When it comes to telecoms, you’d have to search long and hard to find someone that hadn’t heard of Cisco. Despite this, there are several Cisco competitors playing in the same space, and in some cases outperforming them. So if you’re considering moving your existing Cisco network to another platform or you need an alternative to them for your new network, here are some of the competitors that are giving Cisco a run for their money.
Cisco continues to operate in 5 key technology areas including networking, security, collaboration, data centre and internet of things (IOT). In each of these areas, we’ve chosen some competitors that offer an alternative to the Cisco solution and consider which of them is a worthy competitor. We’ve then chosen our top competitor that Cisco can’t afford to ignore.
Topics covered
Who is Cisco?
Before we find out who the main competitors for Cisco are, let’s take a brief look at Cisco and how they’ve become a giant in the telecoms sector.
Started in San José, California in 1984, Cisco Systems was founded by two computer scientists from Stanford University, Sandy Lerner and her husband Leonard Bosack. Cisco was one of the first companies to market and successfully sell protocol-based routers, which remains a core part of their business to this day as they continue to develop and produce routers and switches alongside other network security solutions. Cisco developed its own operating system, Cisco OS which is now the core operating system for all Cisco routers.
Since its creation, Cisco has continued to grow and acquired several smaller companies along the way, which in turn meant that by 2021 they were ranked as one of the top 20 technology companies in the world. In 2022 their turnover was $51.5 billion (US) with a profit of over $11 billion (US).
Cisco has over 80,000 employees worldwide. 15,000 of these are based at their San Jose headquarters, an enormous campus situated in the San Francisco bay area. It is from this city that Cisco takes its name, with its logo being derived from the arches of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Cisco competitors for networking solutions
Networking is big business for Cisco, after all, they made their name with routers, switches and other types of networking equipment. Routers such as their 8000 series, are ideal candidates for the backbone of any critical network due to the high performance offered by the Cisco Silicon One ASICs.
Juniper Networks, Inc.
Juniper, specialise in routing, switches and general IT networking solutions. They offer several key products which directly challenge Cisco’s equivalent products, and have been doing so for some time. A prime example of this is the Juniper M Series of routers which launched in 1998 with the Juniper M40 backbone router. Due to several technological advances made by Juniper, such as decoupling the functions completed by the control plane and forwarding plane, this product line was able to perform at speeds considerably faster than many competitors’ equivalent router, including Cisco’s 12000.
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
Chinese-based tech company Huawei is better known to many as providing solutions for the home communications market with their range of mobile phones. They also offer a full networking solution for Enterprise level businesses, including WLAN’s, routers and switches. Their network solutions are utilised in some of the biggest telecoms providers in the UK including Three, Vodafone and EE. Some businesses may shy away from Huawei products because they are owned and operated from China and the associated perceived security threats. This factor could mean Huawei may struggle to steal market share from Cisco.
Dell Technologies
Dell has a range of networking products that are perfectly suited to creating high-performance edge, core or cloud networks. They offer several multi-chassis fabric architecture solutions that can scale with the specific needs of the business. Their solutions are easy to deploy and manage and are rooted in open standards using its SONiC, VMware, and third-party application development efforts.
Overall Cisco competitor for networking solutions: Juniper Networks, Inc.
With an excellent selection of networking hardware that directly competes with similar products offered by Cisco, combined with their own proprietary software called JunoOS, Juniper is able to offer a full end-to-end network solution that’s comparable to the ones provided by Cisco.
Cisco competitors for security
Security forms a core part of Cisco’s offering, they are generally well-regarded in this sector for their versatile security options. Their Cisco Secure Endpoint product is a fully encompassing, single-agent cloud-managed security solution that offers full detection, protection and response covering to protect all endpoints. Cisco is rated as a Visionary in the Gartner 2022 Magic Quadrant for Endpoint protection, but the competitors we’ve chosen also get a mention, and in some cases score higher.
