Though networking of all kinds remains a white-hot IT concern and technology area, nothing is hotter than wireless technologies for everything from local area networking with 802.11ad to the widespread proliferation and adoption of fourth-generation (4G) wireless wide area networking technologies, such as LTE (with 5G now also starting to make its debut.)

The five certifications we cite in this article represent a small sample of the wireless IT certifications available in today’s marketplace. This year, we continue to feature two ever-popular Cisco certifications – the CCNA and CCNP Enterprise – along with the CWNA and CWSP credentials from the Certified Wireless Network Professional organization. Rounding out our top five list is the CompTIA Network+ credential.

Salaries for wireless-savvy professionals vary considerably. According to SimplyHired, entry-level wireless networking professionals can expect to make roughly $67,000, although there were highs reported at nearly $154,000. Of course, these are just average salaries. Indeed, other factors, such as job role and experience, greatly influence earning potential. When looking at salaries by job role rather than individual certification, you’ll find average salaries are much higher. For example, SimplyHired reports average earnings for network architects at more than $130,000, with earnings on the high end at almost $181,000.

In preparation for this article, we conducted a random survey of various IT job boards to see what certifications are being requested by prospective employers. In reviewing the results, it’s important to remember that factors, such as geography, the current climate of the employment market, and the complexity of the cert, influence outcomes.

You can expect to see lower numbers on more senior certifications, because, quite frankly, they’re more difficult to earn. Thus, fewer people possess them as compared to entry- and mid-level wireless certs.

CCNA: Cisco Certified Network Associate

Cisco offers some of the most widely known and recognizable certifications in the industry. It offers a wireless specialization for each Cisco networking credential at the Associate (CCNA), Professional (CCNP Enterprise) and Expert (CCIE Wireless) levels.

As of February 24, 2020, Cisco has rolled out a new CCNA exam. Currently, there are no prerequisites for the new exam, although ideal candidates should understand IP addressing, network fundamentals, and possess at least one year of direct experience implementing and administering Cisco solutions.

Candidates must also pass a single exam (excluding any exams required for prerequisite certifications) to earn the CCNA credential. The new CCNA exam is a consolidated exam and replaces all current CCNA exams, regardless of concentration area. According to Cisco, the new CCNA exam focuses on a broader range of fundamental skills, including automation and programmability, security fundamentals, IP services, IP connectivity, network access and network fundamentals. The new CCNA credential is valid for three years after which credential holders must recertify by passing an approved exam or earning 30 Continuing Education Credits (CECs).

Professionals who earn the CCNA Wireless prior to February 23, 2020, will receive the new CCNA credential and a training badge.

CCNA Facts and Figures

200-301 CCNA (120 minutes).

CCNP Enterprise: Cisco Certified Network Professional Enterprise

As with the CCNA Wireless certification, Cisco rolled out a new CCNP credential – the CCNP Enterprise – on February 24, 2020. Two exams are required to earn this CCNP Enterprise certification: a core exam (focused on enterprise technologies) and an enterprise concentration exam. There are no prerequisites for the CCNP Enterprise credential, but successful candidates should have at least three to five years of experience implementing enterprise network solutions. The CCNP Enterprise is valid for three years. To recertify, certification holders must either pass a professional concentration exam plus earn 40 CECs, or earn 80 CECs.

If you’ve had or have been working toward the CCNP Wireless credential, your hard work is not in vain. You’ll receive credit toward the new CCNP Enterprise credential for all completed work. Cisco’s CCNP Wireless Migration Tool is an easy-to-use tool that shows you exactly how your current work translates to the new program. For example, if you passed the CCNP Wireless Design exam prior to February 24, 2020, you’ll receive the Cisco Certified Specialist – Enterprise Wireless Design credential. To earn the CCNP Enterprise certification, you would need to pass the CCNP Enterprise Core exam.

CCNP Facts and Figures

CompTIA: Network+

CompTIA is a well-recognized certification provider of vendor-neutral industry credentials. The CompTIA Network+ credential joins the IT Fundamentals+, A+ and Security + credentials as part of CompTIA’s four “core” credentials. The Network+ certification serves as a prerequisite to several other CompTIA credentials including Security+, Cybersecurity Analyst+ (CySA+) (formerly CSA+), Linux+ and PenTest+.

An intermediate-level credential, the Network+ certification targets professionals in junior-level roles, including network administrators, system or field engineers, help desk and support technicians, and network analysts. Network+ validates a candidate’s skill and technical expertise relating to network configuration, design and implementation, virtualization support, troubleshooting, security standards, network devices configuration and more.

A single exam (N10-007) is required to earn the credential. Launched in in March 2018, the exam digs into several domains, including new hardware technologies, cloud computing, technical service models, virtualization and security concepts.

The credential is valid for a period of three years after which candidates must recertify. There are several paths to recertification; candidates can view the current requirements on CompTIA’s renewal web page. Professionals who are on a timeline to recertify quickly should explore a CertMaster CE course that allows candidates with valid credentials to recertify in as little as four to six hours for a nominal fee of $189.

 Network+ Facts and Figures

CWNA: Certified Wireless Network Administrator

The Certified Wireless Network Administrator (CWNA) credential from the Certified Wireless Network Professional (CWNP) organization has been around for more than a decade but still represents a terrific general-purpose IT certification for those who install, configure and maintain wireless networks in the workplace.

