Lawrence Huang on Building Networks for the AI Agent Era

Hey, everyone. Welcome back here to another Techstrong TV interview. Um, let me introduce you to my next guest.

He, it's his first time on Techstrong tv, so let's go easy on him, but his name is Lawrence Huang. Lawrence is with Cisco Lawrence. Welcome to Text Drunk tv.

Hey, thanks a lot, Alan. Happy to be here. We're happy to have yarn.

So, Lawrence, let's, let's start with you, if it's okay, kind of let's, we'll work backwards. Give us your role at Cisco now, and, and we'll work, we'll look at your career from going, you know, back from there. Yeah, sure.

Um, I'm the, uh, general manager of the Cisco Wireless and network platform business. And what that means is I'm responsible for the entire Cisco wireless portfolio, as well as how we actually bring together our network management platform for our campus and branch, uh, customers here. You know, prior to this role, I've held a variety of product management roles.

Uh, I, you know, have been the head of product, uh, for the Meraki portfolio. Uh, I started my product management career, uh, you know, being the product manager for switching and wireless. Uh, prior to all this, I was a electrical engineer and I used to design, uh, RFIC circuits.

In fact, I, uh, built some of the first 8 0 2 to 11 ab, uh, g transceivers really back in the day. Really? Yeah.

Very cool. So, let me ask you the magic question. How long have you been at Cisco?

You know, it's kind of funny. Uh, you, you start losing track, but, uh, this stint has probably been the longest, uh, I've been here since, uh, Meraki was acquired by Cisco since 2012. Really?

And, and you were at Cisco before that? Again, I, uh, I, I was at Cisco where I had my first product management job. So this is, uh, after my, uh, my career as an electrical engineer.

You know, it's, it's funny, I, I've heard this, I've seen this pattern before. I have a lot of friends who like worked at Cisco, then went out and did the startup thing only to be reacquired by Cisco, right? And, and continue along their Cisco career path.

And it's, uh, you know, once Cisco always Cisco, I guess is the, is the word. Um, of course Lawrence, you know, I've been a follower customer of Cisco for 30 something years. com, I helped start a company that was what we called an a SP application Service provider.

And we were a Cisco powered network. Back then, everybody was, was the only game in town. I mean, there was Juniper, they were the new kids on the block then, right?

And, um, but it was, Cisco was a Cisco world. Of course, today, Cisco is very different than that Cisco, that Cisco was all about big honking routers and switches and smart switches and firewalls and, you know, hardware and, and so forth. Today, Cisco, it's a different animal.

It still does that hardware thing. It's probably still the leader in the world, I'm gonna assume. But there's also, there's the Meraki in the wireless unit, there's the software, there's security, there's observability.

How would you describe today's Cisco as, especially from your perch, right? Being there as long as you have. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, look, I, I, as you stated, Cisco's been for a long time, but, and I think one of the things that is amazing about this company is the continued transformation, especially as we think about, you know, how do we help our customers solve the biggest problems today? And the way I think about Cisco today is you we're helping to build the critical infrastructure for the AI era. And so that spans, you know, several areas.

I think first and foremost, how do we help our customers build AI ready data centers? It's not just for the workloads, uh, that you expect, but it's also workloads, uh, for ai. How do we actually help our customers future proof their workplaces across, you know, carpeted, non carpeted, you know, enterprise networks across campus and branch networks, and of course, all of that backed by digital resilience, um, powered by our AI capabilities.

So that is really how I think about Cisco in a nutshell. Today, it's a very different company than probably when, uh, you know, you were thinking about Cisco. But yes, we still obviously, you know, networking is a part of what we do, but increasingly it's how do we in, you know, think about infusing security into, uh, networking and everything that we bring up to the market today.

Absolutely. And I just feel obligated to give a shout out to the WebEx and this web WebEx, uh, the group that WebEx is part of now is, uh, I, I don't remember the name of it, but, uh, my, my friends Jeff Schaffer and Arner Char are, are, uh, part of that group. And, uh, they do a great job too.

So I just wanted to give them some now That I'll, I'll definitely let them know, yeah, that, that's part of the future proof workplaces. Like we're, we're really helping bringing collaboration and networking together, uh, for those type of customers. So, uh, yeah.

