Cisco at Deutsche Bank’s 2025 Technology Conference: Strategic Integration Focus

On Thursday, 28 August 2025, Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) presented at Deutsche Bank’s 2025 Technology Conference, outlining its strategic focus on integrating networking and security technologies. The company emphasized its unique market position and commitment to innovation, while also addressing financial discipline and shareholder value. The conference highlighted both opportunities and challenges in the evolving technology landscape.

Key Takeaways

• Cisco is integrating networking and security into a unified platform, enhancing innovation.
• The company is leveraging AI to drive productivity and strategic investments.
• Partnerships, especially with NVIDIA, are crucial for Cisco’s market strategy.
• Financial discipline is a priority, with earnings projected to grow faster than revenue.
• Cisco is preparing for significant shifts in network traffic due to AI advancements.

Financial Results

• Cisco is experiencing earnings growth outpacing revenue, with similar projections for Q1 and FY 2026.
• The company maintains a balanced performance across geographies and technologies.
• Tariff mitigation strategies have been effective, with over 80% of initial tariffs on China being offset.
• The hyperscaler business exceeded targets, with orders surpassing a couple of billion dollars.

Operational Updates

• AI is now handling two-thirds of customer support calls, with all functions setting discrete savings targets.
• Cisco plans to release AI Canvas in October/November, enhancing AI integration.
• The Silicon One initiative is being incorporated into all products.
• Security enhancements include a secure AI factory, integrating security at every stack layer.
• Product convergence has merged Meraki and Catalyst into a unified hardware and management model.

Future Outlook

• Cisco anticipates a reacceleration in enterprise data center build-outs for AI workloads.
• Learnings from hyperscalers will be applied to enterprise solutions.
• Key challenges include modernizing data centers, ensuring digital resilience, and addressing infrastructure constraints.

Q&A Highlights

• Cisco has shifted from an acquisitive model to a build-first approach, operating with the agility of a large startup.
• The company aligns objectives to enhance execution speed and product development.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed account of Cisco’s strategic insights and future plans.

Full transcript - Deutsche Bank’s 2025 Technology Conference:

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome. My name is Tony Kerison. I’m the Head of Group Technology Infrastructure at Deutsche Bank, also run technology in The Americas. And very pleased and grateful to be joined today by Jitu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer of Francisco and Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer.

So welcome both of you.

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: Thank Hamelis.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: So let’s kick off then, maybe have an introduction from each of you and talk about your roles. I know, Mark, you’ve only been in the role a short time, but talk us through what you’re doing at Cisco. Thanks.

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: Here we go.

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: First, sure. Yes, I’ve only been in this role ninety days, but I’m an old timer at Cisco. So twenty five years, a bunch of different roles and responsibilities, and I think I’ve worked with every geography, every customer market that we have at Cisco. Stepped into this role about ninety days ago, kind of went back to my roots, if you will. Started in finance, was CFO of a startup that Cisco bought back in February.

So just really, really excited, great team. I think we’ll get into it today, but certainly in the time that I’ve been at Cisco, we’ve got probably more opportunity ahead of us and excited about that.

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: I am Jeetu Patel. I took over the role as the Chief Product Officer about a year ago and I have been at Cisco for five, but probably worth noting that we used to for the longest time we ran Cisco in multiple business units and one of the byproducts of that is you sometimes felt like a holding company, because there were multiple different products that hadn’t gotten integrated well. So one of the things that we decided a few years ago was let’s make sure that we pull these things together. And so a year ago, we pulled that together so that we could really focus on creating an integrated platform rather than just individual products in the piece parts. And that’s actually gone remarkably well from the standpoint that the top priority of the company is to make sure that we integrate the technologies together rather than just have each one of them kind of operate independently.

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: G2 will be very humble as you’d expect, but the pace of innovation at Cisco has picked way up since he’s been in this role and the whole focus on really making it a platform and an advantage in terms of our scale and the way the products work together. So it’s been really good.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: That’s great. Thank you. So Cisco has been a standard setter in the enterprise networking role for many, many years. As you look to the future, what’s Cisco’s vision for its role in the next year of innovation? Ajay, if

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: you take a step back and say what is happening in the industry right now and why are we in a particularly good position, the traffic patterns because of AI for the network are going to be very different than what they have been in the past. And largely, most of that is going to be incremental traffic that’s going to be added on. And it’s because of this movement to agentic AI where you will actually have these agents that autonomously conduct tasks and jobs on behalf of humans and they are going to be working seventwenty four. We currently the duration of autonomous execution is about, I don’t know, twenty minutes. You ask deep research to do something, it takes twenty minutes for it to come back.