CWNP describes this credential as a foundational-level career certification for networkers, and it acts as a gateway to more senior credentials. These include the Certified Wireless Security Professional (CWSP), Certified Wireless Analysis Professional (CWAP) and the Certified Wireless Design Professional (CWDP).

The current exam for the CWNA is CWNA-107, which is available at Pearson VUE testing centers. subjects covered include basic RF technologies; regulations and standards; protocols and devices; network implementation; network security; RF site survey; antenna concepts; 802.11 network architecture; wireless LAN hardware and software; along with network design, installation and management, troubleshooting, and site surveys.

The CWNA is good for three years, after which candidates must recertify. Recertification is straightforward: Candidates need only pass the current CWNA exam or any CWNP professional exam, including CWAP, CWDP or CWSP. To stay current, a recertification exam must be passed before your existing CWNA certification expires.

The CWNA is probably the most worthwhile and useful wireless networking credential for administrators, thanks to its vendor-agnostic approach to wireless technologies. Unless you’re firmly ensconced in some vendor’s wireless tool and technologies – most notably, Cisco’s, from the perspective of this article – the CWNA is the place to start.

CWNA Facts and Figures

<table”> Certification Name <td”>Certified Wireless Network Administrator (CWNA) Prerequisites/Required Courses None

Recommended: Certified Wireless Specialist (CWS) and Certified Wireless Technician (CWT)

Number of Exams One exam, CWNA-107 (60 multiple-choice questions, 90 minutes, passing score of 70 percent required; instructor candidates must earn 80 percent) Cost per exam $200. exam administered by Pearson VUE. URL www.cwnp.com/certifications/cwna Self-Study Materials CWNP offers numerous training opportunities, including exam objectives, books, white papers and more (list and links appear on the certification page), the official study guide ($74.99), CWNA Training ($2,495), and the CWNA Self-Paced Training Kit ($325).

CWSP: Certified Wireless Security Professional

Another part of CWNP’s certification program, the Certified Wireless Security Professional (CWSP) targets security professionals working with wireless LAN networks. The CWSP validates a candidate’s ability to assess network vulnerability, employ best practices, make recommendations to prevent security breaches and attacks, conduct WLAN security audits, monitor security compliance, design and architect network security, and implement Wireless Intrusion Prevention Systems (WISPS).

To earn the CWSP, candidates must first obtain the CWNA certification and then pass the CWSP exam. While not required, training is recommended. The CWSP serves as a steppingstone to the more advanced Certified Wireless Network Expert (CWNE) credential. The CWSP credential is valid for three years. To recertify, certification holders must possess a current CWNA and pass the then-current CWSP exam.

CWSP Facts and Figures

Beyond the top 5: more wireless certifications

While not a part of the leaderboard, the Certified Wireless Design Professional (CWDP) and the SANS GAWN certifications (the GIAC Assessing and Auditing Wireless Networks) are worthy credentials to add to your certification portfolio. In addition to CWNP’s Certified Wireless Network Administrator (CWNA) and Certified Wireless Security Professional (CWSP), we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention CWNP’s other wireless certifications: the Certified Wireless Design Professional (CWDP), Certified Wireless Analysis Professional (CWAP) and Certified Wireless Network Expert (CWNE). Together, these certifications provide CWNP with a powerful wireless certification portfolio.

Other vendor-neutral wireless certifications worthy of mention include the iNARTE Wireless Device Certification Professional (WCDP).

Several industry players also offer wireless certifications, including Alcatel-Lucent (now part of Nokia), Extreme Networks, HPE and others. For those wishing to specialize in vendor platforms (such as Alcatel-Lucent, Extreme Networks, etc.), vendor-sponsored programs are the ticket to recognition and specific jobs. IT professionals working with Cisco will (of course) want to take a closer look at the creme de la creme of the Cisco certification tier, the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert Wireless (CCIE Wireless). As with the CCNA Wireless and CCNP Wireless, Cisco released a new CCIE credential – CCIE Enterprise Wireless – on February 24, 2020.

For those interested in specific areas of wireless technology – particularly security – numerous other options also present themselves, depending on the person seeking other credentials that bear on wireless networking, either broadly or narrowly.

The Nasdaq MarketSite at Times Square on October 26, 2022 in New York City. Nasdaq index opened 2% lower as disappointing results and warnings from Microsoft sparked losses in mega cap companies and raised fears of slowing economic growth.

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Dec 13, 2022 (The Expresswire) -- "Final Report will add the analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on this industry."

The “Enterprise Networking Market” expresses deep insights into industry size, share and growth trends forecast by regions until 2023-2029 with top countries data. The report gives comprehensive description about SWOT analysis, PESTLE analysis and Porter’s Five Forces analysis. It also includes key player’s analysis with CAGR status, industry growth revenue and future expectation of industry. Enterprise Networking market report mainly covers industry segment details, business development and expansion strategies across all regions.

The MarketWatch News Department was not involved in the creation of this content.

