Thoughts From Cisco Live

This week at CiscoLive, we witnessed the end of an era with John Chambers giving his last keynote and Chuck Robbins beginning a new era at Cisco with the renewal as well as change in creating a new environment that the two had worked on for 10 months prior to the announcement of the new CEO. In this transition it is critical to take a look at the user experience and the value that they'll derive from the new Cisco solutions. Cisco was built for scale but not for simplicity so it starts with how the world today moves to simplification due to fact Cisco was not built for this simple user experience that customers are gaining from using public clouds. Simplification it's moving to operational efficiency and means of automation and orchestration within the complex networks that Cisco manages. The network needs the mold into the cloud and the cloud needs to be an enabler and not a destination. In working with companies like Red Hat and the OpenStack, open source project the management of the network and its very existence in the cloud world comes from the APIs and the layers of cloud that deals with the application. Cisco clearly recognizes that it must partner and make the network part of the bigger ecosystem than just being part and parcel of a closed network environment. In the keynote Chuck was very clear that partnering and working with an open ecosystem is central to everything that Cisco will do in the future.

The business model has to change. Thinking of billions of smartphones and 10 billion sensors. Digitization changes everything especially with all these platforms. Every industry will be disrupted such as Uber disrupted taxi industry, Amazon disrupted the big store industry and Airbnb disrupted hotels. If you look across all industries what do they have in common they use the Internet and Cloud infrastructures to build the platform. The platform idea is extremely important. Cisco does not want to just become part of the utility. The business model has to be different; Cisco has to innovate within its model. The UCS model was extremely down played.

Their goal is taking complexity away and exposing the services. If they do not there will be a race the bottom. It needs to be bigger and not a minor incremental change. Change is now part of their new business model. The first major change to their business model is going Open. Going from a box provider to software to be a more effective. Go from a transaction to a continuous engagement. There are companies redefining everything that doing. An example was given of Deutsche Telekom  Bruno Jacobfeuerbon, releasing Cloud VPN with security. It has the intrusion detection with flexible selection of speed. It is called CloudVPN, he uses self-service and security and traffic routing is managed by the context of the application. They are orchestrating the networking to enable customer requirements. NFV and SDN are at the core. Cisco and DT was able to put this offering up in three months. Why they were facing more traffic. You can either be a productivity vendor or a bandwidth provider. The business model had to change to a scalable model. This application has been known for optimizing the network, dealing with the security and most of all making a flexible has become symbiotic with its partners. This is a clear divergence from where Cisco was a year ago. In doing this it will monetize the efforts that Cisco is putting through the new enablement's that was announced during the week such as software defined networking and every one of the Nexus switches and its location transparency and security that was brought to them from some of the acquisitions.

This is applicable to both the consumer and the enterprise customers. Creating this new environment enables the digitalization of the Enterprises into the customer environment. It is very clear that Cisco is looking at ubiquitous access and is build a lineup of products to make it possible. The network should be transparent and not something that an end-user should worry about in the clouds should be transparent and interoperable. It was very clear that the 10 months of strategy has put content and applications at the core of Cisco's efforts. it is very clear why the Red Hat alliance was so critical and so is the movement to platforms that enables the bimodal development of applications to enable the new user experience. All applications need to be location aware and network aware and should be again transparent to the application. Cisco was very clear that sees it as the network is the enabler and their other partners will help create the ecosystem to make the next generation of applications relevant to the end-user.

Going from a server-based application to a self-service application as simple as a mobile application is the key heart of the architecture. This is fundamental to Cisco moving with speed to create the value in the marketplace. They finally understood that they had to move from a silo-based services structure to a multiuser multitenant environment. So the architecture needs to be built for simplicity and speed. In the past these were orthogonal to one another. So in the last 10 months Cisco's been very busy innovating and redesigning their organization to meet these needs. Trimming significant leadership and developers who could not conform to the new model.

They presented an architecture that was layered infrastructure platform and services. The key that they did in this round of announcements was that they went open, elastic and extensible in their new products that they announced this week such as an extension to ACI. It was the first time that Cisco recognized that must be in a multivendor environment that needs to be able to manage a heterogeneous environment. So they announced this week as series of security products that was extended around the network for intrusion detection, policy management and orchestration. Cisco FirePower 9300 which is an integrated carrier class multitenant for open service provider networks as well as the private cloud. ACI is an SDN platform will be a security a competitive advantage.

This past year Cisco has been putting out the building blocks, and these were put together in something they call application-engineered value this enables applications to move an incredible speeds because the building blocks were put inside the network. The application engineer value was engineered to remove the state that was put into the network with source routing techniques to any component on the network whether it is Cisco or any other switch. The other breakthroughs that they showed during the week were around telemetry, which deals with web spaces. They also implemented net prom APIs that was implemented across all layers of Cisco's infrastructure. They also announced that their building around open stack many of the infrastructures that are required to be able to go end to end with network centricity. The announced a new product the network service orchestrator which allows customer facing orchestration all with infrastructure. They announced a series of SDN announcements that moves their SDN capabilities from the Nexus 2K to the Nexus 9K and every platform in between. Working with partners makes the network extensible to all services and thus a service-based platform, which used to be called the cloud. So these are all the building blocks that Cisco's been working on over the last 10 months and putting them together. Bringing together into network IT is clearly their new strategy. They've integrated it together with real-time information.

This leads us to Cisco Intercloud, which makes it possible for companies to seamlessly move workloads between different cloud providers. Cisco is creating an environment where you could shift that workload easily from any vendor to any vendor like AWS. See their diagram below:

They also announced partnerships: The first wave of new Cisco Intercloud Marketplace application developers and service partners include: ActiveState, Apprenda, Basho, Chef, Citrix, CliQr, Cloud Enabled, CloudBerry Lab, Cloudera, Cloudify, CloudLink, Couchbase, CTERA, Datadog, Davra Networks, desktopsites, Druva, Egnyte, ElasticBox, F5 Networks, Hortonworks, Informatica, MapR, MongoDB, Moonwalk, Nirmata, Panzura, Pegasystems, Platfora, Sanovi, ScaleArc, Skytree, StoAmigo, Talisen Technologies and Zenoss. Security extends its zone-based firewall services to support Microsoft Azure. Cisco Intercloud Fabric Firewall solves the problem of securing traffic between virtual machines without redirecting this traffic to the edge firewall for lookup by including a zone-based firewall, the Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG).

Using OpenStack KVM, VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V. A business' ability to choose the right cloud for the right workload should not be limited by the underlying infrastructure. Business requirements do not care which hypervisor a public cloud uses. Operational models are better served if all public clouds are treated the same.

This is not your Cisco of last year