Cisco executives make the case that the excellence between product and mannequin corporations is disappearing, and that accessing the 55% of enterprise information development that present AI ignores will separate winners from losers.
VentureBeat not too long ago caught up with Jeetu Patel, Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer and DJ Sampath, Senior Vice President of AI Software program and Platform, to achieve new insights right into a compelling thesis each leaders share. They and their groups contend that each profitable product firm should turn out to be an AI mannequin firm to outlive the following decade.
When one considers how compressed product lifecycles have gotten, mixed with the numerous benefits of digital twin expertise to speed up time-to-market of next-gen merchandise, the thesis is sensible.
The dialog revealed why this transformation is inevitable, backed by stable information factors. The crew contends that 55% of all information development is machine information that present AI fashions don't contact. OpenAI's Greg Brockman estimates we’d like 10 billion GPUs to provide each human the AI brokers they'll want, and Cisco's open supply safety mannequin, Basis-Sec-8B, has already seen 200,000 downloads on Hugging Face.
Why the mannequin is turning into the product
VentureBeat: You've acknowledged that sooner or later, each product firm will turn out to be a mannequin firm. Why is that this inevitable somewhat than only one attainable path?
Jeetu Patel: Sooner or later, there's no distinction between mannequin corporations and product corporations. Nice product corporations will probably be mannequin corporations. The shut tie-in between mannequin and product is a closed loop. To reinforce the product, you improve the mannequin, not only a UI shim.
These corporations being shaped proper now which are a skinny shim on high of a mannequin; their days are numbered. The true moat is the mannequin you construct that drives product habits. This requires being concurrently good at two issues: constructing nice fashions in domains the place you may have nice information, and constructing nice product experiences powered by these fashions in an iterative loop the place the fashions adapt and evolve when you may have product enhancement requests.
DJ Sampath: This turns into much more essential when you concentrate on issues shifting to brokers. Brokers are going to be ruled by these fashions. Your moat is actually going to be how properly your mannequin reacts to the adjustments it must.
Harnessing machine information's development is essential
VentureBeat: You talked about that 55% of knowledge development is machine information, but present fashions aren't skilled on it. Why does this characterize such an enormous alternative?
Patel: To this point, fashions have been superb at being skilled on publicly obtainable, human-generated information freely obtainable on the web. However we're executed with the quantity of public information you can crawl. The place else do you go subsequent? It's all locked up inside enterprises.
55% of knowledge development is machine information, however fashions should not skilled on machine information. Each firm says 'my information is my moat,' however most don't have an efficient method to situation that information into an organized pipeline to allow them to prepare AI with it and harness its full potential.
Think about how a lot log information will probably be generated when brokers work 24/7 and each human has 100 brokers. Greg Brockman from OpenAI mentioned in the event you assume each human has a GPU, you're three orders of magnitude away from the place it’s worthwhile to be; you want 10 billion GPUs. Once you assume that method, in the event you don't prepare your fashions with machine information successfully, you're incomplete in your capability to harness the total potential of AI.
Sampath: Many of the fashions are being skilled on public information. The info that's inside enterprises is usually machine information. We're unlocking that machine information. We give every enterprise a beginning mannequin. Consider it as a starter equipment. They'll take that mannequin and construct functions and brokers fine-tuned on their proprietary information inside their enterprises. We're going to be a mannequin firm, however we're additionally going to make it extremely simple for each single enterprise to construct their very own fashions utilizing the infrastructure we offer.
Why {hardware} corporations have a bonus
VentureBeat: Many see {hardware} as a legal responsibility within the software program and AI period. You argue the alternative. Why?
Patel: Lots of people look down on {hardware}. I truly assume {hardware} is a good asset to have, as a result of if you know the way to construct nice {hardware} and nice software program and nice AI fashions and tie all of them collectively, that's when magic begins to occur.
Take into consideration what we are able to do by correlating machine information from logs with our time collection mannequin. If there's a one-degree change in your swap or router, you would possibly predict system failure in three days, one thing you couldn't correlate earlier than. You determine the change, reroute visitors to stop issues, and clear up the problem. Get rather more predictive in outages and infrastructure stability.