November 30, 2022, 11:34 AM EST

‘Cisco’s got some ground to cover, but it’s really about the long game. While you can argue they are late to market, we believe that they’re going to be able to learn from the lessons of all their competitors and come out with even stronger products,’ one Cisco partner tells CRN about the company’s as-a-service drive.

Customers are looking for different ways to acquire the IT they need, including buying in an as-a-service model to save some capital, but Cisco has faced a few exact hindrances to as a service, according to the company’s executives.

For the San Jose, Calif.-based tech giant, supply chain constraints have been an ongoing obstacle to the Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) trend because Cisco and its partners couldn’t deliver the equipment that’s part of as-a-service offers, specifically, its Cisco Plus strategy.

“And then we also realized we weren’t as operationally ready,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins told analysts regarding the company’s XaaS push at Cisco Partner Summit 2022 earlier this month.

Many customers interpreted the launch of Cisco Plus as just a different way to finance IT — a “fancy lease” — versus a true XaaS model, said Neil Anderson, area vice president of cloud and infrastructure solutions for Maryland Heights, Mo.-based Cisco Gold partner World Wide Technology (WWT).

But channel partners want to put vendor XaaS offerings “under the hood” and built their own services on top of the stack to create a turnkey offering for their end customers. Customers, on the other hand, often want to have the option to manage some of their own IT, Anderson said.

“Part of the problem in getting to a true as-a-service model, as a utility, is that most customers still want some form of co-management. They don’t want somebody to just do everything for them and they have no visibility into it. They want a portal where they can see how things are going, maybe touch a few things. So, this idea of co-management, I think, is going to be really important for network as a service,” he said.

[Related: Cisco’s X Factor: How Chuck Robbins Is Taking Partners Into The Future ]

WWT is seeing this prerequisite across the board — not just in networking, but also in the collaboration space. The firm is seeing more RFPs with a requirement for managed services. “That allows the partner to add an additional layer of value to it so it’s not just a resell lead, it’s [giving] the partner some skin in the game long term,” said Joe Berger, area vice president of Digital Experiences for WWT.

Cisco Channel Chief Oliver Tuszik told CRN in an interview that the company is focused on enabling customers to buy and consume the Cisco portfolio in an as a service motion if that’s how they’d like to buy, and for more partners to sell in an as a service model.

“Our strategy must be that we allow our customers, wherever they are in the world, to buy whatever Cisco has in his portfolio in an as a service or managed motion,” Tuszik said.

But the as-a-service effort goes beyond products. It’s about building out Cisco’s Provider partner role the company introduced in 2021 within its Global Partner Program, he said, a role built with the MSP partner in mind and recognizes partners based on their investment in managed services and as-a-service solutions. As the managed services business has taken off, Cisco has since upped its investments in Provider partners with predictable pricing, deal registration for managed services, more flexible consumption options, dedicated investment and business development funds, technical support enablement, and co-marketing, the company said.

Cisco is also building more modular programs and new incentive schemes, Tuszik said. “We are incentivizing our people to sell partner-managed services,” he told CRN. “We’re paying our sales team more if they sell a partner-managed service — 50 percent more,” he added.

At Partner Summit 2022, the tech giant revealed it had tripled the number of staff working on service creation motions with partners, as well as a 1.5x payout multiplier to support the growth of partner-managed SD-WAN, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), and full-stack observability offers.

Companies like HPE and Cisco are turning to partners during this time of resource constraints and talent shortages to learn more about what the channel can offer by way of managed services and what they can take off the vendors’ hands. Customers are looking for “cloud-like” IT experiences that are more automated and that also encompass on-premises tech environments for customers grappling with requirements that prevent them from going all-in on cloud, like data sovereignty. There’s where Cisco Plus fits in, said CJ Metz, vice president of Modern Infrastructure for Irvine, Calif.-based Cisco Gold Partner Trace3.

Trace3 also partners with HPE. Metz said that the major differentiator for HPE GreenLake has been in how the company shifted its entire focus to support its as a service strategy, including executive compensation, sales compensation and the support structures that underpin it. “[HPE] just has had more time to take more risks, to learn the hard lessons,” he said.

Cisco, he added, has been forthcoming to partners about its need to catch up. “Cisco’s got some ground to cover, but it’s really about the long game. While you can argue they are late to market, we believe that they’re going to be able to learn from the lessons of all their competitors and come out with even stronger products.”

For Cisco’s part in becoming more operationally ready for XaaS, Robbins told analysts: “I think over the next 6 to 12 months, you’ll see a lot of progress on this front.”

In the meantime, Cisco already has many as-a-service offers on the market today by way of their channel partners, the CEO added.

“We’ve got stuff going in the cloud marketplaces that we didn’t have before, we’ve got partners delivering as a service today and we’ve got the SASE [Cisco Plus Secure Connect Now] offer out there,” Robbins said. “There’s a few things we need to do, but there’s an awful lot offers that are out there today for customers.”

Cisco doesn’t specifically break out revenue related to its Cisco Plus strategy, but the company’s most exact fiscal quarter that ended Oct. 29 saw software subscription revenue climb 11 percent year over year.  

The MarketWatch News Department was not involved in the creation of this content.

The MarketWatch News Department was not involved in the creation of this content.

