On Tuesday, Cisco Systems Inc. announced that it was launching an integrated architecture to extend intent-based networking to the internet of things at the edge. By creating a consistent set of configurations and grouping devices, manual set-ups required for each separate device goes away, which makes it far easier now to scale IoT networks.

“Intent-based networking means that you can now express your business intent: ‘Here is the outcome I’m looking for from the infrastructure,’” said Sachin Gupta (pictured), senior vice president of product management, enterprise networking, at Cisco. “The system and the architecture will convert that, automatically provision all of the underlying components, get the data, get the context back out, and prove to you that the intent you wanted was delivered.”

Gupta spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona, Spain. They discussed customer reliance on software-defined wide area networks, solutions to deploy critical applications, such as security across the enterprise, and the architectural shift taking place among Cisco’s customers. (* Disclosure below.)

A ‘data center anywhere’ model

A major focus of Cisco’s announcements this week has been on its concept of the “data center anywhere,” a scenario in which workloads are distributed on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge. This will require greater reliance on SD-WANs.

The integration of Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure with its SD-WAN will help deploy solutions, including critical enterprise security, across application domains.

“We embed the best Cisco security technology, application firewall, and URL filtering natively in our SD-WAN software stack,” Gupta explained. “We can now integrate with cloud services and our SD-WAN solution with just one click. You can deploy this across hundreds of branches now.”

The networking company’s latest news was driven by input from customers who were seeking simpler solutions to the complex problem of managing multiple domains, according to Gupta.

“The companies want simple outcomes,” Gupta said. “The most important part of the story is intent-based networking and the architectural shift, the reinvention it has created, isn’t about any single domain. This is happening in the WAN to solve application experience problems.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE