It’s an exciting future for technology, with end-to-end visibility throughout a network a true possibility.  And the ways these things have come together is through innovation that goes back years, according to John Apostolopoulos (pictured), vice president and chief technology officer for enterprise networking business and lab director for Innovation Labs at Cisco Systems Inc.

“So one of the things which actually [we] … started about five years ago now was looking at what are some of the key use cases that customers need to have addressed three to five years down the road and what architectures do they need to solve it,” said Apostolopoulos. “It takes so long because takes a long time to figure out what are the real problem customers need to address and then how can you build.”

Apostolopoulos spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed the needs of modern businesses and how innovations will change the future of technology. (* Disclosure below.)

Enterprise needs and technological innovations

Businesses need to be able to roll out innovations much more quickly than in the past, according to Apostolopoulos. Some of the innovations that Cisco have been navigating are how to make solutions more quickly in the network.

“What we’ve done is by taking a more holistic view we have a full understanding of what’s happening end-to-end so we can roll out a new service, we can identify both the network policies that require the security policies, figure out what’s needed in each element in the network, go out and deploy it. Then look to see what’s happening and verify if it’s doing what’s needed,” Apostolopoulos said.

This data and analytics in the network has made customers very excited, as the concepts have been talked about for years. A new application needs visibility end-to-end, and technology like “internet of things” and edge computing are making end-to-end visibility a possibility, Apostolopoulos pointed out. This kind of approach was unheard of years ago.

“Edge is a really fun topic, and it’s something Cisco cares a lot about because often for many applications you have to run them at the edge, especially for IoT,” Apostolopoulos said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE