Chuck Robbins, chief executive officer of Cisco Technologies
| Photo Credit:
AL DRAGO
Global tech major Cisco said India has proven itself to be a viable hub for exports with the company’s manufacturing plans in the country moving ahead of schedule, said Chair and Chief Executive Officer Chuck Robbins, adding that the company is now awaiting current global trade dynamics to settle down before making long-term plans.
“If you look out over the next 5-10 years, there’s no other place on the planet where we would expect the growth that we should see here. We’ve been in India for 30 years and started manufacturing two years ago. You’ll see more of us over the next months and years,” said Robbins during a media roundtable on Wednesday.
From a supply chain strategy point of view, Robbins said any adaptation is difficult since CEOs will hesitate to invest $20-30 million until there is clarity on the tariff front.
“We’re all waiting, and we’ve been in deep communication with the White House about the uncertainty. We just need to get to clarity so we can actually respond,” said Robbins. However, from an overall investment perspective, he said the current state does not have a meaningful impact on investments for companies.
Data centre business
Data centre business is key for Cisco, which sees itself becoming a significant player in the segment in India. It is categorised into those who build it for themselves and traditional data centre builders, third party data-hosting companies, and those who adapt their models to suit the requirements of AI workloads coming along their way. Cisco has a mature practice in the first two categories, while the third is a new market where providers are only focused on AI.
“It’s a new and exploding market for us, and something we want to definitely be in and monetise. We feel really good overall about where we are today. The data centre is one of our key businesses, especially around infrastructure and building out the stacks,” said Daisy Chittilapilly, President of Cisco India & SAARC
BharatNet
When asked about BharatNet, Cisco officials said about 70 per cent of the implementation under the initiative are by the company. “The technology that we are deploying at BharatNet is also the product [NCS router] that Chuck mentioned earlier which is manufactured in India for the world. So, there is a tight alignment between the programme and also our manufacturing and emissions and what we’re doing right now.”
Cisco is also working on starting new portfolio offers such as AI defence capabilities, hybrid mesh firewall, and universal zero-trust networking. As India drives forward with the secure AI factory and inferencing, we’re going to play a very active role in the security landscape. So, you’ll see a lot of that, and India’s going to play a big part in that.
Cisco also spoke in favour of the trend towards sovereign clouds. Robbins said this shows people are moving towards private cloud workloads, with individuals saying there are certain workloads for which they will re-accelerate their private cloud, rather than just moving everything to the public cloud.
Published on July 9, 2025