That's great. So you mentioned this data center. Boom.

I haven't seen a data center boom like this since 1998, right? com bubble burst, it took us about 10 years to use up all that data center space and dark fiber that we had laid out. 8 trillion in AI factories or AI data centers.

I, I gotta imagine what company like Cisco now that's, that's a market that could move the needle, right? Um, and, and so, you know, it pays to, to, to put some real resources behind that. Of course, these are next gen ai.

They don't even call 'em data centers. They call 'em AI factories. What's the challenge there for Cisco?

What are you going to do differently? What do you, what's new than, you know, just kind of what you've been doing powering data centers for the last 25, 35 years? Yeah, I mean, I, I think you're right that, you know, right now there's a explosion in data center.

Data center is cool again. And I think that even some of the 3 trillion numbers, uh, that you shared, uh, other people may have even greater ambitions. But I think the, the net of it is like the way that you think about building data centers and how you manage that infrastructure, it has to move beyond just the, you know, traditional, Hey, I, I'm gonna run workloads in a, you know, tiny level server, uh, to a, you know, data center cluster.

I'm gonna, you know, scale up from that and really moving towards a world where you're really scaling out and really creating these like mega clusters across different data centers to, you know, the, you know, power, the workloads that, uh, you know, our customers and, um, you know, where the economy's heading right now. So I, I think the scale of the thing is just vastly different. So how you think about managing, how you secure it, like you just have to take a different approach these days.

I agree with you a hundred percent. You know, Lawrence, the other thing is a trillion here, a trillion there, you know, before, you know, you're talking real money, but for all the trillions of dollars that we're putting into these, let's call 'em hyperscale data centers, a lot of the action is gonna take place at the edge on the end point, right? In transit and everything else.

Um, how, and, and again, these are places where Cisco excels as well, right? They we're not putting all of our eggs in that big honking router at the data center space anymore. We, we need to go where the people are, and they're everywhere and anywhere.

How is, I mean, but that's, that's a different strategy. That's a different, you know, kind of view how, how Cisco adapt to that. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, if, if you think about like this idea that AI is more than just in the data center and really out into the enterprise, it does mean how do you really think about everything from how you manage infrastructure to how you think about securing the infrastructure? You know, I'll give you a, you know, an example. In the old days, you know, you used to use command line interface to manage individual devices, and over time, that moved to a web UI interface ultimately to APIs.

And it's still very much a human-centered activity, if you think about it. But we think that the paradigm is shifting in a dramatic way, and that paradigm is shifting towards a world where it's human and AI agents working together, uh, to drive more automation and ultimately more hands-off operation of network infrastructure. That also means that the way you think about security changes, if you think about this idea that you have agents, uh, you know, deployed in the enterprise, like you and I can have, you know, 10, 12 plus agents working on our behalf, you have to first start thinking about the security of it.

Like what is their identity? What resources are they allowed to access? How do you know if you know you actually are giving them the right policies?

Like this is just a very different shift in mindset, uh, for the management layer as well, and security layer. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And, and it, you know, so I'm a security guy. I've been in security 25 years. To me, it's just like we've blown up the attack surface exponentially, right?

'cause every one of these agents and 10 or 12 agents, for me, 10, 12 agents for you is probably conservative. We may, you know, you're looking at someone who has 250 passwords, Lawrence, You know, locked in my password manager. So you could imagine how many agents, I'm gonna wind up with one deck.

But that being said, you know, the, the, the, the mission of security here, and you mentioned security a few times in your answers already. We, you know, I don't think we were doing such a fantastic job in security to begin with, right? And now here we are talking about, you know, a blown up attack surface at some level.

I guess you need AI to fight ai, but, and this is a job for ai, if you would talk a little bit about how Cisco is scaling up to meet this challenge. Yeah, you know, I, I think in the part of the portfolio that, uh, you know, I focus in, I, I think there's a few different facets to this. One is really understanding the identity and context of the human and agents.

And, you know, there's a rich body of work happening here, but I also think there's like some more fundamental blocking tackling. If you think about the day in the life of a network, uh, administrator, let's say that they have a security vulnerability that comes in. And then one of the things that they have to decide is, how much risk am I gonna take on?

