- Business
- Cisco Systems, Inc. Cisco Systems, Inc. designs, manufactures and sells networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment and high-technology services worldwide. Founded in 1984 and headquartered in San Jose, California, the company operates across the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Asia-Pacific, Japan and China, serving industries including financial services, government, healthcare, education, manufacturing, retail, utilities, oil and gas, media, entertainment, transportation and sports. Its core products and services encompass networking solutions such as switches, routers, wireless controllers, access points and interfaces including the Silicon One family of ASICs; security offerings like firewalls, Duo Security, domain security via OpenDNS and end-to-end cybersecurity platforms; collaboration tools including Webex videoconferencing, Jabber and unified communications; data center technologies; Internet of Things (IoT) platforms such as Jasper; observability software from Splunk integration; and additional categories like optimized application experiences and energy management. Cisco outsources manufacturing to third parties while maintaining a global sales force of around 25,000 across 90 countries and employs approximately 86,200 people overall. In recent developments, Cisco completed its $28 billion acquisition of Splunk in March 2024, enhancing observability, security and AI capabilities with integrations such as Splunk Enterprise Security editions, federated search for Snowflake and AI-driven tools for threat response; announced a joint venture with AMD and HUMAIN in November 2025 to deploy up to 1 GW of AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia starting 2026; doubled AI-related orders to $2 billion for 2025 amid launches like the Cisco N9100 AI data center switch with NVIDIA Spectrum-X and the first AI-native wireless stack for 6G; unveiled Cisco IQ unified AI experience and Webex AI enhancements including agentic AI and quality management; expanded partnerships such as with SoftBank for Silicon One Q200 in optical networks and NVIDIA for AI clusters; and introduced Cisco 360 partner program with $80 million investment while continuing AI security innovations and Splunk synergies like free firewall log ingestion.