Legacy tanker ship Cisco Systems Inc. is veering into multicloud and “internet of things” edge devices. But can the networking giant coast these high seas with new-guard software and cloud companies?

“My question coming into this show is, how much is Cisco a software company?” said Stu Miniman (@stu, pictured, left), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. 

The company is making earnest efforts to move up the stack from hardware boxes, ports and cabling to software-defined offerings. Its acquisitions of Viptela Inc. and AppDynamics LLC last year clearly signaled this. In addition to earlier acquisition Meraki LLC, a cloud-controlled Wi-Fi company, these software-defined wide-area network startups are fleshing out Cisco’s evolving approach to networking. Indeed, the realities of multicloud and IoT fairly beg for a networking overhaul.

Miniman and co-host John Furrier (@furrier, pictured, right) gauged Cisco’s chances of providing it before a fresh, baggage-free cloud company during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona, Spain.

Will clouds eat Cisco’s lunch?

Cisco could easily point to its decades-long history in network and network security as credentials. But securing an information technology environment dashed to shards by multiple clouds and the sprawling surface area of IoT presents challenges over which even Cisco can’t claim mastery.

“The big contrast now with cloud is the parameter does not exist,” Furrier said. The imperative is to move up the stack to secure at the cloud and software level. “They’re doing it fast, and they have to, because they’re under siege,” he added.

Hyperscale public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud Platform are among those threatening takeover. Google has “the best network in the world,” according to Miniman. “They’re site reliability engineering team is freaking phenomenal. They’ve got chops; they know networking. They’re going to push Cisco hard,” Furrier added.

Deeper engineering partnerships could reserve a seat at the banquet for Cisco. “Cisco partners with lots of these companies. How are they going to make it easy? And why do they have the right to be in the center of a lot of those discussions?” Miniman concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Cisco Live Barcelona 2018.

Photo: SiliconANGLE