Last week, I penned my first formal analysis on Broadcom’s pending acquisition of VMware. Net-net, I encouraged any customers, ecosystem partners, and channel partners that weren’t sure of the deal to supply it a second look if they haven’t checked in lately.

I said Broadcom will lean heavily into cloud growth and would invest in hybrid and multi-cloud products and services. I also said both CA Technologies and Symantec Enterprise were not on a leadership track with their product lines, but VMWare is, and that’s why Broadcom would handle VMware differently. Finally, I was surprised at just how communicative Broadcom has been about its vision of the deal, as this isn’t the norm for an acquiree of a public company. Normally, the acquiree says very little or nothing until the deal is approved by regulators.

As for pricing, I said if the new company had a mutually beneficial relationship with customers and partners, I expected they shouldn’t have any concerns. I inferred that if it was a money-losing relationship, they should expect changes.

I was wrong on that one.

Last week, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan made it very clear he wouldn’t raise prices. Crystal clear. Tan made this pricing declaration in conversations with some of VMware’s largest customers, and in the presence of VMware CEO Rangarajan Raghuram. This was more than what I call “executive happy talk.” In fact, Tan published a blog after the event entitled “Broadcom and VMware: Investing for customer value.” In it, Tan says, “I’ve continued to see questions in press reports about whether we intend to raise prices on VMware products. The answer is simple: No.” There we have it.

Interestingly, I did see some chatter on Twitter that this blog may be ‘exec weasel words’ and that this could mean that list prices won’t get raised and that discounts would be lowered. That strikes me as a bit fantastical. That can’t be the case. Why? Customers and channel partners would revolt if not bolt in fast fashion and lose trust in both Hock and Broadcom.

I consider this another example of Broadcom listening to its future potential customers and channel partners. While it would have helped Broadcom to be more definitive sooner, the company is responding to criticism, and we have to applaud it for that. It’s good to see Tan circumnavigating the globe meeting with VMware customers and writing about his decisions, commitments, and journey along the way.

I cannot wait to see what is in store for the cloud products and services if the deal closes, but my expectations are that this will come post-close. Then again, Tan continues to surprise us, so you never know.

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Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) Raymond James Technology Investors Conference December 6, 2022 9:45 AM ET

Company Participants

Kip Compton – Senior Vice President-Strategy and Business Development

Conference Call Participants

Simon Leopold – Raymond James

Simon Leopold

Folks, thank you very much. My name is Simon Leopold, Raymond James' Data Infrastructure Analyst, here at our in-person tech conference in New York. It's exciting to see people again, to get dressed and to put shirt on with buttons and shoes, nice change, but we've got a session now with Cisco, Kip Compton.

So Kip, to get started, we've known each other for many years, crossed paths many times. You strike me as sort of the ultimate utility player. You've done a lot of things at Cisco side. I almost feel like no question is out of bounds, but I'm sure they are. So to help us maybe set the context for our conversation and the boundary conditions, maybe tell us a little about your current role and current focus. And we'll dive into the outline. And folks, if you have questions, raise your hand, we'll try to take questions from the audience as well.

Kip Compton

Thanks, and it's great to be here in-person. I think we've had shirts with buttons for a while, but shoes and all the rest of it is great as well as seeing everyone in-person. Before I jump in, I'm compelled by my Investor Relations team to say that I'll be making forward-looking statements that are subject to the risks in our latest filings.

With that out of the way, I've been – as you mentioned, I've been at Cisco a long time, I've done a lot of different roles. I'm currently Senior Vice President for Strategy and Business Development, for a business that internally we call Cisco networking. We're trying to simplify things, including with our organizational names.

In terms of our external reporting segments, that roughly maps to Secure, Agile networks as well as Internet for the future and represents the majority of the product revenue in business at Cisco.

Simon Leopold

And I guess in terms of, I've got sort of my notion of what to ask you about, but I think it's important for us to understand what are you spending most of your time on? What's – what are you occupied with? What do you – what keeps you busy?

Kip Compton

Yes, it's a large business. And so when you think about strategy and business development, I spend a lot of my time thinking about how can we grow the business, how can we generate more differentiation in our products that are valuable to our customers.

I spend a fair amount of time on inorganic activity as I think people who are familiar with that know you send more time on deals that you decide not to do than you do, and those are pretty important. And I spend time working with our go-to-market teams, understanding how we can accelerate the business.

Simon Leopold

And the volume question is a macro question, but I want – I understand. I want to ask it in the context of your job. But given we've got a strong U.S. dollar, recession worries, various changes by regions and products, how are you thinking about those elements influencing the way you think and what you're working on?

Kip Compton

Well, I'm in the product, our research and development side of Cisco. So we tend, frankly, to take a longer view. So we pay close attention to macroeconomic forecasts in terms of our operations and understanding how we should be managing our supply chain and our forecast and our sales and all that.

But in terms of our strategy and our research and development, we're looking out a three to five year sort of timeline. And we have – I mean we've seen – you mentioned some of the strong dollar for us over – I think 90% or more of our revenue is actually dollar denominated, and we do have some hedges in place for some of our costs. So we've so far seen a fairly material impact from that.

And in terms of softness, I mean, I think on our call, we mentioned we've seen some areas of softness, including in Europe. On the other hand, I think we just had our second biggest first quarter bookings number in the history of the company, second only to last year when things were jumping as people were building out networks in the pandemic.