CrowdStrike
Rated as a Leader, is CrowdStrike. With the CloudStrike Falcon platform, operators can get a wide variety of endpoint security features including file integrity monitoring, cloud security and identity protection. It also allows operators to easily manage firewall policies by using a centralised firewall management system and machine learning to make the whole process flexible and easy to use. In 2021 they purchased a SIEM service provider called Humio, using their tech will allow CrowdStrike to build XDR integrations into the Falcon platform.
Palo Alto Networks
Another big player that often appears alongside Cisco is Palo Alto Networks. Their core business focuses on cyber security and they do it very well. Unlike CrowdStrike, Palo Alto already have excellent XDR capabilities. Their security offering is incredibly broad, going all the way from Cloud Security Services, next-gen firewalls and endpoint security.
Microsoft Defender
Microsoft were one of the first companies to start building solutions in the XDR category. This gave them a head start over other competitors and allowed them to perfect many integrations between the Defender security platform and other Microsoft products. Microsoft has also started developing its Defender platform so it can be used on MoS and Linux operating systems, which could give them an edge over other competitors.
Overall Cisco competitor for security: CrowdStrike
CrowdStrike is the leader of the pack here, due to its market-leading innovation. Although still relatively young compared to some other tech companies mentioned in this list, they’re already creating some industry-leading security solutions. The acquisition of Humio also gives them excellent potential to scale for XDR.
Cisco competitors for collaboration tools
A core area of focus for Cisco is collaboration. In 2007 they purchased web/video conferencing company Webex to allow them to develop a purpose-built solution for this sector. Since then, Webex has evolved into the Webex Suite which allows users a range of connectivity options including calling, meetings, messaging, whiteboarding and webinars amongst others.
Google Workspace
The tech giant’s own collaboration suite has seen many iterations since its initial launch as ‘Gmail for your Domain’, in 2006. It offers email, messaging services, virtual meeting rooms and a basic workflow/task management tool. Add to this a Microsoft Office alternative in the form of Google Sheets and Google Docs, and you’ve got a well-rounded and easy-to-use platform, which is reasonably priced and scalable.
Microsoft 365
You’d be hard-pressed to find a business that hasn’t used Microsoft 365 at some point. Usually, this comes in the form of MS Office to use Excel, Word or Outlook. However, Microsoft 365 has a full suite of productivity management tools including OneDrive and instant messaging, amongst others. Created initially in 2010, Microsoft has expanded this software several times over the years and it now includes a whole host of features designed to make interaction with your team easier. There are several subscription levels available meaning your can tailor your package to the needs of the business.
Zoho Workplace
Perhaps not as well known as some of the other collaboration tools featured in this list, Zoho Workplace is still worth mentioning. Created in 1996, this Indian tech company has built an entire suite of online tools designed to make collaborative working easier. Featuring all the apps you would expect to see in any major collaboration tool, such as an email client, an office suite, document sharing and online meeting rooms, it offers strong competition to both Cisco Webex and Microsoft 365.
Overall Cisco competitor for collaboration: Google Workspace
With its full suite of simple and easy-to-use apps, Google Workspace is an excellent competitor for Cisco Webex. Many apps are already in common daily usage (Google Sheets and Docs for example), and tools such as Google Drive makes sharing and storing documents convenient and easy with nothing more than a Gmail address.
Cisco competitors for data centre management
This sector probably provides the largest number of direct competitors to Cisco than any other sector. If you’re a large company such as Cisco, that focuses on building routers and switches, then you’re also going to offer some sort of data centre management tool to ensure that users of their networking equipment can get the best out of their data centre. In the case of Cisco, it’s called their Nexus Dashboard.
Arista Networks, Inc.
Despite being a newer company than Cisco (they were formed in 2004), with a smaller market share, Arista still manages to provide an excellent range of data centre management and networking solutions, particularly focusing on ethernet switches. Their Arista Extensible Operating System, EOS offers automated network provisioning and monitoring as well as integration of third party apps. It should be noted that Arista doesn’t offer any routing hardware and instead utilise a software-based routing solution, which might not be suitable for every business, meaning Arista may struggle to tempt users away from Cisco.