And of course, there's, you know, scores for these, the severity levels, uh, and sometimes they have to take action much sooner than they want to. That can mean upgrading, you know, the firmware on a device. It's okay if you're talking about just a handful, but if you're managing hundreds of thousands of devices across a, you know, enterprise network, it, it, it becomes extraordinarily hard.

And so at Cisco, we're investing capabilities. Uh, you know, one of the most recent ones we talked about here is Live Protect. And what this does is it takes the investments that we made, uh, in eBPF and really hook this into the kernel of the embedded operating system so that we can actually apply compensating controls, which allows a administrator to give them more runway to do that, uh, you know, upgrade.

So the compensating controls protects against, uh, some of these security vulnerabilities. Then you go in into other areas like, hey, you know, we're having conversations right now, uh, you know, with federal customers, with healthcare customers, uh, around getting ready for a post quantum compute era, and what does that mean? You know, right now we know that, you know, the harvest now decrypt later, uh, is a real security threat.

So with our, you know, most recent, uh, you know, uh, you know, hardware and software releases, we want to build, you know, these devices to be pqc ready. And that means building it at all layers of the stack from how you sign the factory firmware, uh, to how you protect the embedded operating system to how you, uh, you know, harden the, uh, the control plane aspects and networking protocols for Maxi and IP second, modernize it, uh, you know, for this era here. And these are conversations that, you know, I think a lot of customers, you know, know is out there, but they're struggling to understand how can we get ready for this right now?

Absolutely. You know, look, make no mistake, Q Day is coming, right? I've spoken to a lot of quantum and quantum security folks, and the thing I, I learned from them is that, you know, it, it, it's not gonna be like marked on your calendar.

Oh, tomorrow's Q day, Q day is gonna happen. It may take months, weeks, or months for us to realize it did, and we're probably gonna realize it did as a result of something bad, right? That, that, yeah.

That, that happens from it. But when you, when you take quantum and you take ai and what we're doing with ai and even, you know, physical ai as we call it, robotics and stuff like that, the three of them together, I mean, you know, you wanna talk about Industrial Revolution 4 0 5, oh, whatever you want to call it. Um, I mean, the, the, the, the promise is, you know, astronomical.

But so is the risk. How, again, is Cisco, and we got a little specific, if you don't mind, how is specifically, what's Cisco doing to, you know, for this eventuality? Because though it may not be today, and it may not be tomorrow, it's not too much beyond that.

Yeah, and you know, I, I, I think the funny thing about all this is, if you look at the trends even before, uh, you know, this mega trend of ai, what we saw in the, uh, network infrastructure is the rise of non-traditional devices. So things beyond the mobile, uh, devices, the laptops, iot, like devices, things that are, you know, coming in terms of the factory floor, the distribution warehouse, uh, robotics, to your point, these non-traditional devices aren't always the easiest to identify, to profile, uh, to secure. And so I think a lot of the, you know, the work that we're doing is starting with some of the, the foundational aspects, which is a, how do you actually make sure that you're defining, you know, common security policies that can be askable to your entire infrastructure, whether it is that carpeted, non-competent environment, how do you build the hardware and software so you could have the distributed enforcement to translate the policy intent into something that's actionable.

And then I think the third piece that's always been the struggle for a lot of customers is how do you do this at scale? How do you make it easy? How do you drive operational simplicity into this?

So, you know, even as an example here, a lot of the work that we're doing with our security, uh, peers around, you know, hybrid mesh firewall to, uh, you know, our access manager, uh, you know, solution that's basically a SaaS based, um, access control, you know, solution, uh, to help our customers, you know, really deploy security in a much more meaningful and simple way across the enterprise. These are things that we're doing and then some to really help our customers get ready for this era. What advice would you give to IT leaders today who are listening to us talk here and saying, oh my God, I gotta do something this, but I thought AI alone was, was enough.

The quantum robotics, what we, what could they do, you know, real world to futureproof their networks in ai? It can't just be, buy more Cisco gear, right? Though that might be, but what would be your advice there?