So we're monitoring the situation, but we've also seen – I mean, Gartner recently published a report, surveying IT folks and companies. And I think 51% of them said technology was the last area that they plan to cut. So we're watching things carefully. We're investing for the future in R&D, but we're seeing some resiliency right now.

Simon Leopold

And the succinct next question is lessons learned from the pandemic. And what I mean by that is prior to the pandemic, maybe you might sole source certain components that now you multisource. So how has the experience in the last couple of years affected the way you think about long-term strategy?

Kip Compton

Yes, absolutely. I mean it hasn't fundamentally changed our strategy. That said, we learn and adapt to an environment just like everyone else. And so where we may have had our supply chain more optimized for certain things as we're in a time of uncertainty, clearly.

Right now, I think there's a lot of exogenous forces, certainly the pandemic and now the geopolitical environment. Our supply chain team and everyone else is adjusting to the environment that we see, going forward.

Simon Leopold

And so Cisco hosted an analyst meeting. Was it September? Lights are blur, seemed like that. But it was the first analyst meeting that the company hosted in a while, and you outlined at the time a TAM growing to $900 billion, which is pretty big. So I'm not asking you to repeat the entire content of the meeting, but help folks understand really what are the big growth drivers, what are kind of the most exciting transitional aspects of what's influencing that kind of massive TAM.

Kip Compton

Yes, absolutely. And I think you're referring to our Investor Day in September 2021. For folks who might want to look that up, all the materials are online. I think what I would say in terms of drivers over the next, let's say, three to five years, certainly, we're seeing hybrid work, IoT and then the web scalers as being three good drivers for us.

On the hybrid work side, the immediate thing you think of is our collaboration portfolio, and particularly, we believe with some of the devices that we have as companies are outfitting their campuses for hybrid work and realizing basically that every meeting is going to be a video meeting, and so every conference rep needs to have that equipment in it, that's an opportunity for us.

But in my job on the networking side, we're focused on the opportunity with the networking. And we're seeing that whenever a meeting is a video meeting because every meeting will have some remote participants, the load and the traffic on the campus networks is intense.

And that's driven a wireless and campus upgrade cycle that we think is fairly durable. That along with the traditional generational upgrades for WiFi 6 is – WiFi 6 has been very good. We're seeing 6E now kicking into gear as well.

On the IoT side, we're seeing people putting sensors into carpeted spaces and starting to use these to understand occupancy, to understand and optimize their energy usage. And actually, our office here in New York, there's some videos online Wall Street Journal just did a feature on it, where we renovated and put these technologies in as a good showcase for that.

On the web scaler side, we just continue to ride the growth there. I mean we saw a strong double-digit growth in our first quarter that just ended. We're really excited about the pipeline of technologies that we have to offer those folks and expect that to continue to drive growth as well.

Simon Leopold

So one of the things that I suspect is the way Cisco operates is the business units are sort of given their targets and you run with it, you run your business. And as long as you're running it, go. And so when we think about the – essentially, moving strategy to execution, that's the mystery to me from – as an outsider observing it. So you're looking out years and your colleagues are busy working on day-to-day, what's the process? And how does it go from your vision and your activities out years to come into the business day-to-day?

Kip Compton

Sure. Well, one thing I'd say, I mean, as you mentioned, you've known Cisco for a long time. So it's – I think it's a good observation of how we've treated our businesses in terms of autonomy. I would say, we formed the Cisco networking organization that I'm part of, we just formed in October.

And we actually brought together all of our networking businesses across both service rider and enterprise, for instance, really looking to be able to get more synergies and deliver more integrated solutions. So we're actually blending that classic model with more governance and more sort of big-picture thinking, so that we can get more efficiency as well as more differentiation.

In terms of how strategy works at Cisco, we have an annual long-range planning process, where we build three to five year plans that outline financial forecasts as well as strategies and areas that we want to enter investments we want to make. Those are presented and discussed with our CEO and his staff.

Once those are in place, we actually translate those into strategic intents for each of our businesses. And we work – my team actually works with them quarterly to monitor the progress against what needs to happen to have those strategies in place.

As well as in this environment, frankly, if there are any changes that would cause us to tweak our strategy, we're not changing strategy every quarter, of course. But depending on what's happening in the world, we might decide that an element of it should be sped up or another element maybe a little bit relatively less important. And then we repeat that process on an annual basis. So we feel good about that model.

Simon Leopold

So I want to ask about what the R&D priorities are. And I imagine there's a one-word answer, which is software. So let's go a little bit deeper.

Kip Compton

Absolutely. So when I think about it, I think in terms of two buckets for R&D, one is core technologies, and the other is essentially experiences that we're looking to invest in to deliver to our customers. So I think the core technology side, no big surprises there. By the way, software is big, but we're continuing to invest heavily in our ASIC strategy, right? Our Silicon One ASIC strategy is very important. We’re investing in our optics, which is highly differentiated and something that’s helped propel our webscaler success. We’re investing in core networking software. I think some of the things that we’ve made our name on and that we lead the world in. And we’re also investing heavily in security. So those are some of the core technology areas that we think are just important long-term plays, and that we’re pouring R&D investment into.

