Cisco CTO: Software is becoming a core competency for us

Padmasree Warrior talks up vendor's software, server and switching skills in opening speech at Cisco Live event

Cisco's chief technology officer has claimed that software will soon be seen as one of the vendor's "core competencies" as it strives to forge ahead of competitors with its technology architectures ethos.

For the last two years, Cisco has been pushing its vision of a world in which its wares are regarded as architectural offerings, rather than merely siloed technologies. Its channel programme is being moved to recognise and classify partners based on their credentials across six architectural areas: SMB, consumer, service provider, datacentre/virtualisation, borderless networks and collaboration.

The Cisco Live Europe event opened at London's ExCeL centre, and the vendor's CTO Padmasree Warrior opened the show. In her speech, she reiterated Cisco's commitment to an architectural approach and spoke of how important software will become to the vendor.

"More and more we recognise that software is going to be at the heart of what we are driving with intelligence in the network," she said. "We are on this journey [for software to become] much more of a competitive advantage for us. We are moving from the old ways of thinking about operating systems, to ways that are much more intelligent and contextualised."

Warrior told attendees that Cisco's UCS server business is now at run-rate of $1bn (£634m) in annual revenue, with more than 10,000 customers across the globe.

"We are the industry leader in recognising that your compute network and virtualisation should be brought together," she added. "This is becoming a game-changing technology in the datacentre. When combining UCS with Unified Fabric [switching technology], this becomes a unique differentiator for us. A lot of compute vendors are trying to do this, but they do not have the strength in switching to do that."