Real transitions do not happen overnight. After attending Cisco Live Europe 2018, I wrote about Cisco Systems Inc.’s digital transformation toward becoming a software company. At Cisco Live Europe 2019, it was impressive to see how much progress has been made toward Cisco’s goal of becoming a software company — and to be known as a software company more than as a networking company.

One of the biggest benefits for customers is that this evolution of Cisco’s strategy into software suites and multicloud solutions acts as a “unifying factor,” helping to simplify a vast portfolio that in the past could have users feel that they are dealing with more than 100 different, primarily hardware-focused “companies” inside the networking giant. Hardware doesn’t go away, but announcements such as ACI Anywhere and Hyperflex Anywhere help connect the dots for how the boxes in SDN and HCI fit into multicloud solutions.

The theme of the conference was that Cisco is looking to be the “bridge to possible.” Its position as the dominant network player in enterprise gives them the opportunity to meet customers where they are and help them move into the new multicloud world where – to use another Cisco line – customers need to become “data-centered.”

One of the more visible pieces of Cisco’s progress on supporting a modern multicloud world is from the DevNet community. Over the last five years, the team run by Cisco Senior Vice President Susie Wee, who’s chief technology officer of the DevNet group, has built a developer platform that now counts more than 560,000 registered members. For comparison, in 2017 there were 45,000 CCIEs globally. The DevNet team has also been a driving force internally to ensure that all Cisco products are programmable and have APIs.

At the conference, the DevNet Zone, where SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio theCUBE was located, was full of both classrooms and labs that were bustling with activity. In talking to users and partners, one of the outstanding online resources is the Sandbox, which provides an always-on place to develop, code and play with a variety of software and infrastructure solutions. The DevNet group is the best example that we have seen in the industry of a traditional information technology company building a successful developer practice with a thriving community from grassroots efforts.

Now 10 years into the wave of cloud computing, we have seen many players go through iterations and failures in cloud strategies. Strong enterprise tech players such as Cisco, VMware Inc. and Red Hat Inc. now position themselves to be help users in multicloud deployments. For Cisco, this means partnering with cloud providers – Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp.’ Azure, Google Cloud and service providers – and software and solutions that span between on-premises and cloud offerings.

Cisco released a major update to its cloud management software from the CliQr acquisition, now known as Cloud Center Suite. Now microservices-based and a Kubernetes service itself, the software can now manage and orchestrate containers, not just virtual machines. As discussed by Cisco’s Dave Cope, you allow “CloudCenter, once you define your application, to understand the resources on each of these environments and lay down that application natively on those different environments.”

Cloud Center Suite is only one piece of a broad multicloud portfolio developed from acquisitions, including Viptela (now Cisco’s leading SD-WAN offering), AppDynamics (application performance monitoring and management) and Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud (security solution from Lancope). Wendy Mars, Cisco’s president of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said on theCUBE that European customers have gotten beyond hesitancy of embracing cloud. Now, users determine, based on business, application requirements, governance and security, the right places for workloads and resources.

Cisco’s multicloud portfolio (Image: Cisco)

Although the leaders in public cloud are clearly defined, there are numerous challenges and opportunities in multicloud. Cisco’s strategy is help bridge its products and customers from its dominant networking and data center position into a world where Cisco isn’t the center of data, but does have strong relevance. The role of networking and hardware will not disappear, but it’s smart of Cisco to help be a leader in training and building the next generation of workers and tools.

Here’s a list of key clips from theCUBE’s interviews at the show. In addition, there are multiple analysis segments from Cisco Live Europe 2019 on theCUBE.net page, as well as an episode of theCUBE Insights podcast on iTunes and Spotify, and more coverage in SiliconANGLE’s special report on Managing the Multicloud. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE was a media partner for Cisco Live. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Cisco