On the experience side, we’ve seen that what customers want is simplicity. And the way we think about this is what kind of experience. These core technologies are amazing. They enable essentially the modern world. But if you can’t operate it and you can’t get the outcomes out of it that you want, it’s not very compelling. And so investing in things like Meraki dashboard and what we announced last summer, and bringing Meraki across our whole portfolio is a big part of what we invest in as well.

Simon Leopold

Now, you did make a comment earlier on about inorganic efforts, and having filed Cisco for a while, I’ve observed the strategy that, I guess, we call outsourced R&D maybe that’s a common term. But you’ve invested in private companies historically, often they become acquisitions. How do you think about that particular strategy? It may be my imagination, or it just seems like you’ve made fewer acquisitions over the last 12 months than the prior period. But there could be a lot of variables there. So maybe update us on how Cisco thinks about that strategy.

Kip Compton

Sure. So, internally we have what we call our build by partner framework. And whenever we’re looking at a new capability or getting into a new business, we’ll ask ourselves and we’ll often actually do the analysis, scenario-based analysis, hey, if we built this ourselves, what does that look like? How long would it take? How much would it cost? What kind of differentiation could we build with our technologies and our engineers? If we partnered, what does that look like?

We don’t need to do everything ourselves. We have great partnerships across the industry, including somewhere we put things on our price list where it makes sense. And then last, and the one that generates the headlines is the buy, the acquisition case. And we’ll look at what targets are out there, what would that likely cost, what kind of cultural fit? I mean, you buy a company and you get the technology, but the team bolts, that’s usually not a value creation event for us.

And so we’ll actually map out all three of those and then sit down and look and decide, what’s the best path for each area. To your point about acquisitions, we don’t have a quota. It’s like, I’d have to go look at the numbers, my perception’s kind of aligned with yours. But we don’t have sort of a plan at the beginning of the year, oh, we’re going to buy this many companies because we do look at it through this build by partner. And what we do depends on the outside environment, where – what targets are available and what makes sense from a business perspective.

Simon Leopold

And in terms of the criteria, you mentioned cultural fit, I hear that over and over and over again. What are some of the other criteria used in making these decisions?

Kip Compton

I mean, some of the criteria are somewhat deal specific. So I don’t want to suggest like we have like a scoring, rubric or something, if only it was that easy. I think how complimentary the technology is, like maybe it’s obvious, but if we’re looking for a particular capability or product and the company has it, but it has a whole bunch of other stuff that either overlaps with what we have or has things that we would not want, and so we would be potentially exiting. Those tend to not be very good deals.

Where the mission – where we buy a company and then are like, oh yes, we’re going to change what you do. We’re going to take you in a different direction after we buy them. That’s often a little bit of a warning sign. I mean the general thing that I tend to think about a lot, I mean, the strategic fit is kind of obvious. The thing that I think about a lot of times is the fact that it is far easier to buy a company than is to like integrate it and keep the team and get the multi-year successful outcome out of that company. That is the hard part. And so, if anything I tend to bias my evaluation in that area.

Simon Leopold

So I want to pivot the questions towards a syllabu I’ve been noodling with a bit more is around this idea of power consumption. So there’s been a lot of press lately about how much electricity data centers consume that they’re detrimental to the environment. And I read an interesting article saying, well, but if you’re not getting on a plane and flying, you’re reducing greenhouse gases. And so maybe there’s a good use. And so, I guess with rising costs of electricity, these questions have to be come up. So maybe could you talk a little bit about how you’re thinking about power consumption and the production of greenhouse gas as CO2 in the sort of engineering side and how that’s evolving with your customers and your engineering?

Kip Compton

Sure. So this is a huge focus for us, and it’s been for a while in terms of just – excuse me, our own sustainability goals. And what, I think we published some pretty ambitious and aggressive goals as a company. And part of those sustainability goals is how we reduce not just the greenhouse gases from Cisco’s own operations, but from our customers who are using our equipment. That’s part of our framework as it is for most companies. So this has been an effort for a long time.

In terms of the focus on engineering, last year I actually formed a engineering sustainability office that’s in engineering and works with all our engineering teams as well as the supply chain, as well as our Chief Sustainability Officer for all of Cisco to make sure that this is first and foremost as we’re designing products.

In terms of what we’ve seen in the market, this was important and then it became important and urgent with the rising energy costs and particularly in Europe. And what we’re seeing is that there are multiple places where we can help our customers. Customers are coming to us and one is with our Silicon One technology that is significantly more efficient on a per gigabit basis. Watts per gigabit is a metric in networking. I think we announced deployment with Deutsche Telekom publicly where they said that they reduced their power requirements by 92% on a per gigabit basis. So that’s a pretty significant improvement if you’re looking at a big energy bill.

Another area where we can help customers is with power over Ethernet technology. So this is technology that lets you send power over low voltage wiring. It turns out that this makes the power supplies much more efficient. So we’re seeing a lot of people when they renovate spaces or even build some data centers using this technology. And it improves the power supply efficiency pretty significantly.

The other area is in IoT and I mentioned earlier the sensors and environments. We did a study with Forrester using our Meraki sensors where Forrester saw a 27% energy improvement by using these sensors to trigger close the blind when it’s hot. These are some very basic things, but if you can use sensors to automate them, you can get those savings at scale.

