The 10 Biggest Cisco News Stories Of 2024

The tech giant’s path toward becoming a “meaningfully different” company included the close of its $28 billion Splunk acquisition and a handful of smaller deals, a new channel chief and full revamp of its historic 30-year-old partner program, a layoff and real estate reduction, and big AI investments, to name a few major items on Cisco’s agenda in 2024.

From its AI and security focus to its fully refreshed partner program and leadership team, Cisco Systems is in the midst of one of its largest transformations yet, if 2024 was an indication.

The tech behemoth kicked off the year with the close of its $28 billion Splunk acquisition in March. From there, Cisco went on to carry out two more acquisitions and announce two pending deals, all of which have security and AI as the common thread. The company in June at Cisco Live also unveiled a $1 billion global AI investment fund aimed at targeting strategic investments in startup companies and helping Cisco grow faster. It’s safe to say that Cisco, now combined with Splunk, placed its bets on AI in a big way in 2024.

Alongside the portfolio evolution came some major leadership and headcount changes. Cisco this year named former Splunk CEO Gary Steele as its president of go-to-market and over the summer promoted Jeetu Patel, formerly Cisco's executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration, to chief product officer and gave him command of Cisco's bread-and-butter: the $29 billion networking business. But the growing pains also included job cuts. Cisco in August confirmed that rumors about a massive layoff round were true. The job cuts, which were carried out this fall, impacted about 7 percent of Cisco's global workforce. At the same time, the company also began evaluating its real estate footprint and started consolidating some of its presence in the Bay Area by closing up several of its offices in San Jose as well as Splunk's San Francisco headquarters.

But perhaps most noteworthy for partners was what came at the end of the year when Cisco revealed a fully revamped partner program set to roll out over the next year and a half. While the company has made major changes to its flagship partner program along the way, Cisco 360 marks the biggest changes to the program in its storied 30-year history. Cisco Channel Chief Rodney Clark, who also coincidently joined the company in 2024, sat down with CRN exclusively to dish out the details on the new incentive plans and the goals of the brand-new partner program.

Cisco Systems, one of the biggest tech companies in the market today, had a jam-packed year on its path toward becoming a "meaningfully different" company. What follows are the 10 biggest Cisco stories of 2024.

10. Cisco Invests In Hot AI Startup CoreWeave

The tech behemoth, which has been heavily investing in the AI space as evidenced by its massive $28 billion acquisition of Splunk, this fall agreed to invest in cloud AI upstart CoreWeave, an emerging player that’s backed by Nvidia and was valued at $23 billion as of October.

CoreWeave is a cloud computing provider that’s among the hottest companies in the AI arena.

The company owns a large amount of high-powered graphics processing units (GPUs) and builds cloud offerings for compute-intensive use cases like AI which can be up to 35X faster and 80 percent less expensive than public clouds, according to the company. The startup is heavily backed by Nvidia — to the tune of more than $100 million — and private equity firms.

Roseland, N.J.-based CoreWeave, which was founded in 2017, in May announced a $1.1 billion funding round, which brought its valuation from $19 billion, to its current $23 billion valuation just six months later. The company is reportedly planning to hit the public markets next year with an IPO expected by the first half of 2025, The Information reported in May.

9. Cisco Consolidates Bay Area Offices

Making good on the company's plan to put “more work into lower-cost locations,” Cisco in October revealed plans to shutter several of its offices in San Jose as well as Splunk’s San Francisco headquarters six months after closing its $28 billion megadeal of the software analytics specialist.

Cisco is shifting some of its business units to Santana Row, the residential and commercial district of West San Jose, in which Splunk already has an office presence. Cisco is also closing the doors on four of its office buildings at or near its 13.3-acre San Jose campus that includes more than 30 buildings, a report from the San Jose Mercury News said at the time.

A Cisco spokesperson told CRN in an email that the firm was “bringing our Cisco and Splunk teams in the Bay Area closer together to drive greater collaboration, improve cost efficiencies within our real estate portfolio, and create an environment where our people can thrive and drive innovative solutions for our customers and growth for Cisco. To do this, we are expanding, upgrading, and modernizing our Santana Row office, reducing square footage in our North San Jose complex, and moving San Francisco Splunk employees to the current Cisco office there. We have deep roots in San Jose and San Francisco, and we look forward to offering our employees vibrant and engaging new workspaces designed for our future.”