Yeah, I, I think, you know, just like we see with, uh, you know, a lot of, I mean, every company out there adopting AI tools, oftentimes the difference between simply trial and proof of concept to production level adoption is having clear goals of what problems you're trying to solve. If you don't have clear goals, then everything is up for grabs, and you're gonna try, you know, the next, uh, shiny object here. And then I think at Cisco, fundamentally, you know, if I think about going back to what I said at the beginning, we're helping to build critical infrastructure for the AI era.

I think that, you know, from our perspective, the way that we provide value, the way we deliver innovation starts with, you know, modernizing the infrastructure starts with, you know, making sure that our customers have a platform that they can build on that can layer more capabilities, that as we deliver innovations, uh, to them, as our partners deliver innovations through our platform, they get the benefits of that. So I think a lot of it is like, you know, very foundational, moving away from the firefighting mode that many of our customers in to something that is much more, you know, strategic and, you know, thinking over the next, you know, 3, 5, 6, 7 years here. Absolutely.

Lawrence, we're running a little low on time. I wanted to pivot and talk a little bit about the partner summit that you guys had. I don't know if it was, well, by the time people see this after we record it, it might be a week or two ago.

Um, and, and just a shout out to our Futurum sister company. I believe Tech Field Day was, was, uh, over at Partner Summit or, or more of the Cisco summit's, been doing a tech field day with Cisco on this stuff. But you guys announced a raft of, uh, enterprise connectivity solutions at the partner Summit Summit for those, and I'm sure a lot of people out here weren't able to be there.

For those folks who weren't kinda, what did they miss? Yeah. You know, and I think first and foremost, if you think back to what I just, uh, said before, how do we help our customers, uh, you know, really accelerate and deliver on the outcomes for their business?

It starts with the foundation of the platform. We've been working towards a unified management platform, and what we are doing at Partner Summit is taking that to next level. How do we start providing greater options across all operational types?

We don't care if you're cloud, if you're on-prem or everywhere in between. We want to be able to allow our customers, whether you're using Catalyst Center or Meraki, to, you know, get the innovations that we're building across AI system, ai, ISTs, and delivering that experience to all of them through one single management experience. That's number one.

I think the second one is we want to base, you know, continue to provide our customers more options, uh, for cloud management, uh, more hardware capabilities, modular switching as an example, but also just more, uh, software capabilities. How do you deliver on that operational simplicity while still delivering great security? A cloud orchestrated, uh, fabric that's cloud managed allows our, you know, customers to achieve that.

And ultimately, you know, radar automation, we've been working, uh, on capabilities with our AI system in AI canvas that is a agent in nature. How do you use, you know, English as your foundational interface to these management platforms? And these management platforms understand what you're asking for, and it's intelligent enough and, uh, to pull out the right workflows to kick off, uh, you know, to write, pull in the right, uh, telemetry to help you troubleshoot issues at greater scale.

These are the things that we're bringing to market in a way that, uh, I think our customers have been looking for from Cisco for a long time now. Absolutely. Lawrence, this, we covered a lot of ground here today, specifically on the partner Summit announcements, is, I realize you may not have this at your fingertips, but is there a particular place on the Cisco site people can go to kinda read up and dig deeper?

You know, I, I'm terrible at that, so, uh, we'll have to, You know what, I'm gonna ask if we could grab a URL or something and we'll put it in the notes on, on this interview. Of course, you can always Google it, and I'm sure with Gemini, you know, if you are using Google, uh, it'll, it'll probably pull it up for you too. But that's a great thing about living in the world we live in now, isn't it?

Oh, 100%. You don't, yeah. You don't have to remember those arcane URLs anymore.

Uh, well it reminds me of when you didn't have to take your calculator in a math class, right? And then I wanted you kids could do the math. But anyway, Lawrence, I wanna thank you for coming on here on Techstrong tv.

We'd love to see you back on here. You know, I think there's so much going on in this whole space right now. And of course, right now AI is the, uh, what's the, the, the spoon that's stirring the pot, right, uh, to a large degree.

But, um, thanks for coming on and continued success at, at Cisco. Oh, thanks for having me. It was great to be a first time guest.

Looking forward to talking again. We will for sure. Lauren Sw here from Cisco.

And, uh, we're gonna take a break on Textron Gang, excuse me, text Drunk tv. I just finished Text Drug Gang on Text Drug tv. And we'll be back in a moment.