So we see – we talked about – Chuck mentioned on our most exact conference call, we see these energy costs as obviously a potential macroeconomic headwind for everyone. But we also see there being an opportunity for us to help our customers in this area. And we’re seeing some instances of customers actually accelerate investment to get those energy savings.

Simon Leopold

So basically the scenario is a customer has a, let’s say four, five year old campus or data center network consumes more electricity than the newer generation of product. So because of that, they’re refreshing in order to reduce…

Kip Compton

That’s right.

Simon Leopold

The total cost of ownership.

Kip Compton

Maybe they were thinking of refreshing in a couple of years, and now they’re looking at that return and saying, given the energy costs, perhaps I should refresh earlier. And that’s a potential catalyst. Now, on the other side, I mean, realistically there may be customers who decide to delay projects because of energy costs. But we are seeing the energy efficiency for both the sustainability and the current economic reasons as kind of a top of mind topic.

Simon Leopold

And I want to ask about the sort of impact of hybrid multi-cloud on your business. Because it feels to us that eight and 10 years ago, Cisco sort of took the attitude of, I’m not going to sell to those guys, I’m going to just help my enterprise customers. And maybe five years ago, your corporate mind changed and said, you know what, this isn’t going to change. Let’s help the enterprises, embrace multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, we’re a neutral party. So maybe help folks understand a little bit of that history and what you’re doing to help your enterprise customers and their adoption to migration to multi-cloud.

Kip Compton

Sure. So I mean, it’s – cloud for Cisco really impacts our different businesses in different ways. So in the Campus business for instance, a lot of that is about using the cloud to make it easier to manage a campus network. You can’t move your campus switches, your access points to the cloud. You still need them in the building. But we can leverage cloud technologies to just radically simplify and accelerate how people run those networks. And Meraki is a great example of that. And our internet for the future segment, well, that’s where we’re actually helping the webscale is build their clouds with our Silicon One technologies, our Cisco 8,000 product, which is the fastest growing product in the history of the company is really being fueled by that.

On the data center side, it’s kind of what you were referring to which is okay. Most of our customers are going to be in a hybrid state. We’re bringing technologies like the Cisco network control – Cisco Cloud network controller that lets customers design and implement policies and automation and visibility across their on-prem networks as well as their VPCs at Amazon and their networks at Azure and Google Cloud as well. So helping our customers take advantage of multi-cloud for workloads in the same way that we’ve helped them take advantage of on-prem networks.

So you see us with kind of a multifaceted. In terms of the evolution of our attitude here, and I think it took us some time, the webscalers are a different kind of customer. And I think it’s – it took us some time to learn how to sell to them. I think the success we’re seeing now demonstrates that we crack the code and we form the relationships and have very tight engineering – to engineering relationships with the key webscalers and that’s enabled us to achieve that success.

Simon Leopold

Yeah, it’s sort of interesting in that from your disclosures, it works out to be 5% to 6% of revenue from public cloud, which on the surface, oh, well, that’s not a big number, but it’s a big number of a $50 billion revenue company, which would make you the biggest vendor of IT equipment or X servers into that vertical. I think that often goes miss. And so in terms of those partnerships, and from your vantage point of the enterprise, do you see the cloud players as receptive to working with you as a partner? Or do you feel like they’re more competitors?

Kip Compton

No, I don’t see them as competitors. They’re customers and partners. As you said, at this point we’re selling, they’re buying billions of dollars worth of technology from us each year. And I think particularly with what we can bring with our Silicon One technology, our optics and the Cisco 8000 platform, which is actually built on Silicon One is a pretty differentiated value proposition for them in terms of how they can really scale their network and achieve phenomenal economics and power efficiency at the same time. And that’s why you see them adopting their technology.

Simon Leopold

And you mentioned a little bit earlier the effort to extend the Meraki model, let’s not take for granted that everybody knows what that meant.

Kip Compton

Absolutely.

Simon Leopold

Maybe unpack that a little bit in terms of helping us understand the importance of doing that and what it is?

Kip Compton

Sure. So Meraki dashboard is a cloud management tool. So Meraki customers are able to manage their networks by just going to essentially a website in their browser, and they can see their whole network and manage everything from there. And because we’ve got all of that telemetry and all of that configuration information in the cloud, we’re able to provide recommendations, provide more powerful tools and generally make it much easier for our customers. We also on that platform have an incredibly rich set of APIs and a very strong developer ecosystem and partner ecosystem around it, where people are able to build solutions on top of and around the Meraki cloud. And getting all of that – getting essentially the network control plane to the cloud is really key there because developers can access that as opposed to a situation where you’ve got different controllers On-Prem in different enterprises.

So we don’t break out Meraki separately in our results. It’s embedded in things like wireless switching, routing, but it has certainly – it’s certainly been buttressing our market share, and we’ve certainly seen a lot of customers interested in the simplicity that cloud management delivers. And we really think that that cloud management is that the key. I talked about delivering experiences before. We think that’s the key to delivering the simplicity that our customers are looking for. Customers – if customers don’t know what operating system their Meraki products are running, they use the Meraki dashboard, and that’s a full stack dashboard with your full networking stacks, a route, switch, wireless. But now we’ve integrated a bunch of other products. So we have Meraki sensors, we have Meraki cameras, we have cellular gateways. We have systems manager for managing devices all integrated in a dashboard. And as we bring all these products together across different domains of the customer’s infrastructure in one dashboard, that enables us to make it simpler for them as well, because they can implement policies or track usage across these different domains.

