Cisco's Wei Songbin: Cisco makes people's work and life smarter, simpler, safer and more convenient

[51CTO.com original article] Reporters have attended many Cisco press conferences, but rarely have they seen Cisco systematically sort out the company's strategy. Recently, Wei Songbin, senior vice president of Cisco Greater China and general manager of the product division, was interviewed by the media. He said that every time Cisco launches a new product, it is inseparable from the guidance of Cisco's corporate strategy. He said that Cisco has been committed to providing a secure and intelligent platform for digital business through five pillars through the ever-increasing speed of innovation. Cisco's five business pillars include: enabling a multi-cloud world, reshaping a fully intelligent network, releasing the power of data, enhancing ubiquitous security, and enriching the experience of employees and customers.

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Wei Songbin told reporters that Cisco recently released two major products, one related to the fully intelligent network, involving artificial intelligence and Wi-Fi6, and the other product related to collaboration, which is about how to integrate artificial intelligence into collaboration to make it personalized and humane. "Of course, Cisco continues to launch new products in other areas, including the multi-cloud world, data and security. Among them, Cisco builds all its products on the cornerstone of security," he concluded.

Let artificial intelligence replace human repetitive mental work, Cisco's three major innovations in intelligent network analysis

As Cisco's "base camp", the network has always condensed the essence of Cisco's research and development and innovation. In Cisco's view, the complexity of the network has exceeded the scale that humans can handle. Under such circumstances, artificial intelligence can be used in the network world to replace humans' repetitive basic mental work. Wei Songbin gave an example, in the past, when there were problems in the network, experts needed to rely on their experience to collect data for diagnosis, analysis and processing. This activity is largely repetitive and based on experience. Every time a person is replaced, they have to learn it all over again. In addition, everyone has different experience accumulation, different diagnostic speeds, and different conclusions. This is where artificial intelligence can show its prowess.

In the future, a large part of artificial intelligence work is to train models, and an important factor that training models rely on is data. Cisco started connecting networks as early as the 1980s. Today, Cisco has accumulated a large amount of network operation and maintenance data around the world, whether from the backbone network, edge network, access network of operators, or the networks of large enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises. Therefore, Cisco combines massive data and practical experience with artificial intelligence to generate practical and usable machine learning models.

Wei Songbin shared the analytical capabilities of Cisco's intelligent network from three aspects: first, achieving visibility and providing personalized benchmarks. Cisco uses unified global telemetry data to intelligently define personalized network benchmarks; second, enhancing network insights to achieve smarter analysis. Cisco networks can reduce interference, improve problem correlation, and accurately identify trends and root causes; third, they are more operational and can accelerate fault repair. "On top of personalized benchmarks, Cisco adds real-time data to artificial intelligence models to detect real problems, and based on the knowledge base of the expert system, it can infer the type of problem and provide corresponding solutions. It can even predict some network failures and provide early warnings."

　　How to embrace the 5G+WiFi6 era?

When talking about the hot 5G and WiFi6, Wei Songbin said that the outstanding advantages of 5G over 4G are faster speed, support for massive connections, and low latency. Wi-Fi6 not only has the advantages of 5G, but also has its own unique characteristics, one of which is low energy consumption. Traditional Wi-Fi technology has always been connected to the base station, while Wi-Fi6 can disconnect when the device is in standby mode through the agreement reached between the terminal and the base station, which greatly reduces power consumption.

It is understood that Cisco recently released two products that support Wi-Fi 6, namely the wireless Catalyst 9100 and Meraki. Among them, Cisco Meraki is a cloud-managed product line, and its MR series also supports Wi-Fi 6. Wei Songbin said that the Wi-Fi 6 standard will be finalized in November this year. Cisco's equipment was born before the standard, and after the standard comes out, only the software needs to be upgraded. In addition, with the significant increase in the speed of Wi-Fi 6, the requirements for the speed of supporting network equipment have also increased significantly. To this end, Cisco has also upgraded its previously most popular core network switches from Catalyst 6000 to Catalyst 9600.

So what is so unique about Cisco's Wi-Fi 6? Wei Songbin said that first of all, Cisco has its own Wi-Fi 6 RF chip, which greatly enhances fault diagnosis and data analysis capabilities. When paired with Cisco DNA Center, it can perform fault diagnosis and artificial intelligence applications. In addition, it can trace faults. He told reporters that it is difficult to replay Wi-Fi faults because most faults are related to environmental interference. As environmental interference disappears, faults are difficult to replay. In response to this, Cisco combines Cisco DNA Center and Wi-Fi to replay previous problems. Like a camera, it can rewind the video to the moment the fault occurred to help engineers diagnose the problem.

Secondly, Wi-Fi 6 supports massive connections. In addition to Wi-Fi standards, it also supports IoT standards, such as ZigBee and BLE protocols. Moreover, third-party edge computing applications can be run on the Cisco Wi-Fi 6 APP, and custom applications can be installed according to customer needs to combine edge computing.

At the same time, Cisco has also organized a global Wi-Fi 6 industry alliance to build an open roaming platform to integrate operators and Wi-Fi providers. In the future, when people go out, their devices will automatically connect to available Wi-Fi without the user having to perform any operation. In particular, the speed of Wi-Fi 6 is comparable to that of 5G, which brings great convenience to users.

A good collaborative assistant - a more humane Webex

With the development of mobile technology and mobile phones and laptops, collaboration is everywhere. Collaboration is no longer limited to telephone communication. Real collaboration can achieve file sharing and even allow users in different locations to share virtual workspaces, making collaboration more efficient than ever. Cisco has many collaboration products, and recently Cisco integrated them and grouped all collaborations under one brand, Webex. Whether it is meetings, calls, or online customer service, all products are grouped under Webex, making customers more familiar with the brand without being bothered by the complicated names. In addition, all technologies are fully unified, allowing AI technology to be implemented in every product line.

The reporter learned that Cisco's artificial intelligence technology has made Webex no longer a cold communication device, but a personal assistant for corporate users. Wei Songbin gave a detailed introduction to the application of artificial intelligence in Webex: First, character insights allow users to have a deeper understanding of the participants. When there are unfamiliar faces among the participants, users can easily understand their background information, making the communication more personalized and targeted. The second is to become an enhanced Webex assistant. Users only need to give instructions to the screen, and it will immediately become a personal assistant. The third is enhanced facial recognition, the Webex camera can identify the identity of the person entering the room. Fourth, the customer service center can analyze customer behavior in real time, and technical support provides users with solutions. "Webex is not only becoming more and more intelligent, but also more and more humane and personalized."

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