 We continue now with the network, powering hybrid work. Now we just heard from Lawrence Wang on the rapid move to Wi-Fi 6E, which is going to increase Wi-Fi efficiency, enable routers and devices to more efficiently use bandwidth. And that additional spectrum that Lawrence talked about, that means more Wi-Fi channels, which is really going to help reduce overlap between networks and make a noticeable difference, especially in crowded places. We're here now with Muhammad Imam, who's Senior Director of Product Management for Catalyst Switching. This is a multi-billion dollar business for Cisco. If you ever listen to Cisco's earnings calls, you'll hear the CFO, Scott Herron. He'll talk about the Catalyst 9000 and double digit growth and switching. This is the fastest ramping product in Cisco's history. So Muhammad, that's got to make you feel pretty good. He has indeed. Thank you, David, and thank you for having me here. Yeah, great to have you. So look, Catalyst 9000, it's been really successful. What does the 9000X bring to the table for your customers? Yeah, absolutely. And indeed, the Catalyst 9000 family of switches have been extremely popular with their customers. As you said, fastest ramping product in Cisco's history. And the last four or five years, we have really evolved the Catalyst 9000 family of switches to a very comprehensive product portfolio, addressing the various enterprise use cases that we address. But now we see increase in demand on the networks and that really stems from some of the most recent trends that we are seeing. Part of it is hybrid work spaces. It's going to be a video dominant hybrid work space. A lot of cases is going to be high definition, 4K, 8K videos. We are seeing cloud-based applications everywhere. My spreadsheet used to be on Excel sheet. Now it's either an Office 365 or a Smart Sheets. My files used to be on my computer. Now it's on in the Dropbox, right? So these are trends that are really putting pressure on our networks. We are also seeing trends where VR headsets are becoming common. They are being used for trainings and education use cases. WebEx hologram. In certain industries, we are seeing robotics are becoming more and more popular and they come with a lot of applications that are very latency sensitive. And as Lawrence mentioned earlier, Wi-Fi 6E is really making over the year multi-gigabit Wi-Fi possible, right? And for all of these different trends and the recent technologies that are evolving, we really need the network that can really address and deliver for these applications. And that's where we are bringing the Catalyst 9000X that addresses the increase in network demand. We are expanding the Catalyst 9000 family with top-of-line premium introductions in the access layer of the switches of the network, as well as in the aggregation and core layers. So we are bringing 400 gig high-speed core and enterprise core and edge layers of the network. We are bringing point-to-point IPsec security, which will give you 100 gig of IPsec encryption. High density of multi-gigabit, which is becoming very common as we wall our Wi-Fi networks because we don't want our wired infrastructure to be the bottleneck when the wireless infrastructure is capable of going more than a gig. High density of 90 ward powering the smart buildings use cases, right? These are all different use cases that are being enabled by the Catalyst 9000 and the new Catalyst 9000X family is really addressing some of these new trends and applications. Well, it's good because the Metaverse is coming too and we're going to need some help with that, right? Who knows how much bandwidth we'll need for Metaverse? Absolutely. Yeah, guarantee you'll be a lot more. But so I want to hear more about the new products that you've just launched and maybe how these offerings are going to help with this new hybrid work model that we've just been discussing. Absolutely. So let me start with the Catalyst 9300. We are introducing the Catalyst 9300X which is the highest density full multi-gigabit platform with 100 gig uplinks and 90 watt of power on every port available, right? That's an industry first that we are bringing on the Catalyst 9300 family. It is also capable of one terabit per second of a stacking which is also unheard of in the industry. This will serve our customers with all the new trends that we talked about including the hybrid work and some of the new trends that are going to come in the next decade. But 9300X is not just a high-end campus switch. It can also be a lean branch in a box solution where you don't really need an SDVAN but you do need an encryption point-to-point from the Catalyst 9300 from your front branch with the Catalyst 9300X to the data center or to the cloud. So for the first time we are introducing the IPsec based encryption natively in the hardware and that means no compromise on performance and you can get up to 100 gig of encrypted traffic with the Catalyst 9300X. Second is the Catalyst 9400. We are introducing Soop 2 and Soop 2 XL with 100 gig uplinks enhancing the scale and performance giving our customers options for fully loaded line rate multi-gibbit board on a 10-slot chassis, right? It'll give you two to three times bandwidth boost to your existing line cards since it completely removes the OOR subscriptions and you know the Soop 2 on the Catalyst 9400 is coming up with the version of the ASIC that we used in the past on the Catalyst 9600 that means it's also bringing the core capabilities that we use today have on 9600 on the Catalyst 9400 and that brings high density 10 gig boards on the Catalyst 9400 without OOR subscription, right? With the core capabilities. Then we have the Catalyst 9600 where we are introducing a Supervisor 2 which really triples the bandwidth per slot on the Catalyst 9600. It introduces 400 gig uplink and truly drives the transition to 100 gig in the core. Get 6K customers with XL scale requirements. Now they can transition to the Cat9K with Soop 2. And by the way, we are also introducing a combo line card on the Catalyst 9600, which means now you don't have to burn the whole slot for your uplink boards. In fact, you can get up to 400 gig of uplink with this new line card. So that's a bunch of things that we are bringing on the Catalyst 9600. In line with Catalyst 9600, we are also introducing Catalyst 9500X, 100 gig boards with 400 