I think over time as you have two hours and two days and two months and two quarters, you will actually start to see, very, very different levels of business outcomes. But what that also does is it has a very different level of kind of sustained inference volume that’s needed. So the first big area is this market is going to be infrastructure constrained with power, compute and network. And then the second big thing is it’s also very sensitive on latency. And so you have to make sure that it’s very fast.

And agents are going to have a very different level of security exposure and risk than what we’ve had before. And so rather than having security as a separate appliance from the network, which then adds latency, what we feel like if you actually bake security into the fabric of the network, you will actually lower the latency. And so when you have a packet that gets forwarded, that packet should also be inspected on the same device. And so we’ve now got this capability called a smart switch, which has not just an NPU for processing the network packet forwarding, but also the DPU for data processing that can do the packet inspection all within one device. And so that those two dimensions, the fact that there is going to be massive traffic surges that are going to happen because of AgenTeq AI and two is security will need to be something that needs to be done at line rate, will fundamentally demand architecture shifts that we are pretty well positioned to go out and have, because none of our networking competitors have a security stack, none of our security competitors have a networking stack.

We happen to have both of those and that gives us a huge

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: advantage. Very good. So Mark, again, congratulations on the new role. How does your approach differ from your predecessors in managing the finance function?

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: I always like to joke about it will be completely different. But in reality, Scott did a great job. He was a great partner. I worked with him. Jitsu and I both worked with him for I think he was with us five years and really played a big role in sort of our move to software and subscription.

I think as I look to Cisco’s future and my focus, you’re going to get strong financial discipline, transparency, things you’d expect, how we return value to our shareholders, but you’re also going to get I was previously Chief Strategy Officer. So I think really leaning into this tightly coupling of finance that we were talking about this morning, how close the team is with G2’s team to really just make sure that we’re funding the things that matter and the big opportunities that we have ahead. Also, think we’ve got to drive productivity. And there’s no end to the list of things that right now that we can invest in and the opportunity. So we’re going to lean in on AI and driving productivity to be able to really free up some resources for the things that we really need to invest in going forward.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: I was going to ask you about what you’ve seen in AI running the company and your perspective of that and how you Yes.

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: And Sammy, who runs our Investor Relations, he’s got a team that actually is pretty cool that we have an AI engine that essentially pulls in all the competitors’ and peers’ reports and earnings as well as all our financial data and previous quarters’ scripts and all the analysts’ sort of expectations, comments, etcetera, listens along with the call, suggests answers. Pretty soon, won’t need me at all. He probably doesn’t think he needs me now, but it’s pretty cool. I think some of the things Liz is doing and customer support, twothree of our calls now are handled through AI. G2 is doing a number of things, obviously, to really lean into AI in terms of coding and some of the efficiencies there.

Really, I think all the functions are leaning in. We actually gave a discrete and G2 knows this painfully, but we gave a discrete savings number for every function that we said, look, you should be able to save X amount this year on AI and it should ramp by the time we exit the year and really look to do more of that next year. It’s not necessarily to lower headcount, lower OpEx, but it’s to be able to actually give him money for silicon, some of these opportunities that we need.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: Right. Due to the networks essential for AI infrastructures you’re just talking about there, what’s your vision for the ideal enterprise AI network over the next five years?

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: I think what you’ll see is, firstly, we do, a pretty meaningful amount of work with four key constituents of customers and that really helps us out. So for example, we serve some of the largest hyperscalers. And as you folks might have tuned into our earnings call, you saw that we actually exceeded our target number for the year, and it was over a couple of billion dollars in orders. And so that’s the first constituency. The second one is neo clouds.

Third one is service providers. And the fact that we serve those three, really helps us take all of the innovation that happens over there and take it to the enterprise. And so you could start to see a pretty kind of advantageous position where the learnings that we get from the hyperscalers who are the most sophisticated of the sophisticated can then be taken to the enterprise as well. The way that we see it is the network in the future is going to be a secure network. And I think that’s probably one of the biggest areas in AI that you will have to and we talked about this a little bit where if you can bake security into the network and then make sure that that’s actually inspecting every bit of traffic from the point of time that a piece of process originates on an endpoint goes through an encrypted line and terminates on the host, we have full visibility end to end, and we are able to make sure that that’s something that’s embedded into every part of the network in a hyper distributed mode rather than just the old school perimeter firewalls that used to be there.

