The Cisco Pinnacle Awards - Market Impact Winner: Catalyst 8000 Edge Platform Family

YouTube Video Description (5,000 chars max): The Pinnacle Awards are Cisco’s top recognition, honoring contributions furthering Cisco’s legacy of technical innovation. Market Impact Award winners, Catalyst 8000 Edge Platform Family, share their innovation.

JU LIN: I think Cat8K platforms provide a complete solution in a box. It addresses customers' needs for improve the performance, increase security, with voice, data, and 5G solutions all together in one SD WAN network. So they don't need to have separate networks, which simplifies their life greatly.

RAHUL SAGI: The Catalyst 8K does a terrific job about transitioning customers to SD WAN, with the right kind of user experience, application visibility, and also connectivity to 5G.

HARI PALLAI: We had a huge install base with the previous generation of the platforms. We had to come up with the ability for the customers to leverage most of the investments and the line cards that they developed into the next generation of the platforms.

JU LIN: When a customer choose product performance and scale numbers are always one of the important factors they consider. The biggest challenge for me was how to design a software architecture that would meet the new SD WAN performance and scale requirements for different customer use cases using limited system resources.

HARI PALLAI: As part of this Catalyst 8000, one of the innovations that we wanted to bring up was to develop the sustainability aspects. If you look at the SD-WAN deployment, this is always deployed at very large scale. So, if you look at customers purchasing 5,000, 10,000, 17,000 units across the different geos. So, if you save 10 to 50 watts per power per site, then look at the enormous power savings that the customers can benefit from it. So that's the value prop that we provide with the sustainability aspect of it.

RAHUL SAGI: I'm really proud that the Catalyst 8K hit the $1 billion bookings mark. This Catalyst 8K platform helps Cisco to move towards DNA subscription towards Cisco's goals of becoming a software company. I think what I love about the team is the collaboration between all the people across time zones and technologies, and also the responsibilities of hardware, software, supply chain, and finance. We are able to come together and build incredible, world-class products that help Cisco and Cisco's customers.