Happening at the same time as its real estate consolidation plans, Cisco also revealed it has permanently laid off 842 employees as part of its plan to cut about 7 percent of its workforce. The company let go 134 from its San Francisco office, 145 in Milpitas, California, and 563 that were based at the tech giant's San Jose, California headquarters.

8. Cisco’s Pending Security Acquisitions

Cisco in December announced its intent to acquire SnapAttack, a threat detection and engineering platform provider that the company expects will help Cisco’s Splunk business power the Security Operations Center (SOC) of the future for enterprises. Startup SnapAttack’s platform will become part of Cisco’s Splunk business to further accelerate its organic threat detection road map and help enhance enterprises’ security operations in favor of a more threat-informed defense once the deal closes, according to the two companies.

Cisco, which has been hard at work raising its security profile in recent years, said the acquisition of SnapAttack could help win over new security customers “on the fence” about the value of Splunk Enterprise Security. The two companies did not disclose when they expect the deal to close.

Cisco also announced its intent to acquire Deeper Insights AI, a privately held AI services company based in the U.K., in October.

7. Cisco’s Closed Acquisitions in 2024

In August, Cisco closed two security software acquisitions, including DeepFactor, a privately held cloud-native application security company, and Robust Intelligence, a privately held AI security solutions company.

San Jose, Calif.- neighbor DeepFactor is a privately held cloud-native application security company that will help to expand Cisco’s deep bench of security product and engineering talent to accelerate innovation of the Cisco Security Cloud strategy by building on Cisco's Secure Access (SSE) offerings, the company said.

Robust Intelligence, meanwhile, is a firm at the forefront of AI security. The company's purpose-built platform will give Cisco more protection for AI models throughout their lifecycle, from development to production, including advanced automation and risk mitigation. The company was formerly part of the Cisco Investments portfolio.

6. New Channel Chief Rodney Clark Joins Cisco

Ahead of the Cisco 2023 Partner Summit, the tech giant named Microsoft veteran Rodney Clark as its new global channel chief following the company's former channel chief of five years Oliver Tuszik leaving the position in August for another opportunity within the company leading Cisco’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region as Cisco’s EMEA president .

Clark, for his part, started in his new role as senior vice president, partnerships and small and medium business, in January. From there, he began making changes to Cisco's longstanding channel program to help move more partners down the managed services road as the company continues its evolution in favor of software, AI, and security services.

Clark, a channel veteran, joined Cisco from industrial machinery manufacturer Johnson Controls, where he has served as the company’s chief commercial officer since June 2022. Prior to that, Clark spent more than 24 years at Microsoft where he held a variety of positions, including most recently corporate vice president of global channel sales and channel chief. Before his time at the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant, Clark spent eight years at IBM in sales and marketing roles.

5. A Leadership Revamp

Cisco in 2024 underwent a leadership shakeup. In May, Executive Vice President and Chief Customer and Partner Officer Jeff Sharritts announced he would be leaving the networking giant after 24 years as an employee. Sharritts joined Cisco in 2000 as manager of channel operations and ascended to the role of senior vice president of Americas sales in 2018. In 2022, he became executive vice president and chief customer and partner officer in 2022 with the retirement of Gerri Elliott. Sharritts left the company at the conclusion of its fiscal 2024 year in July.

At the same time, Cisco moved former Splunk CEO and then-executive vice president and general manager of the newly acquired Splunk subsidiary Gary Steele (pictured) to a new role as president of go-to-market for Cisco. In August, Jeetu Patel, formerly Cisco's executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration, was promoted to chief product officer. In addition to security and collaboration, Patel has also taken command of Cisco's massive networking business, which was valued at about $29 billion in FY 2024.

The refreshed executive leadership team comes at a time in which Cisco is undergoing its own massive transformation as it boosts its security profile and moves fast against the AI opportunity. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said in an interview with CRN in October that Steele joining Cisco as president of go to market and Patel being promoted to chief product officer shines on a light on the company's sense of urgency and desire to win.