So what we have done is, completely re architected the environment, and that is probably the thing that sets us apart compared to any of the networking providers or the security providers. Anything to add?

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: No, I think you’ve said it perfectly.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: Just to build on the point about the hyperscalers, do you see that customer mix changing over time? I mean, clearly, you’ve got you’re selling a lot to the hyperscalers today. You see that evolving, changing at all?

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: Right. Today, you think about the volumes, there’s a lot of data center build out that’s happening with hyperscalers, right? What we anticipate is that there is going to be a reacceleration also in the enterprise because at some point in time when your volumes get large, you want to make sure that you are building out your own data centers. Also for sovereignty reasons, you are actually going to start seeing data centers getting built out all around the world. We are working closely with the different kind of governments as well for sovereign data center build outs, whether it be in UAE, in Saudi, so on and so forth, Indonesia.

So I do feel like there is going to be a point in time where you will have certain percentage of workloads that will get reaccelerated in the private cloud. Today, majority of the workloads for AI happen to be in the public cloud with hyperscalers, but enterprise classical workloads are in the private cloud. Now what’s happening is every company we talk to is starting to think about them wanting to modernize their data center footprint, so that they can get ready, because they are going to need to make sure that they rearchitect everything from power requirements to the compute requirements to the network requirements within the data centers. They need to modernize their workplaces, whether it be a campus, branch, factory floor, store, home office. And then all of that will have to be done with a level of uptime resilience that’s needed, what we call digital resilience.

And the acquisition that we made of Splunk is, frankly truly completes the portfolio because what it does is it allows us to make sure that we can take network telemetry and security telemetry and correlate that data together so that we can be way better at compressing the time for investigation during an outage and spend most of the time on response and remediation rather than spending the first four hours trying to determine whether or not there was a network outage or a security breach or was that an API overage or bug in the application, we are able to go out and correlate that data pretty effectively. So the way that we’ve messaged this to the market is there are three big problems we solve, re architect and rethink data centers so that they can become AI ready, make sure that you future proof your workplaces and have digital resilience. And in each one of those areas, we have massively upgraded the portfolio, including in campus and branch, which is our largest business. We’ve got a full lineup of the portfolio that’s refreshed at this point.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: So I completely agree with

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: your point, by the way, because

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: we’ve gone through exactly that right now. We’ve got a relationship with Google for the public cloud side. But now we’re going to look internally because we’ve the density and capacity that we’ve got is not going to scale the level we need to.

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: At some point in time, even a small fraction of the margin, when you get to enough volume, people want to make sure that it’s a lot of millions of dollars. Exactly.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: Mark, you’re going say something?

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: Well, I was just going to add. So we just came from our global sales meeting the last couple of days that we had. And it’s interesting. So being here twenty five years, it’s interesting to see how things have evolved over time. And we used to have a lot of discussions about routing, a lot of discussions about switching, discussions about security, etcetera.

These areas that G2 is pointing out in terms of the AI data centers and the digital resilience and the campus and future proofing your workplace, those conversations now, they run across everything. So you’re seeing security being talked about everything, the networking pieces being talked about everything, the role that observability plays, Splunk, etcetera. So the portfolio is really coming together, I think, in a much different way than it has in the past. Yes.

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: And if I could just add, there’s a piece that’s really important to understand is if you think about what the constraints are going to be for the future, I think there’s going be three areas of constraints. We’re going to be massively infrastructure constrained with the amount of to satiate any kind of bandwidth or any kind of volume requirements of AI. The second big constraint is going to be a trust deficit, but people have to trust these systems and you have to make sure that security is a bigger and bigger problem that most CIOs are facing right now and most CEOs are facing. And then the third one is a data gap. We happen to have a front row seat in every single one of those areas because we are the core critical component for infrastructure that’s low latency, high performance, power efficient for the network.

We actually have a full security stack that not only provides AI for cyber defense, but also secures AI models themselves. And then thirdly, Splunk allows us to have machine data kind of fabric that’s very, very unique compared to what anyone else in the market has. So those three constraints tend to have a direct benefit to Cisco and that’s what gets us really excited.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: Interesting. So why is Silicon One so important in your value proposition to customers?

