Cisco Systems, Inc.
Cisco designs and sells networking, security, collaboration, observability, compute, and related software and services that help organizations securely connect infrastructure, people, applications, and data. Its stated strategy is to securely connect everything to make desired business outcomes possible, with the purpose of powering an inclusive future for all.
At a Glance
- Large enterprises and Fortune 500 companies
- Small and midsize businesses
- Public sector and government organizations
- Cloud and web-scale providers
- +3 more
AI Tools by Cisco Systems, Inc.
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Cisco AI Defense
Enterprise AI Security Platform
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Latest News
Cisco Reimagines Security for the Agentic Workforce, announcing security innovations for AI-agent identities, access, governance, and machine-speed incident response.
Cisco Redefines Security for the Agentic Era with an expanded AI Defense portfolio and AI-aware SASE capabilities.
Cisco reported fiscal 2025 revenue of $56.654 billion and highlighted completion of Splunk integration and subscription-led growth.
Cisco and NVIDIA unveiled the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA for secure, scalable enterprise AI infrastructure.
Products & Services
End-to-end enterprise AI security for organizations using third-party AI applications or developing their own. It inventories AI assets, assesses model and application risks, provides algorithmic red teaming and validation, and applies runtime guardrails against prompt injection, denial of service, data leakage, and harmful responses.
Routers, switches, wireless and access points, Silicon One, data-center networking, networking software, and industrial IoT networking; includes on-premises and cloud-managed offerings such as Meraki.
AI Defense, Hypershield, firewalls, Duo, Secure Access, Cisco Identity Services Engine, Splunk Enterprise Security, Cisco Talos, XDR, and zero-trust solutions.
ThousandEyes, Splunk Observability Cloud, Splunk IT Service Intelligence, Splunk Agent Observability, and cloud/application security capabilities for monitoring digital experiences and infrastructure.
Market Position
Cisco positions itself as a broad enterprise platform provider combining networking, security, observability, collaboration, compute, and services. Its differentiators are a large installed base and partner ecosystem, global go-to-market, network telemetry and enforcement points, Cisco Silicon One, and the ability to combine Cisco networking/security with Splunk analytics. Key competitive sets include Arista and Juniper/HPE in networking; Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Zscaler, CrowdStrike, and Microsoft in security; Microsoft Teams and Zoom in collaboration; and Datadog, Dynatrace, and New Relic in observability.
Leadership
Founders
Leonard (Len) Bosack
Stanford University computer scientist and director of computer facilities for the Stanford Graduate School of Business; co-developed the early multiprotocol-router technology with Sandy Lerner.
Sandy Lerner
Stanford University computer scientist and director of computer facilities for Stanford's computer science department; co-developed the early multiprotocol-router technology with Len Bosack.
Executive Team
Chuck Robbins
Chair and Chief Executive Officer
Cisco's CEO since July 2015 and board chair since December 2017; previously led Cisco's global sales organization and held regional sales and partner-organization leadership roles.
Mark Patterson
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Cisco finance, strategy, and operations leader for 26 years; previously EVP and Chief Strategy Officer and earlier led global strategy, planning, and operations. Previously led finance and operations at IPMobile, acquired by Cisco in 2000.
Board of Directors
Founding Story
Bosack and Lerner founded Cisco in December 1984 after solving Stanford's problem of connecting incompatible campus computer networks. Their initial vision was to commercialize multiprotocol routing so different networks could communicate reliably; the name Cisco references San Francisco.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Cisco sells networking, security, collaboration, observability, compute hardware and software, plus subscriptions, software licenses, SaaS, technical support, advanced services, and customer-success services. It sells directly and through a large certified partner ecosystem; more than half of fiscal 2025 revenue came from subscriptions.
Pricing Tiers
Named-user and enterprise-agreement buying models cover combinations of Meetings, Webinars, Calling, Messaging, Webex Suite, Contact Center, and related collaboration capabilities; public pricing varies by product, user, and agreement.
Enterprise solution sold through Cisco sales and partners; Cisco's official page directs prospects to request a demo rather than publishing a standard price.
Target Markets
- Large enterprises and Fortune 500 companies
- Small and midsize businesses
- Public sector and government organizations
- Cloud and web-scale providers
- Telecommunications and service providers
- Industrial, manufacturing, healthcare, education, and financial-services organizations
- AI-ready data centers and enterprise AI training and inference
- Secure campus, branch, hybrid-cloud, and wide-area networking
- Enterprise cybersecurity, zero trust, SOC modernization, and threat response
- Discovering and governing employee use of third-party AI tools
- Developing, validating, red-teaming, and protecting production AI applications and agents
- Digital-experience monitoring and resilient application/infrastructure operations
- More than 1 million customers across 150 countries, including 99% of Fortune 500 companies
- Government organizations
- NVIDIA as a strategic technology partner for the Secure AI Factory architecture