With the interconnection of billions of devices in public and private networks and many applications and services moving to the cloud, software is increasingly becoming independent of and abstracted from hardware. At public cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, hardware has been commoditized and software has taken center stage.

At Cisco, resellers and enterprise customers put complex solutions together using our products. The integration of switches, routers, and other gear with software used to require up to a one-year qualification cycle. But with the cloud providers, it's immediate. Today, more native cloud concepts have been added to Cisco IOS XE software. Quarter by quarter, our enterprise software is becoming more efficient and cost-effective, more automated, and more programmable.

From Physical to Virtual to Cloud Native 

The first incarnation of Cisco enterprise cloud-enabled products was the virtualization of physical hardware devices in the cloud as virtual machines. They had all the existing concepts and features customers were used to in existing physical Cisco platforms.

In recent years we've been moving from physical to virtual to cloud-native products. As customers are becoming more aware and ready to consume cloud-native features, Cisco IOS XE is being enriched to provide those features. At?190 million lines of code