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: So right now, you look at the market, there’s essentially not that many players that create their own network ASICs. So there is Broadcom and then there is us and then there is a little bit of Nvidia, on the scale upside. But as you start thinking about the hyperscaler business, for example, we would not have a hyperscaler business if we didn’t have our own silicon because what that does is provides an offset for the market and it provides choice so that they don’t get hold into just one vendor because that actually gives them more pricing power. So we become a very essential component. And the other thing that you should keep in mind is this is where we get pretty excited about it because our silicon,

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: if

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: you think about a switch, it has three components to it, the silicon, the systems, which is the physical box and then the software. The margins are largely in the silicon and software, not in the system, right? The fact that we make our own system and some of our competitors are just resellers of other technology allows us over time to have extremely advantageous positions in the market. So I think there is a choice in the market that the market desires that we bring to the table. And it also allows us to have custom purpose built ASICs all in the same platform that gets better performance over time.

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: Yes. I think from a financial standpoint, I mean, the margin stacking that happens with other players is certainly a benefit to us in terms of just accretive to our margins over time. And we’re going to build Silicon One into all of our products. Also just having more control over the supply chain, the innovation cycle that goes into that, etcetera, is a big thing for us. But I don’t know, this may surprise G2, but I actually like to carry one of

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: those chips. I just happen

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: to have the G200 chip with me right here. I just did that for you because it’s so important to me. I remembered to get it from under my pillow this morning. One of the things I have to

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: say, Mark is a really funny guy. And from the time he took over as CFO, he had just become very serious. It’s really nice to see him.

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: He said, you’ve been really serious the last couple of weeks. I said, well, shouldn’t the CFO be pretty serious? He said, you’re right.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: Fantastic. Switching gears a little bit, can you briefly describe your partnership with NVIDIA? And how does that help in your go to market strategy and your products, your thinking?

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: I think it’s a very strategic partnership and you should know that we are very plugged into the AI ecosystem at large, because we’ve also been strategic investors and a lot of players in the markets like we are investors in Grok and Anthropic and Coherent and Mistral and Scaled dot AI and that really helps us. We just invested in our thinking machines with Miramaradi, so on and so forth. So we’ve been very tightly integrated into the AI ecosystem. NVIDIA is of course one of the most strategic partners that one could hope to have. And the thing that we’ve seen as a buying pattern with NVIDIA is a lot of customers pay attention to the NVIDIA reference architecture.

And so they have a reference architecture they publish and then that’s how the buying decisions get made is based on the recommendations of the reference architecture. We happen to be the only non NVIDIA silicon provider that happens to be in the NVIDIA approved reference architecture program, right. And so that really helps because our switches work with their NICs in their reference architecture and that’s how the build outs in the enterprise happen. And so we’ve got a pretty strong partnership from that perspective. They have this notion of an AI factory and we have built something called a secure AI factory where our security capabilities get added to every layer of that stack.

And so if you think about a product like AI Defense, which is our product for doing model security, that’s actually part of the Secure AI factory and we integrate with the NIMS framework. And so what that allows us to do is the customers can rest assured that if they are using NVIDIA technology, they can use our network for interim kind of cluster communication, as well as what they now call scale across, which is across data centers. You will start to see more and more kind of patterns of usage where there’s going to be more and more emphasis around across data centers you might actually have a training run. And all of that as that happens, we have our optics technology that can go ultra long haul even for going out connecting data centers. So all of those technologies that we have, being part of NVIDIA’s reference architecture really helps validate the criticality of it.

And we’ve had a great partnership with Jensen, and we meet with them regularly. And it’s been fantastic so far.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: Okay. You talked about LogentiC AI and the traffic and the increase in chatter and everything like that. What do you think companies need to do in terms of getting ready for that in campus and branch networks? And how does Cisco help get through that? Yes.

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: So it’s first, it’s important to understand the traffic patterns, right? So if you look at a chatbot, I ask a question, I get an answer back, those typically have very spiky traffic patterns. The utilization spikes up, but then comes right back down. When you think about AgenTik and there’s a seventwenty ’4 kind of operation, the traffic patterns start to get much more sustained and persistent over time. And so our current infrastructure is simply not built to go out and accommodate that level of traffic pattern.

