In an exclusive interview with Telecom Review during the 18th edition of the Telecom Review Leaders’ Summit, Zayan Sadek, Middle East & Africa Service Provider Managing Director at Cisco, discussed the company’s innovative solutions for CSPs in the region.
As the new MEA Service Provider Managing Director, what strategy have you employed, and how have you engaged with CSP commercial operators in the region?
My strategy focuses on leveraging Cisco's broad portfolio to address unique market challenges and opportunities for CSPs in the region. Building strong and trusted partnerships with our customers is central to this, ensuring we understand their specific needs and deliver aligned, trusted solutions. We are empowering our customers by:
- Driving Digital Transformation: Promoting Cisco's advanced technologies enables CSPs to enhance their service offerings and improve operational efficiency. This positions service providers to meet the growing demand for connected services in the region, whilst also streamlining their operations.
- Ensuring Security and Compliance: Security is at the heart of our strategy. For 40 years, are leaders and a trusted partner in networking and security. Additionally, in March this year, Cisco announced its completion of the acquisition of Splunk Inc., (the cybersecurity and observability leader). This acquisition brings together two powerful innovation engines, creating one of the largest software companies globally. Our innovations help our customers prevent breaches, meet regulatory requirements, and protect both operations and customer data.
- Enhancing Customer Experience: Cisco's multi-channel customer engagement and observability solutions enable telco operators to improve application performance, link metrics to business outcomes, and deliver personalized customer experiences. This increases customer loyalty and reduces churn, driving long-term success.
- Positive Market Trends: MEA region’s investment in digital infrastructure, coupled with the demand for advanced connectivity aligns with Cisco’s strengths. By capitalizing on these trends, we position Cisco and our partners favorably for sustained growth and success in the region.
What strategy has Cisco’s adopted to develop next-generation offerings that align with the current and future networking demands and business objectives of its customers?
Cisco's broader strategy to develop next-generation offerings is deeply rooted in its "One Cisco" approach. It is about leveraging the collective strength of Cisco's various technologies and solutions to deliver comprehensive, seamless, and innovative offerings that address the complex needs of modern organizations.
At the core of this strategy is Cisco's commitment to ‘connecting and protecting organizations in the AI era.’ This involves integrating networking, security, observability, and collaboration to create AI-ready data centers, future-proofed workplaces, and digital resilience. When you unify these pieces of the puzzle, Cisco uniquely powers how people and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds.
We deliver AI-ready data centers, transforming them to power AI workloads everywhere. Future-proofed workplaces modernizing the places where people work and serve their customers. Utilizing this approach, we ensure the resilience of data centers, workplaces, and the entire digital footprint, against all types of threats through game-changing security, assurance, and observability.
All of these areas are supported by AI. Cisco’s portfolio is AI-native; AI isn’t afterthought when designing our products. It has been fundamental across our whole stack, from networking, security, and collaboration, to improving productivity and delivering better outcomes.
Please tell us about Cisco’s strategy when it comes to cybersecurity.
In today’s complex and hyper-distributed digital landscape, businesses face an unprecedented level of risk. Expanded connectivity results in more opportunities for cyber criminals to disrupt critical infrastructure and global economies.
Cisco adopts a multi-layered approach that combines advanced automation capabilities with strategic human intervention to ensure robust and effective incident management. At Cisco, simplicity is a cornerstone of our security strategy. Our platform-based solutions are designed to seamlessly monitor and protect even the most complex environments, whether the customer is using SaaS applications, websites, or internal corporate resources.
Among our offerings, Cisco Hypershield stands out as the industry’s first AI-native security architecture, designed to help customers defend against both known and unknown attacks. This innovative solution integrates functions traditionally associated with a modern firewall into the distributed network, utilizing a broad range of previously unreachable workloads and network enforcement points to deliver high-performance, intelligent, network security protection.
Additionally, our Cisco Security Cloud provides an AI-powered, cloud-native, integrated platform that delivers effective, scalable protection for organizations of all sizes. Rather than relying solely on human monitoring to detect anomalies or breaches across multiple points of attack, our solution harnesses an extensive set of telemetry data, allowing customers to easily identify trends.
Supported by the unparalleled expertise of Talos, our human intelligence team monitors 800 billion security events daily and discovers over 200 vulnerabilities each year.
Cisco at TRS-24:
Revolutionizing Connectivity: Cisco’s Vision for the Future of Networks
TRS-24 Panel Explores What AI Means for Telcos and Consumers
