As enterprises connect tens of thousands of sites, hundreds of thousands of people, millions of devices, and an emerging ecosystem of AI workloads and agents, operational simplicity has become a necessary superpower for business growth.
We sat down with Austin Lin, Vice President of Product Management for the Cisco Networking platform, to unpack how Cisco powers the world's largest enterprise networks at global scale.
Cisco has the industry's largest networking platform. What does that scale look like, and why does it matter for IT teams?
Today, our networking platform manages over 38 million devices and connects more than 1 billion clients.
This massive set of real-world data fuels AgenticOps. It's our next evolution in AI-driven networking to deliver intelligence and recommendations for simpler network operations and faster troubleshooting, powered by Cisco Deep Network Model. With the Cisco AI Assistant and embedded agentic Workflows, we're moving beyond traditional AI automation and enabling teams to generate AI-powered workflows to automate complex tasks across Meraki, Catalyst Center, Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), and Nexus Dashboard.
By unifying cloud and on-premises management into a single platform, customers can reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by 60%, speed up resolution times by 80%, and reduce site visits by 75%.
Our platform data also drives digital resilience. Cisco Assurance from ThousandEyes provides complete visibility across owned and unowned networks, helping teams proactively resolve issues and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) by over 90%. And with self-healing capabilities like AI radio resource management (RRM), networks can prevent issues from happening in the first place.
Cisco differentiates itself by embedding security directly into the network fabric, integrating technologies like identity-based access control, microsegmentation, and SASE to deliver a comprehensive Universal Zero Trust Network Access (UZTNA) solution. This approach leverages our scale and AI-powered threat intelligence to reduce threats by up to 98%, outperforming the industry average by 25%.
All of this powers some of the world's largest deployments. Our cloud platform scales to support any size business, with enterprise customers managing over 500,000 network devices in a single environment.
It's the combination of intelligence, security, and assurance that lets teams run with far less friction and far more impact.
What makes the Cisco Networking platform trusted by global enterprises?
Customers consistently tell us they value Cisco not just as a technology provider, but as a partner who is invested in their long-term success.
We're focused on outcomes, not just features. This means bringing together our technology, global ecosystem, and expertise to help customers solve tough challenges and move their business forward. For us, reliability, built-in security, and world-class support are table stakes.
We know that our customers, including over 95%[1] of the Fortune 500, rely on us to keep their operations running and their systems secure.
Our Cisco Networking customers include 100% of the top 25 retailers, top 15 healthcare organizations, and top 15 technology companies; 90% of the top 25 manufacturers; and 80% of the top 25 financial services firms and top 10 hospitality brands. And it's not just enterprises. One of the largest public education systems in Brazil relies on our platform to connect over two million students across thousands of school sites for uninterrupted learning.
That level of trust is earned. The Cisco Meraki cloud platform delivers a 99.99% uptime service level agreement (SLA)-the highest in the industry.
Cisco also has the industry's largest networking app ecosystem. What does that enable for customers?
We built our platform API-first, so customers and partners have an open ecosystem for automation and integration.
Today, we support more than 2,000 application programming interface (API) endpoints and see over 15 billion API calls per month. In addition to the industry's broadest functionality and scale, we also have an award-winning developer experience with Best API recognition by Postman, the industry's most widely used API platform.
Our app marketplace brings this ecosystem to life with 350+ apps for automation, security, AI, and assurance. We have built-in integrations with industry-leading IT, security, and observability platforms, including ServiceNow, Ekahau, Datadog, and PagerDuty, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) providers like Terraform and Ansible. Marketplace partners like Splash Access, Boundless, and EveryAngle build on this scale to deliver powerful guest connectivity experiences.
This flexibility is a huge part of why customers choose Cisco Networking. They get a platform that extends into their own systems and third-party tools at global scale.
Speaking of large-scale deployments, which enterprise capabilities does the platform now provide?
Cisco powers the world's largest and most complex environments, and more of our enterprise customers are moving to a cloud operating model for their campus networks.
We're making it easier for large sites to securely roll out fabric segmentation at scale over existing infrastructure from the cloud.
We're also providing advanced features for Catalyst 9000 Series Switches right from the Meraki dashboard. This includes advanced routing protocols, such as virtual routing and forwarding (VRF), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and routed ports, and high-availability features like StackWise Virtual and in-service software upgrades (ISSU).
Across industries, we're seeing global retailers use cloud-managed fabric for secure operational technology/information technology (OT/IT) separation in warehouses, while K-12 school districts can deliver consistent connectivity across dozens of campuses with small IT teams.
As more enterprises move to cloud-first operations, Forrester's Total Economic Impact (TEI) report on Cisco Networking showed impressive results. What stood out to you?
Forrester's Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) report of Cisco Meraki cloud-managed networking puts hard numbers behind what our customers have been telling us for years.
A few results stood out: customers that deploy Cisco Meraki break even in just over a year and deliver an additional 89% ROI on top of their original investment over three years, nearly doubling their investment. This comes from simplified operations, reliability, and assurance capabilities which result in a 40% reduction in network downtime and a 90% reduction in time spent on configuration changes after switching to Cisco.
These aren't just statistics; they represent time, money, and resources given back to global IT teams. When you automate routine tasks, standardize policies, and gain global visibility, you can focus less on firefighting and more on driving business outcomes.
Can you share how customers are achieving success with the Cisco Networking platform?
Two customers come to mind: Decathlon and Purdue University.
Decathlon, one of the world's largest sports retailers, connects its warehouses, offices, and thousands of stores across 79+ countries. With Cisco wireless, switching, routing, and API-driven automation that handles 2.5 million API calls per month, they're rolling out new stores faster and with fewer errors at a massive scale.
Then there's Purdue University. They modernized campus connectivity for more than 70,000 students and faculty with a more reliable and secure network. Along with Splash Access for seamless Wi-Fi log-in and Splunk for observability, Purdue cut support tickets by 80%, improved uptime by 28%, and saw 4x faster wireless performance.
Different industries, but the outcomes are similar: better visibility, faster troubleshooting, and secure networks that simply work.
Looking ahead, what's next for the Cisco Networking platform?
The next chapter is all about making life easier for IT teams at any scale through unified management, enterprise capabilities, and AgenticOps.
With Global Overview, we're advancing our journey toward a unified platform experience by bringing Meraki and Catalyst Center together in one dashboard for streamlined operations.
Soon, Cisco Cloud Control will bring networking, security, collaboration, and observability together under one AI-native management platform. This will reimagine how organizations manage, operate, and optimize their IT infrastructure. At the heart of it will be Cisco AI Canvas, a generative user interface (UI) workspace built for multiplayer, cross-domain teams to move beyond reactive monitoring to autonomous, closed-loop remediation.
This is only the beginning as we redefine what's possible in network management.
[1]According to Cisco data