And then you add to that physical AI, where you’re going to need some more edge based computing and edge based networking, that’s only going to compound the requirements. So if you think about AI in three phases, you started from a chatbot, you go to an agent and then you go to physical as the three most logical phases right now. Phase two and three, your infrastructure requirements go up quite precipitously, both in campus branch as well as in data centers. And so what we need to do is make sure that and by the way, it starts from power. If you have large systems, you need to make sure that you actually run very different kinds of power in the data center as well.

And so it starts from power constraints, it starts from compute and then the network. And so what you’re starting to see is re architecting of data centers, to accommodate for this new additional volume of usage. And you’re also starting to see re architecting of campus branch networks, because everything from Wi Fi to routing to switching needs to get rethought. And one of the big areas that customers are really excited about the work that we’re doing right now is around Look, we used to have a very broad portfolio.

And one of the things that we were criticized about in the past is the complexity that it took some time to manage these architectures. And what we’ve done is we are converging these architectures together. So if you think about Meraki and Catalyst, now they are one physical hardware box, they are one physical license model, and they are one physical management plane in the cloud, with enterprise class capabilities. And then what we’ve done is we’ve created a product called AI Canvas, which is going to be out in the October timeframe, October, November timeframe, where what that’s going to allow us to do is get agentic ops frameworks. You will basically have an agent that can generate a UI and can correlate data across multiple different domains.

If I have an outage for troubleshooting, the agent will automatically proactively detect saying, hey, there is a pattern of usage that’s not right. There is a ServiceNow ticket. You can just paste the ServiceNow ticket into a chatbot and before you know it, the agent has actually given you all kinds of dashboards, pinpointed where the issue is, told you it might be a security breach or it might be a network outage, dynamically created the dashboard that you could actually bring other personas like if you are a networking person, you can bring a security person into a collaborative workspace, and coordinate with the agent. And by the end of it, have the troubleshooting done within a fraction of the time of what it would have taken otherwise. So that kind of notion of management simplicity, troubleshooting simplicity with AI and a fully refreshed portfolio across data center and campus branch is what actually creates the unlock in our minds.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: That’s a big change for my role in managing these environments. It’s And a phenomenal

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: the only thing you didn’t mention you might want to talk about is Zero Trust and identity and the importance of that as you move

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: to Asia. And then so what we’ve done essentially and by the way, all of these products that we’ve built, we are starting to build our own purpose built models. So we have a foundation model we built for security. We built something similar called a deep network model for networking. So these are like PCIe caliber responses that you can get back.

Our deep network model actually performs better than a trillion parameter general purpose model. And then to Mark’s point, a lot of companies are focused on this notion of zero trust implementations, which is like least privileged access. How do I make sure that my the individual connecting the application only gets permissioning to the degree that they need to and no more, because right now there’s a huge issue around over provisioning permissions. As you move into the agent world, this problem is only going to get exacerbated, because now the agent is going to need to have an identity that is different from the human identity, even though they might both be using the same device. So if I’m using an agent today, the agent might use my user ID and password degree on my laptop, but you don’t want that.

And I’ve given my agent permission to say go ahead and use my email, it’s okay if the agent sends an email to my team. I don’t want to have the agent send an email to my board of directors. So you’re going to need to have some kind of fine grained control, that needs to be in place as well. So that entire kind of picture of zero trust kind of network access will need to expand to universal zero trust network access that encapsulates not just humans connecting to applications, but agents connecting to agents and IoT devices connecting to IoT devices. And so we have a universal ZTNA framework at this point that we’ve introduced in the market.

And that’s starting to see some really good competitive takeouts that we’re seeing with our competitors as well. So and this was a product by the way that we built from the ground up over the past two, two point five years. So this was not something that we kind of retrofitted something that we had. We built a product from the ground up, our secure access product, and that became the core foundation of it. And that’s now fully integrated with our firewall capabilities and our kind of segmentation capabilities and all of those things pulled together is managed under one management plane.

So this notion of platformization where people want to have fewer products because security is a highly fractured market and tied into the network is something that we are able to do better than any other player in the market at this point.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: So we have to trust agents then?

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: Only selectively. Trust but verify.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: Switching to you. So, Cisco had a solid quarter despite some challenging conditions. What does this tell you about the operational discipline and your business model resiliency within the company?

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: Yes. First off, was great to have my first quarter be a beat and raise and have a good quarter to come into. But yes, we’re seeing really good balance across geographies, across the technologies, etcetera, seeing a lot of momentum. I think you’re seeing very good financial discipline. We showed earnings growing faster than top line.