4. Cisco Reveals Mass Layoff Plan

Cisco in August confirmed plans for a massive layoff round that would impact about 7 percent of its global workforce. The company at the time said that the move would cost up to $1 billion and affect upwards of 6,000 people, based on the vendor’s 84,900 headcount as of July 2023.

The tech giant said in a regulatory filing in August that the cost will mostly consist of severance, one-time termination benefits and other costs that would have Cisco spending between $700 million and $800 million in the first quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, which ended October 26.

CEO Robbins said on the company's Q4 2024 earnings call in August that his team is “shifting hundreds of millions of dollars into AI,” including AI networking for cloud, AI infrastructure, silicon and cybersecurity, and attributed that as part of the reason for mass layoffs. On the same call, CFO Scott Herren said the restructuring and layoffs of about 7 percent of the global Cisco workforce was not about saving costs, but rather “finding efficiencies across the company so that we can pivot more resources, much like we did last year, into the fastest growth areas within the company." Herren said that the company would also see savings “by putting more work into lower-cost locations.”

3. Cisco Unveils $1 Billion Global AI Investment Fund

At Cisco Live 2024 in June, AI took center stage.

The tech giant at the show unveiled a $1 billion global AI investment fund targeting strategic investments in startup companies that build offerings based on Cisco’s strategy and infrastructure.

Among the first moves of that new AI fund, Cisco made investments in Toronto- and San Francisco-based Cohere, which develops security-focused, enterprise-focused large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities; Paris-based Mistral AI, which develops new GenAI models for businesses; and San Francisco-based Scale AI, which develops a data-centric, end-to-end platform for training and validation of AI applications. The AI fund aims to help Cisco get bigger and grow faster, the company told press and analysts in June.

At the same time, Cisco also announced an expansion of its relationship with Nvidia with the introduction of the Cisco Nexus HyperFabric AI cluster, a technology that combines Cisco AI-native networking with Nvidia accelerated computing and AI software and data storage from New York-based Vast Data.

2. Cisco 360 Unveiled

Cisco’s iconic partner program known for its ability to fund major industry transitions for Cisco partners is in the process of undergoing its biggest refresh in the history of the company.

The brand-new partner program, Cisco 360, was revealed on the first day of Cisco Partner Summit 2024 in October. Cisco 360 was built to attract more MSPs and MSSPs with its focus on the value partners bring over transactions.

The goals of the new program are for Cisco to drive double-digit growth in the markets it serves while boosting the profitability of partners, through which Cisco does 90 percent of its business, executives told CRN. The fully refreshed program, which will include new incentives and do away with separate partner programs and the historic Cisco Gold partner designation, represents a marked break from the biggest payouts going to partners landing large, capex infrastructure deals.

As part of the new partner program announcement, Cisco also revealed an $80 million investment that the company said would go toward new partner initiatives to boost skills and provide the tools needed to compete in the market. A majority of that investment—$60 million to be exact—will go toward supporting qualified partners with benefits such as all-access Cisco U. subscriptions for skill development and certification. An additional $20 million will fund Ladder Up, an investment for partners focused on AI, security, observability and networking through self-paced learning, hands-on labs and continuing education credits, according to Cisco.

Cisco 360 will also eventually include the Splunk Partnerverse program. In an effort to give Cisco's partners all over the world time to adapt, the new program won’t go into effect until February 2026.

1. Cisco Closes Blockbuster $28 billion Splunk Deal

A deal that shook the networking space since it was first rumored to be in process, Cisco in March closed its whopping $28 billion acquisition of Splunk in a move that would combine the two companies’ cybersecurity and observability strengths and create what company executives described as a distinctive, AI-powered data platform. Cisco completed the all-cash deal, paying $157 per share representing approximately $28 billion in equity value.

“As one of the world’s largest software companies, we will revolutionize the way our customers leverage data to connect and protect every aspect of their organization as we help power and protect the AI revolution,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said in a statement on the day the megadeal closed about six months after it was first announced in 2023.

The company's $28 billion acquisition of San Francisco-based Splunk marked Cisco’s largest purchase in the company’s history.