Innovation is at the heart of any major technology company, but Cisco Systems Inc. wants to take it a step further. The company formed a new group called Emerging Technologies & Incubation, whose mission is to incubate its next bets.

“The charter for this group is to move further and further out from Cisco’s core business and take this core into newer markets, into newer products, and newer businesses,” said Vijoy Pandey (pictured), vice president and chief technology officer of cloud and distributed systems at Cisco, as well as vice president of engineering and research for the new group, led by Liz Centoni.

Pandey spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual event. They discussed the projects being backed by Emerging Technologies and Incubation, how Cisco wants to expand its journey in the open source market, the complexity of network architectures and the importance of network service meshes. (* Disclosure below.)

Accelerating toward open source

In its initial steps, Emerging Technologies & Incubation is betting on solutions that are close to the core activities of Cisco but that still do not fit them with regard to business alignment or go-to-market alignment, according to Pandey. Two of the group’s current projects involve connecting and securing the application programming interface endpoints, wherever they are and whatever type they are.

“Our other big bet is around API security, and that has a bunch of other connotations to it where we think about security moving from runtime security, where traditionally Cisco has played in that space, especially on the infrastructure side, but moving into API security, which is only under the developer pipeline and higher up in the stack,” Pandey explained.

The idea is to gradually move away from Cisco’s main businesses. “When you prove some of these bets out, you can walk further and further away or a few degrees away from Cisco’s core as it exists today,” Pandey pointed out.

Still on the innovation side, Cisco plans to extend its open-source journey. Despite already having a long and deep involvement with open source, the company wants to press the accelerator toward open source as part of the Emerging Technologies & Incubation group, according to Pandey.

“You will see more of us in open-source forums, not just the CNCF, but very recently we joined the Linux Foundation Public Health as a premier foundational member,” Pandey said. “We will be working very closely with Dan [Kohn, leader of the Linux Foundation Public Health] and the foundational companies there to not just bring open source, but also evangelize and use what comes out of that forum.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual Experience. Neither the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE