Partners react to Cisco's as-a-service launch
Softcat, Logicalis and others give their verdict on all on the announcements from Cisco Live
Cisco Live took place digitally this week drawing in more than 90,00 customers and partners from some 200 countries globally.
This year's theme was "Turn IT Up" - a nod to how businesses have accelerated their adoption of technology as a result of the Covid pandemic.
The key development from this year's Cisco Live was the announcement of Cisco Plus which will make its IT infrastructure products including networking, security, compute, storage and applications available through an as-a-service model.
Cisco Plus will be available in the UK from mid-2021, Cisco claims.
Partners cheered the launch of Cisco Plus, describing it as a major step forward in being able to provide IT as-a-service.
CTO at Conscia Netherlands, one of Cisco's top partners in Europe, said that Consica already provides IT as-a-srervice including managed services and its own cloud offering. But with Cisco and other vendors not having their own answer to as-a-service, it was difficult for Conscia to provide a complete offering.
"The arrival of Cisco Plus fundamentally changes this. With Cisco Plus, we can complete the IaaS solution that we offer our customers. Cisco Plus offers a financial model and a comprehensive set of software technologies that enable a true IaaS delivery portal. Cisco Plus provides easy, efficient ways to deliver an as-a-service-based solution based on Cisco's broad portfolio of platforms and technologies."
Softcat's alliances and marketing director, James Baker, described Cisco Plus as a "powerful statement to the market".
"We are seeing an increased appetite from our customers looking for simplified flexible procurement and the option to consume as-a-service. We know this delivers significant speed of delivery to our customers helping them achieve their business outcomes more effectively and so to see a vendor like Cisco embrace this is such a powerful statement to the market."
Baker added that the announcements around Cisco's SASE offering will act as a "real differentiator".
"Rapidly unlocking new features within their SASE proposition and delivering complete protection from endpoint to the cloud will allow our customers to manage the continual complexity of hybrid working. Combining this with the option of a subscription-based offer really does strengthen Cisco's route to market," he said.
Partners were particularly excited by Cisco's observability announcements. Cisco announced that it would integrate its network visibility acquisition - ThousandEyes - with its AppDynamics offering and offered a more complete vision of its application observability solutions.
Logicalis' practice director for digital infrastructure, Rob Price, added said the most exciting news from Cisco Live was around Cisco's observability portfolio.
"For me, the most exciting announcement, and something I fully expect Logicalis to get behind very, very aggressively is this whole business observability piece. Because it is the application that is the business, not the switches or the access points of the routers."
"The application is the business, and this is increasingly true for our customers. Our customers are often 100 per cent reliant on their applications. If you're a Deliveroo or an Uber then your only interface with your customer is the application. That being the case, it has to work properly. Even more conventional businesses, like a bank for example, is doing more business via their mobile apps than via their branhes, so even i that case the application is the business."
Baker said the observability announcements will open up more software adoption conversations with Softcat customers.
"The integration of ThousandEyes and AppDynamics into the Cisco's switching platform will enable us to widen our software adoption conversations into more line of business engagements, enable positive service delivery outcomes and provide a level of actionable insight so our customers can ensure the optimal digital experience for their employees or end users."
Price add that, while there were no "earth-shattering" announcements in this year's Cisco Live, he's encouraged by what he saw from Cisco during the conference.
"The Cisco direction of travel is the right one in the market. Covid has taken 10 years of the transformation of work and compressed it into 12 months. The idea is that work is something you do, not somewhere you go and Cisco has a whole bunch of technologies to support that."
Baker said: "Cisco Live gives us a window into what a future with Cisco will look like in 2021 and beyond. Their ongoing focus on leading the way in how customers connect, secure and automate the constant changing digital world will be integral to our combined success and is definitely aligned to our business model and approach."
Tony Lock, analyst from Freeform Dynamics, added that the announcements during Cisco Live reflect how Cisco is trying to adapt to how their customers are moving to adopt new ways of working post-pandemic.
"They're trying to put together an ecosystem of solutions that all support different ways of working. That's the big thing," he said.
"The way they're developing their solution stack is certainly something that will be very interesting to many organisations. It's taking a lot of individual elements they had together and gluing them all into much more of a whole, so they can begin to wrap some comprehensive policies around them."
Lock said that he noticed Cisco talk up opportunities to grow among smaller organisations with its solutions geared towards remote working.
He said that a key question mark hanging over Cisco is whether it can motivate its channel partners to go after that small business segment on its behalf.
"I think the big thing we need to see now is how they're going to do it and what tools they're going to put into the hands of their channel partners to take that to market," he said.
"The proof in the pudding is going to be in the next 12 months; are the channel really ready to go for this?"