Simon Leopold

And how do you think about making that management solution multi-vendor? So if the customer chooses to buy a particular component from somebody that’s not Cisco, which might happen occasionally. Do you integrate that? Do the customers lose any features or capabilities? How do you think about that?

Kip Compton

It’s a great question. I mean, honestly, right now we’re focused on bringing that simplicity across our entire portfolio, and that’s sort of job one. And last summer we announced, okay, what I described with Meraki is great, but Catalyst is the – our largest, frankly, the world’s largest campus portfolio of networking equipment. It’s the most powerful in terms of feature sets and performance, the most powerful campus portfolio in the world. We’re really focused right now on bringing that Meraki simplicity across into our – the rest of our campus portfolio.

And we think that’s the key thing for us to focus on right now. That’s what our customers frankly are asking for more than anything. And that’s something actually we’ve been working on for several years. And we have right now available for our customers cloud monitoring, where they can register their catalyst equipment with the Meraki cloud. They can now go into the Meraki cloud and see all of their catalyst equipment, see the topology, see the status, do troubleshooting. And we’ve actually added that Meraki entitlement into our DNA licenses. So now the people with the DNA licenses associated with the catalyst switches have the option of On-Prem management with DNA center or cloud management with the Meraki cloud.

Simon Leopold

So you might imagine, I talked to some of your competitors on occasion. One of the things that they consistently point out as a challenge for Cisco is the complexity. And so they’ll cite the fact that Cisco has multiple versions of every product, and it’s hard to deal with, and I get it, because if you are a massive company with a full portfolio, their complexity just comes along with that.

Kip Compton

That’s right.

Simon Leopold

And so how do you counter the challenge when your competitors who are maybe more narrow, more point focused, argue that well, Cisco’s complex and we’re [ph] easy?

Kip Compton

Oh, well, I mean, I think, I mean, the breadth of our portfolio, it’s immense and outpaces just about any of our competitors. And we haven’t done as much in the past probably to simplify that as we could. I think you’re going to see us using cloud management to bring that simplicity, frankly, without compromising the breadth or power of our portfolio. I think if you’re a point competitor in one domain, it’s a lot easier to be simple. I mean, they have a simpler portfolio, but what we are seeing and what we’re responding to is customers want simplicity. We’ve seen the growth and the power of that Meraki model. And we think bringing that to the rest of our customer base is the best thing that we can do to address complexity.

Simon Leopold

So as we’re about to run out of time, I always like to close with a question that it’s really meant fairly for – from your vantage point. So not CEO, CFO, but from your vantage point, what do you think is least appreciated by the investment community about Cisco?

Kip Compton

Well, I liked your point about the size of our webscale business. So that’s…

Simon Leopold

Keep publishing that for short.

Kip Compton

Sure. That’s great. I mean, I think the size of our software business, I think we did over $15 billion in software revenue last year. We’re – we’d like to push faster. You joked earlier about how my R&D priorities are software, software and software. We’d like to push, wish faster on that. But we’re at 43% of – since all of our revenues recurring. We’re at a point now where 85% of that software revenue is subscription, only 15% perpetual as we’ve been executing on that transition. So I think I’m – I think that’s an undertold story. At the same time, frankly, we’re not done. We feel a lot of urgency as well as a lot of opportunity to continue driving more software value for our customers and more predictable recurring software revenue for the company.

Simon Leopold

Oh, great. Well, thank you very much, Kip. Appreciate you joining us folks. Thanks for joining us with Cisco at our fireside. My job is to make sure you get to your next meeting on time.

Kip Compton

Thank you.

Simon Leopold

Thank you.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q -

Cisco is preparing for a year of solid partner growth following 12 months of internal investments and enhancements, ramping up lifecycle efforts as security and collaboration opportunities accelerate across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ).

With customer experience (CX) a leading priority -- dovetailing into software and recurring revenue growth -- the vendor has focused on in-house additions to lay the foundation for future profitability via the channel, with distribution expected to assume greater responsibility in the process.

“We’ve spent the past 12 months structuring ourselves for growth and investing in the right internal capabilities to help partners be successful,” said Rodney Hamill, managing director of Partner and Routes to Market Sales across A/NZ at Cisco.

“We have Kelly Sabo leading distribution, Emma Harris driving our growth team, Mary Armstrong supporting our partners and Fiona Hodges heading our enterprise agreements and buying activities with partners -- we have a strong and settled team, backed by increased invested in our software and CX offerings.”

The addition of Hodges -- who joined the vendor nine months ago -- in particular signals a change in approach for Cisco in relation to CX, as the technology giant becomes more purposeful in driving channel engagement.

“This is a new role and a big position for us,” Hamill outlined. “Fiona is leading our efforts helping partners focus on Cisco Enterprise Agreements [EA], enablement, simplification and navigating the vendor machine.