We also guided for the same thing in Q1 for earnings to grow faster than the top line. And we also guided the same thing for FY ’twenty six overall. Right now, we have a lot of tailwinds, I think, in the business, and most of them are kind of right in our wheelhouse. A lot of tailwinds relative to certainly web scale and what’s happening with AI infrastructure build outs and as well as the enterprise space and then this campus refresh and the way that security and networking are coming together. So overall, I think very, very good.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: Any thoughts on tariffs and what that’s going to do?

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: Yes. So I think obviously, what we wanted to do and have always done is just be very clear about the assumptions and really lay that out in terms of what underpins the guide for us. It was really a minor impact in terms of Q3 and Q4, but it definitely hits us. We’ve assumed that the tariffs that are in place today will remain in place. We’ve also assumed that USMCA exemptions and the semiconductor and electronic components exemptions will stay in place as well.

If those things change, then certainly we’ll be able to react. But we’ve got a very global supply chain. This is one of those areas where I think our scale isn’t actually an advantage in the way that we can adapt and move. If you look at just the first set of tariffs that Trump put in place on China in his first term, we’ve mitigated over 80% of those tariffs by just being able to make the moves that we can with our scale.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: Does it help having your own silicon? Is that

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: Tariff wise, I’m not sure that it really plays there. But given everything that we mentioned earlier, it’s certainly a big thing. And our cost basis, again, will be different from those that are procuring it from other players too. So that could potentially help us.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: Great. Well, that’s the end of the questions that I have today. So we’ve got a few minutes left. If we can go to the audience and see if there are any questions. One over there.

Get a mic please.

Unidentified speaker: Thanks. Well, thanks for your time this morning. It’s really fascinating to hear the journey and the story that you guys are telling. I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more on the culture change that it’s taken to move from what you said kind of like a holding company to one that’s a little bit more synthesized and rowing in the same direction?

Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco: Yes, it’s really interesting because, one of the big lessons we learned on this is Conway’s Law is true and you tend to ship your org chart and org charts matter. So if you have three or four leaders and you have to have a committee to go out and make a decision, the decisions get slowed down. And things that were taking us and Mark was at one of those meetings when he was Chief Strategy Officer when I just took over the job, we did an off-site with the top 50 leaders. And, there was one project on AI that was taking like nine months and we weren’t able to get it. And literally within a matter of two weeks, we were able to ship a product, because the objectives got aligned and people actually had very clear marching orders and we were able to just go out and execute.

So one of the things we convey to our team internally is operate like the world’s largest startup and operate at speed with scale. And we’ve got the benefit of scale, but if you start operating with speed, everything changes. And the reality is, is most engineers, what do they want to do? They want to work on meaningful projects that get to kind of scaled adoption. That’s the most rewarding thing that engineers want to do.

The challenge is that as large as companies get large, the systems get complicated to go out and move with the level of agility. And one of the challenges that we had is we were a very our mental model was very much of an acquisitive model where someone always come and ask me, hey, Jesus, it seems like this is a really important area, what are we going to buy? And the thing that we’ve changed now is we’ve said, if this is a really important area, what are we going to build? And if by the way, we won’t be shy to deploy our balance sheet if we find something that can accelerate our vision, but the strategy should not be around acquisition. The strategy should be around building products that people love that they can talk to their friends and family about and make sure that there is a level of asymmetry in the market rather than just playing catch up.

And that change in culture has truly galvanized our company in a way that even I had not imagined within a very compressed amount of time. And so we were at the sales kickoff. This was the highest rated sales kickoff we have had in like twenty five years. There is a spring and the step in the employee base, because they are seeing us winning and they are seeing us actually doing great building great products and we are kind of at the front of a trend that is being defined and the architectures that are getting rethought, we are defining those architectures rather than trying to chase and follow them. And when a company has the size and scale of Cisco and you start doing that, you can essentially we’ve gotten our swagger back and that’s the thing that’s the most exciting in my mind.

Tony Kerison, Head of Group Technology Infrastructure, Deutsche Bank: Got one minute left, if there’s a very quick question. Okay. Well, you very much, G2. Thank you, Mark. Thanks, Simon.

Appreciate it. And pleasure having you on speaker Thank you.

Mark Patterson, EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco: Thank you so much.

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