2021 YEAR IN REVIEW

"In 2021, ‘hybrid work’ became the new normal, eliminating the distinction of ‘mobile workers’ and leveling the playing field for every employee and experience across the enterprise. This decentralized hybrid environment is not about bringing employees to the data but bringing data to employees. It’s about offering choice and flexibility in how we collaborate – no matter where you are or what technology you’re using. To deliver these experiences, in an especially dynamic year for fresh innovation and startups, we actively approached organic and inorganic innovation – with five acquisitions and 14 investments in the security and collaboration spaces, extending the WebEx suite and the SecureX platform."

"Worldwide, there are still nearly 3 billion people without adequate internet service. In 2021, we focused on helping operators lower costs, giving them the reach they need to tackle unaddressed and underserved markets. The acquisition of Sedona Systems last year, together with the Silicon Photonics advancements we made with the Luxtera and Acacia acquisitions, helped us launch Cisco’s Routed Optical Networking (RON) Solution. Cisco’s RON Solution helps unify the IP and Optical layers, dramatically lowering costs for our operators.

The second area of focus is to help our operators tap into newer sources of revenue. With our investment in Qwilt, we jointly launched CDNaaS that brings the operators into the content delivery ecosystem.

By laying the groundwork with the Sedona acquisition and Qwilt investment, Cisco is in a great position to help our operators bridge the digital divide in 2022."

“Looking back on 2021, two major shifts come to mind: the emergence of Machine Learning Ops or ‘MLOps’ platforms, with companies like Cogniac making it easier for data scientists and engineers to inject AI into business operations, and the adoption of serverless architecture delivered to the market by companies like TriggerMesh. These paradigms are only going to accelerate in 2022, helping businesses drive their automation and agility goals without having to think about managing every individual component of their underlying multi- vendor infrastructure as their workforce continues to work through a hybrid working environment.”

“There’s no way to capture the uniqueness of 2021 succinctly. Instead, I’ll focus on the micro-trends that continue to define our space, especially this past year. We saw a milestone in the maturation of cloud-native business models, heralded by the IPOs of Confluent, GitLab, and our portfolio company HashiCorp. Data, increasingly driving business decisions, continued to drive product innovation in BI workload-focused offerings (e.g., Dremio’s Lakehouse functionality). In contrast, Machine Learning technologists continued to address the operational chokepoints of the AI chain (e.g., DataRobot acquiring Algorithmia). While here at Cisco, we acquired Epsagon, Replex, and others to expand the foundations of our Full Stack Observability strategy.”