Cisco CEO Spies Networking Opportunity in AWS Outposts

Cisco wants hyperscale cloud providers to buy its networking products and sees 400Gb Ethernet as its golden opportunity. Meanwhile, these same cloud companies are looking to encroach on Cisco’s traditional stronghold — enterprise data centers — with hybrid cloud products and even on-premises hardware like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outposts, which will be available later this year. But that may provide a networking opportunity for Cisco, said CEO Chuck Robbins, speaking today at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference. Robbins said he didn’t want to imply that an AWS Outposts deal was in the works. But he added that AWS Outposts with Cisco networking was “certainly conceivable, but they [AWS] would have to want that and we’d have to work with them.”