Last year, Cisco defined a bold vision on a new Intent-based Networking architecture. It soon became apparent that WAN would be one of the strongest use cases for this new architecture mainly due to businesses rapidly adopting cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud and cloud applications like O365, Salesforce, and Workday. Suddenly, the Internet has become the backbone of the enterprise, opening opportunity and challenges.

Our acquisition of Viptela last year, followed by an ambitious commitment for full integration across our routing portfolio was a strategic move to address our customers' needs quickly by bringing together the best in SD-WAN software with the best in branch-WAN technology. We believe the evaluation of Cisco as a leader in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for theWAN EdgeInfrastructure reflects our progress along the journey toward intent-based networking for the WAN.

The emergence of SD-WAN has fascinated me. Cloud applications require a new architecture. Our customers' networking topology and security architecture has been totally disrupted by multi-cloud adoption. I have to remind myself that such major shifts happen once a decade.

In the face of such significant challenges for our networking customers, It has been exciting to witness Cisco's SD-WAN technological transformation; enabling even the most conservative enterprises to rapidly adopt a new technology and architecture at scale. When Fortune 500 enterprises are able to turnaround major projects in weeks in what typically took more that 12+ months, that puts Cisco in the position of driving our customers' business outcomes at many different levels -secure connectivity, user experience, business productivity and cost savings to name a few.

Cisco SD-WAN now represents full integration of Viptela technology -one of the fastest integrations onto our enterprise networks portfolio that I have witnessed in my nearly 20 years at Cisco. It is available across most of our enterprise networks portfolio products and across three major form factors: cloud, virtual and physical. And over 1.1 million of our routing devices in existing customer environments can benefit from our SD-WAN solution simply with a software upgrade.

Cisco continues to look at the WAN more comprehensively in terms of simplified operations, security, and user experience with agile innovation. It makes me proud that Cisco is positioned as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the WAN Edge infrastructure, and that we are positioned highest for Ability to Execute within one year of our Viptela acquisition.

And to address the broadest set of customer deployment needs, the combination of Meraki completes our SD-WAN applicability for any size environment. Our journey to a full SD-WAN transformation is off to a strong start, and we are just getting going. Stay tuned, things are going to get very interesting in this space.

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Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, Joe Skorupa, Andrew Lerner, Christian Canales, Mike Toussaint, 18 October 2018.

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