gig uplinks in a fixed form factor. And all the benefits that I just talked about on the Supervisor 2 and 9600 is also available in a fixed form factor on Catalyst 9500X. So that's in summary kind of the multiple product lines that we are introducing. Yeah, so a lot to unpack there. I mean, the big theme there of course is optionality. You got a lot of choices for customers. I love to encrypt everything without a trade-off. You know, no performance impact and anytime you can reduce my oversubscription it's going to make me happy. You know, Mohammed, we've reported in our breaking analysis segments the importance of custom silicon. And not every company has the resources or the expertise to develop their own silicon Cisco of course does. Catalyst 9K is bringing silicon one based products with this launch. Tell us more about that. Why is this important? Yeah, that's really exciting development that we have on the Cat9K family because you know the silicon one is a powerful ASIC that enables high performance and high scale with modern silicon architecture bringing the architect, a converged architecture for switching as well as routing. Cat9K, as we know, has been running on a UADP ASIC which has been a programmable ASIC. It has served us really well so far on the Cat9K family. But with the silicon one we are taking it to another level. Silicon one brings the capabilities of UADP ASIC and unlocks the Excel scale and high performance in the enterprise stages. This is a critical and foundational element to meet the core requirement for the next decade. Silicon one is a 12.8 terabits per second chip supports up to 10 million routes supports much deeper buffers brings multi-slides VOQ architectures. With this new architecture, the silicon one ASIC has paved the way to transition the Cat6K Excel deployments to Cat9K. So that's kind of the silicon one importance in the Cat9K family that we are bringing now. Yeah, and it brings differentiation. A lot of people sometimes don't appreciate that but when you have the control like that you can do things that you might not be able to do with off the shelf silicon. But I want to ask you, what about customers that previously purchased from you as you evolve the portfolio to 9KX? How do you protect their investment? Yeah, thank you for asking that question because when we started building the Cat9K we always thought about investment protection for our customers. So if you buy today how you will have a very long life for that product and you will be able to unlock new powers on that platform that you have purchased maybe five years back, right? That's exactly what we are doing with the Catless 990, 9000X. Talking about modular, right? On the modular side, the supervisors that we are introducing now are backward compatible with the line cards that you already have. In some cases, the line card throughput is doubling and tripling because now you have a new machine that is going to power these line cards, right? So you don't have to change your line card. You just change your supervisor and you have much higher performance and scale with this new supervisor. Similarly, on the stackables you can stack with the existing Catless 9300X for example and you will be able to you don't have to rip and replace everything. It's not a forklift upgrade for our customers. You can continue benefiting from your existing Catless 9000 deployments and add to the power with the Catless 9000X components as well as new platforms that we are introducing. Nice, that's key. This just speaks to the software content that you guys I know you have a lot of software engineers running around and this is welcome to the 2020s folks, new world. You know, Mohammed, zero trust was kind of a buzzword before the pandemic but it's really become a mainstream topic today. We talked about the infrastructure. We know security has to be built in from the start. It can't be bolted on and zero trust is really top of mind for customers. How are the security requirements changing as a result of hybrid work and how do you make sure that as we shift to hybrid that these new security requirements are addressed? What are you doing there? Absolutely and we know as you said security is top of mind for our customers. In fact, security has been highlighted as the number one reason why a lot of customers pick Cisco and Cat9K. We have a comprehensive zero trust architecture with software defined access where we started with segmentation and expanded into endpoint classification and visibility. Now we are taking that to the next level and we are introducing Talus powered trust assessment for unmanaged endpoints to further make the workplace stronger with zero trust and software defined access. Trust analytics, it detects traffic from endpoints that are exhibiting unusual behavior by pretending to be using a MAC spoofing or probe spoofing or man the middle techniques. When trust analytics detects such anomalies it signals endpoint analytics to lower the trust score. So we have a trust score system when the trust score goes down it shows up on the dashboard. And the network admin can completely deny or limit the access to the network from these endpoints. From another security aspect that we are introducing and I touched on that briefly earlier is for non SDVAN internet only branches where we are, where services, security services might be in the cloud, right? That's a trend that we are seeing. To secure that connectivity from a lean branch to the cloud, we are introducing the IPsec capability with the Catalyst 9300X and that's built in as we just talked about. And as far as the automation is concerned for these use cases, they are, we are bringing those automation with our command center, the Cisco DNA center and we are bringing the full lifecycle of automation as well as assurance for the secure connectivity that is being provided with the Cisco DNA center. Well, a couple of takeaways there for me. I mean endpoint security has really become much more important for obvious reasons when you have remote workers. The built in IPsec just that really emphasizes that you got to have it built in from the ground up. You can't just bolt it on and the automation is key. The number one problem that CISOs face is lack of talent. So automation definitely helps with that. So, okay, Mohammed, thank you so much. Really appreciate you coming on.