All networking products, in every installation from the smallest home office to the largest cloud service, have fundamental characteristics in common: They all perform actions on network packets. They modify packets, forward packets to other pieces of equipment, collect data about packets, and sometimes block packets.

But each market has its own unique requirements, and Cisco optimizes its various products to suit. Cisco uses both in-house and 3rd party silicon to create industry leading platforms that optimally address specific functions and roles. In fact, we invest more heavily in silicon than any other network vendor in the world. Every single silicon innovation Cisco has brought to market has defined a disruptive breakthrough.

The Catalyst 9000 family is focused on the enterprise campus, for example, while the Nexus 9000 focuses on the enterprise and service provider data centers. The ASR 9000 is for the service provider core and aggregation markets. The Cisco 8000 is for the very large service provider and web scale markets. All these products, and many others, are purpose-built for their unique customers. Each offers the appropriate degree of programmability, buffering, scale, port speeds, and performance