Hoping to recharge its declining networking business, Cisco Systems Inc. today unveiled a new edition of its foundation network switching equipment along with a new subscription plan for its services, both aimed at making it more intuitive for its customers to manage data on their corporate networks.

The new Catalyst 9000 series (below) is the latest version of the networking gear that controls the movement of data over a large chunk of the Internet and large corporate networks, and Chief Executive Chuck Robbins (pictured) positioned it as Cisco’s biggest launch in many a year.

Cisco said it completely rewrote its core IOS software, which handles the complex routing of data around networks, to make it more intuitive for customers to use the data to improve tasks ranging from network security to real-time marketing and customer service. In particular, Cisco pitched new technology for warding off increasingly rampant malware attacks as a key differentiator that it hopes will help spur sales of the new network switches.

“Today we are redefining the network for the next 30 years,” Robbins said at an unusually ritzy event at an upscale event space in San Francisco today. “The network of the future has a more relevant role to play in the industry than the last 30 years.”

Indeed, it’s clear that Cisco aims to make the network itself more of a command center for managing information technology overall, thus making Cisco an even more central and essential part of data centers, not just ever more sophisticated plumbing. For example, Robbins, whose blog post today was tellingly headlined, “The Need for More Intuitive Computing,” said the new network can manage cloud applications, Internet of Things devices such as self-driving cars, and mobile phone connections.

“This is a big deal for Cisco,” said Jim Duffy, a senior analyst at 451 Research Inc. “It’s a bold attempt to adopt software-based networking and revenue models.”

Photo: Cisco

Cisco did announce three new Catalyst machines, already being tested by customers such as NASA and Accenture. The switches will be more programmable by users thanks to new application-specific integrated circuits that can be customized to particular network tasks.

But more important than the hardware, despite the fact that the slick boxes were designed by longtime Ferrari sports car designer Pininfarina, is the software — in particular how it’s sold. Just as customers increasingly subscribe to services from cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp., now they will buy subscriptions to Cisco’s core networking and additional security and other software.

Subscription push

Robbins has made subscriptions a focus for Cisco with services such as its WebEx conferencing, because they provide recurring revenues, now almost a third of overall revenue, in contrast to onetime purchases of hardware and software. But this is the first time subscriptions are coming to its core networking business, David West, Cisco’s new head of worldwide sales for enterprise networks, said in an interview.

Besides the new IOS operating software, there’s a new dashboard called the DNA Center, which is intended to automate various network tasks, such as letting the chief financial officer of a company get access to all the financial info even if, say, he’s on vacation and using his spouse’s device to get access. More generally, the data running to and from many thousands of devices on a network can be aggregated to allow the network to learn from it to provide such services in a smarter way.

Cisco is also promising more adept analytics derived from all the data in the network to provide more automated services. For instance, said Mike Giresi, chief information officer at Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., the cruise line could anticipate whether guests had issues with a dining experience in real time, so their issue can be addressed immediately. Or a network can know whether there are problems with WiFi strength in an office to fix problems even before anyone calls in. “We’re building services that directly solve customer issues,” rather than simply selling them hardware and software to configure themselves, said West.

Not least, the new systems use machine learning to find malware at the network level, even in encrypted data — which the company said is an industry first — rather than a company having to wait until it sees attacks at the application level when it’s too late to stop them. That also helps ensure user privacy, since the data in email messages and the like never gets decoded by Cisco.

Robbins and other Cisco executives didn’t provide a lot of detail, in particular about how machine learning is employed in the new software. And it’s clear that even though some of the new models are available to buy now, the way they will work on customer premises remains a work in progress. “This isn’t vaporware, but it’s clearly beta,” Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst at The Enderle Group, told SiliconANGLE at the event.

Cisco has been making a belated but concerted push lately to move toward becoming more of a software company, and while the new switch is still a play to keep its hardware at the core of its business, subscription-based software is clearly a major new thrust for the company’s core networking business.

“It’s a 180-degree change for Cisco,” said 451 Research’s Duffy. He said the key for Cisco is whether it can persuade enterprise to buy into the more automated “intent-based networking” it’s pitching, another name for policy-based networking that has been around for awhile in more primitive form, rather than just moving everything to public clouds.

“Competitors will try to win over Catalyst 6500 customers during the transition, and public cloud providers will still market themselves as an alternative to on-premises private clouds,” Duffy added. “Cisco will use intent-based networking to keep workloads on-premises as much as possible.”

New competition

The venerable networking company has been struggling to contend with competitors, including longtime rivals such as Juniper and new ones such as cloud computing providers, whose subscription models have allowed customers to avoid paying up for Cisco’s networking hardware and software. In May, the company suffered its sixth straight quarter of revenue declines and said it would eliminate 1,100 more jobs on top of the 5,500 it cut last August.

Investors haven’t been happy with Cisco’s slow progress. After providing cautious guidance for the current quarter, traders knocked down its shares 5 percent in after-hours trading on May 17.

In February, the company debuted a new hardware platform and virtual network services for branch locations as well as new software for virtualizing the network perimeter and extending that capability to co-location centers that handle large volumes of Internet traffic. The new services were part of Cisco DNA, its virtualization architecture introduced in early 2016 that helps organizations extend network services such as routing and security to other platforms and locations. In turn, DNA is Cisco’s version of software-defined networking, network function virtualization and other technologies that move functions that were formerly in proprietary silicon chips into software.

The company had been rumored since at least March to be looking at further separating its networking software from its hardware. A report in The Information in late March said it was planning to offer its operating system software for network switches independently of its hardware, so it could run on less expensive, generic switching hardware made with chips from other companies.

But this latest set of announcements is a sign that even as Cisco aims to put itself at the center of the new software-driven networking industry, it has no intention of giving up on its own bundled systems.

Photos: Robert Hof