The Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) is the highest level of professional certification that Cisco provides. CCIE was the first Cisco Certified qualification, and as such there were no other certifications that could be taken prior. The development of the associate and professional certifications was due to recognition of the fact that a CCIE is over kill for many networking personnel, and also for the vast majority of businesses who employ such people, and that certifications needed to be offered at lower levels. Despite the development of the lower certifications, Cisco has chosen not to make them formal requirements for the CCIE certification.

The CCIE what CISCO describes as its “premium networking certification" is widely regarded as having one of the toughest, most demanding exams. It includes both a written exam and a day-long lab exam. This certification is aimed at senior level networking professionals who design, build, implement, maintain, or troubleshoot complex enterprise networking infrastructures. CCIE recipients can specialize in routing and switching, communications and services, security, or voice systems and technologies.

CCIE Routing & Switching

Routing and Switching is by far the most popular track, and covers a wide range of subjects, such as: LAN, WAN, Ethernet, TCP/IP, OSPF and BGP,IPv6 and many more.

CCIE Security

The Security track concentrates on network security and covers subjects such as ASA, IDS, IOS security, security and many others.

CCIE Service Provider

The Service Provider track focuses on networking in the service provider industry. Subjects include Optical networks, DSL, WAN switching, Voice over IP, Content Networking, Broadband Cable and Metro Ethernet.

CCIE Voice

The Voice track concentrates on voice solutions for the enterprise and includes subjects such as QoS, MGCP, Call Manager (Cisco's VoIP PABX), Cisco Unity (Cisco's Unified Messaging platform), Unity Express and IP Contact Center Express.

CCIE Storage Networking

The latest addition to the CCIEcertification tracks is the CCIE Storage Networking track. As the name suggests, the Storage Networking track concentrates on storage networking topics, such as Fiber Channel, iSCSI, FCIP, Intra VSAN Routing and FICON.