If you were in the railroad industry, would you be more interested in the business of laying the tracks or delivering the freight? One element is discrete and transactional (how many new rail lines do you really need?); the other represents ongoing value. A new management team at Cisco decided to go all-in on services, which by definition meant subscriptions. But how do you sell routers and switches on a subscription basis? By focusing on the data inside all that hardware—the freight, not the tracks. Cisco’s latest set of Catalyst hardware comes embedded with machine learning and an analytics
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