Cisco is the essential infrastructure firm for AI. This utterly adjustments the extent of stability we are able to generate for our infrastructure. Manufacturing is without doubt one of the high industries for the info quantity generated day by day. Mixed with agentic AI and gathered metadata, it utterly adjustments the aggressive nature of producing or asset-intensive industries. With sufficient information, they’ll transcend disruptions round tariffs or provide chain variations, getting them out of value and availability commoditization.
Cisco's deep dedication to Open Supply
VentureBeat: Why make your safety fashions open supply when that appears to provide away aggressive benefit?
Sampath: The cat is out of the bag; attackers even have entry to open supply fashions. The subsequent step is equipping as many defenders as attainable with fashions that make protection stronger. That's actually what we did at RSAC 2025 once we launched our open supply mannequin, Basis-Sec-8B.
Funding for open supply initiatives has stalled. There's an elevated drain within the open supply group, needing sustainable, collaborative funding sources. It's a company accountability to make these fashions obtainable, plus it supplies entry to communities to begin working with AI from a protection perspective.
We've built-in ClamAV, a extensively used open supply antivirus software, with Hugging Face, which hosts over 2 million fashions. Each single mannequin will get scanned for malware. It’s important to make sure the AI provide chain is appropriately protected, and we're on the forefront of doing that.
Patel: We launched not simply the safety mannequin that's open supply, but in addition one on Splunk for time collection information. These correlate information; time collection and safety incident information, to have the ability to discover very attention-grabbing outcomes. With 200,000 downloads on Hugging Face, we're seeing resellers beginning to construct functions with it.
Taking the shoppers' pulse after Cisco Stay
VentureBeat: Following Cisco Stay's product launches, how are clients responding?
Patel: There are three classes. First, utterly ecstatic clients: 'We've been asking for this for some time. Hallelujah.'
Second, these saying 'I'm going to do this out.' DJ exhibits them a demo with white glove remedy, they do a POC, they usually're dumbfounded that it's even higher than what we mentioned in three minutes on stage.
Third are skeptics who confirm that each announcement comes out on the precise days. That group was once a lot larger three years in the past. Because it's shrunk, we've seen significant enhancements in our monetary outcomes and the way the market sees us.
We don't speak about issues three years out, solely inside a six-month window. The payload is so giant that we now have sufficient to debate for six months. Our largest problem, frankly, is holding our clients updated with the speed of innovation we now have.
Obsessing over clients, not {hardware}
VentureBeat: How are you migrating your hardware-centric put in base with out creating an excessive amount of disruption?
Patel: Quite than fixating on '{hardware} versus software program,' you begin from the place the shopper is. Your technique can not be a perimeter-based firewall for community safety as a result of the market has moved. It's hyper-distributed. However you at present have firewalls that want environment friendly administration.
We're providing you with a totally refreshed firewall lineup. If you wish to have a look at what we've executed with public cloud, managing egress visitors with Multicloud Protection with zero belief, not simply user-to-application, however application-to-application. We've constructed Hypershield expertise. We've constructed a revolutionary Sensible Swap. All managed by the identical Safety Cloud Management with AI Canvas on high.
We inform our clients they’ll go at their very own tempo. Begin with firewalls, transfer to Multicloud Protection, add Hypershield enforcement factors with Cilium for observability, and add Sensible Switches. You don't have so as to add extra complexity as a result of we now have a real platform benefit with Safety Cloud Management. Quite than saying 'overlook every thing and transfer to the brand new factor', creating an excessive amount of cognitive load, we begin the place the shopper is and take them by means of the journey.
What's subsequent: energizing international companions to show AI right into a income alternative
The interview concluded with discussions of November's Companion Summit in San Diego, the place Cisco plans vital accomplice activation bulletins. As Patel famous, "Sustained, constant emphasis is required to get the whole reseller engine shifting." VentureBeat is satisfied {that a} globally sturdy accomplice group is indispensable for any cybersecurity firm to realize its long-term AI imaginative and prescient.