IBM
IBM’s data centre management solution is called Turbonomic. It gives users full-stack visualisation, combined with AI-powered insights and intelligent automation to help reduce the amount of manual input required by operators. It is capable of automatically optimising resourcing levels for apps which allows dynamic scaling in real-time. The platform also generates lists of actions based on real-time network performance data. These can then either be handled individually or automated.
Juniper Networks, Inc.
Unsurprisingly Juniper Networks makes a second appearance in this list, again challenging Cisco at it what it does best. Juniper’s own data centre management platform is called Apstra. This intent-based networking software automates the design, deployment and operation of an entire network from day one. Many operations can be automated to ensure that network issues are detected and rectified quickly with minimal chance of human error.
Overall Cisco competitor for data centre management: Juniper Networks
Juniper takes the lead here because of the way it combines the Apstra DCM solution with its excellent selection of routers and switches. Their QFX Series, PTX Series, and ACX Series of switches form the ideal backbone for any data centre and offer 400G interfaces, the Junos OS, and comprehensive EVPN-VXLAN and IP fabric capabilities.
Cisco competitors – internet of things (IoT)
IoT is the concept of creating intelligent and interactive smart devices by connecting objects (or things) to each other via the cloud (the internet). Perfect examples of this are TVs, watches and even fridges, which can now be connected to the internet to make them ‘smart’. This is a space that Cisco has been heavily involved in for some time, even developing their own subsidiary cloud-based IoT platform called Cisco Jasper which eventually became Cisco’s IoT Control Centre.
Microsoft Azure IoT
Unsurprisingly Microsoft is one of the big players in this space. In September 2022, Gartner Inc. published its list of Global Industrial IoT platforms, with Microsoft Azure IoT Hub rated as a market leader. Using Microsoft’s, proprietary cloud-hosted solution, Azure IoT Hub, users are easily able to connect multiple devices linked to an IoT application. The Azure IoT Hub is then able to remotely manage and monitor these devices. It even offers cutting-edge security which allows you to generate separate access keys for each of your smart devices making them easy to control and gives this platform a competitive edge over others in the category.
Software AG
Using an intuitive and easy to use interface, Software AG’s Cumulocity IoT platform is designed to make creating an IoT set up as easy as possible. It also allows for onsite deployment should a particular business need to create an IoT setup that isn’t cloud-based. It’s capable of connecting to hundreds of SaaS applications and many different devices. Software AG’s Cumulocity IoT platform has seen considerable success in the manufacturing sector, although it has been implemented in other sectors as well.
Siemens MindSphere IoT
Again, simplicity is a key selling point for Siemens MindSphere IoT. It utilises advanced analytics and AI to create a cloud-based IoT solution that is versatile and scalable. In 2018 Siemens acquired Mendix, a low-code application development platform, the capabilities of which they use in their IoT solution. Although the majority of MindSphere IoT deployments are based in Europe, they do have some examples of international deployments.
Overall Cisco competitor for Internet of Things (IoT): Microsoft Azure IoT
Microsoft comes out top here, if only because of the amount of partners it allows collaboration with. These span across multiple industries all over the world. The platform is so flexible that many other key players, including Siemens MindSpere IoT (mentioned above), have built their own IoT platforms based on the Microsoft Azure IoT hub.
Who is the overall competitor for Cisco?
After reviewing the competitors, we’ve decided to choose one that competes with Cisco in the largest number of its core business areas. For that, there is one clear winner: Juniper Networks, Inc. Out of all the competitors, Juniper Networks, had products that rivalled those of Cisco in almost all areas. They offer excellent alternative networking and data center management solutions, they have been rated highly by Gartner for Network firewalls and overall security options, they have developed their own scalable IoT hub, and they also have a collaboration tool. Due to this, it’s obvious that Juniper Networks, Inc. proves itself to be the biggest competitor to Cisco.
Help and advice for your current network?
TXO are one of the UK’s leading suppliers of refurbished telecoms equipment. We are able to source replacement parts and service equipment for many of the manufacturers listed in this article. So whether you have an existing Cisco network that requires some attention or are thinking of moving away to one of their competitors, why not contact TXO to find out how we can help.
Contact us today to find out more.