication. Real identity security happens when who you are, what you're doing, and where you're doing it from get correlated in real-time across every domain—not just at login.
BTA Series
Secure Connect & SASE Evolution: When "Meet You Where You Are" Becomes Strategy
Cisco's SASE strategy evolved from "our way or the highway" to "we'll meet you where you are"—supporting single-vendor, dual-vendor, and hybrid deployments. That shift reveals more about market reality than any product launch. Here's why pragmatic flexibility might be their smartest move.
BTA Series
The Numbers Don't Lie
Cisco's Q1 earnings reveal the gap between transformation vision and current reality: $1.3B in AI infrastructure orders validates Silicon One, but Security revenue down 2% and AgenticOps absent from discussion. We're at a checkpoint—three months before Amsterdam shows what's actually ready.