No one can call Cisco Systems Inc. shortsighted. The 33-year-old networking company waxed futuristic all the way to 2050 at the recent Cisco Live event in Barcelona, Spain. The company envisions an emerging data-oriented network infrastructure for software and developer-driven enterprises. 

“We kind of haven’t even really started with the internet yet. We just tried a few things, and it seems really cool, and we know there’s a few problems,” said Rowan Trollope (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of applications at Cisco Systems.

Today, network engineers try to solve those problems — too many tedious manual chores, security holes and cloud complexities, for instance. But we ought to think much bigger about what the network can be, according to Trollope, who spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Cisco Live. (* Disclosure below.)

The network of the future

“We live in a world today where we don’t actually access the internet — we access it through companies that have put a business model on top of it,” Trollope said. “You go to Google or any other search engine, that’s the case.”

This is basically a data-oriented layer on top of the network. But we can reimagine this with the new networking principals, information-centric networks, and data-oriented networking architectures. These differ from current architectures that are based on the end-to-end principal and are systems-based, Trollope explained.

“It’s going to be information-based, which means I don’t ask for the Microsoft.com URL and then get the IP address and connect to a system,” Trollope explained. Instead, a user can request: ‘Show me the product list for Microsoft, and the network serves me that up and Microsoft publishes it and says I have that information. Wo when someone asks for it, I say I have it, and I publish it.”

This network abstracts to a higher-up data layer, not the connectivity layer. Pushing abstraction up the stack makes it easier for developers to interact with the networking infrastructure.

Cisco has new, programmable networking offerings, like Intent-Based Networking  for companies ready to enter the networking future, Trollope 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. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco Systems nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE