The Digital Revolution: Becoming an Industry Winner in the Era of Hybrid Work

Over the last decade, digital transformation has become one of the most critical initiatives driving organizational success, often dictating industry winners and losers. Today, the stakes have never been higher: 80% of all customer interactions happen over digital channels¹ and 66% of users saying they would avoid a brand completely if their experience isn’t perfect².

When executed correctly, digital has the power to revolutionize industries through customer acquisition and engagement, operational agility and scale, and employee empowerment. The recent pandemic proved that digital tools and capabilities are indispensable to navigating global uncertainty.

Shifts in customer expectations and digital consumption are redefining organizational priorities and expectations. As a result, IT leaders are now implementing their own accelerated digital agendas, focused on powering hybrid work, reimagining their applications, transforming their infrastructure, and securing their enterprises.

Turning challenges into opportunities

As organizations continue to push digital to the forefront of their agendas and seek to deliver more technology experiences as-a-service, we at Cisco see our customers using digital transformation as an opportunity to become more agile, more secure, and more automated.

One of the greatest opportunities for digital transformation is the domain of data networking. Outdated networks are not only unreliable and expensive, but they also decrease productivity and leave organizations vulnerable to threats. The massive scale of global networks, the interdependency of globally distributed software and hardware, and the intricacy of securing these networks all contribute to the complexity of network transformation.

Another opportunity is how organizations purchase and consume technology. Traditional purchasing approaches require months of approvals across hundreds of point product SKUs; a majority of which include software licenses with finite terms. This leads to an infinite number of true-up invoices and renewal dates that increase complexity and the number of hours spent renegotiating discounts and managing entitlements.

Simplifying transformation

Cisco’s multiyear software innovation journey combined with our new Enterprise Agreement provides the simplicity, flexibility and agility needed to empower digital transformation in a cloud-first world.

Our software innovations are powering hybrid work. For instance, our secure collaboration technology enables us to connect users, devices, applications, and data, to deliver an inclusive video meeting experience that is best-in-class. It also provides the scope, scale and capabilities needed to secure those users and empower our customers to keep up with the ever-increasing number of threats.

Cisco’s networking solutions take a software-delivered approach to automation and analytics. Giving our customers unparalleled visibility across networks and applications, so they can monitor, manage, and anticipate, across multiple environments and cloud permutations at the same time.

However, great technology is not enough. In an environment that demands digital agility, innovation becomes increasingly irrelevant if it is not easy to access and consume. Cisco’s goal is to provide customers with the ability to seamlessly buy, manage and consume their software licenses.

For the first time ever, the new Cisco Enterprise Agreement is giving customers access to our entire portfolio under a single contract that can be scaled rapidly. Customers can also maximize and futureproof their investment by bundling interoperable product suites at the best price. Allowing them to deliver bottom line results faster, like a SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) solution, so they can build an agile and secure network while optimizing cost and complexity. Or a full-stack observability solution, so they can understand interactions and surface actionable insights on the entire digital experience technology stack.

Operational simplification is at the heart of our ability to ensure unmatched financial predictability. By putting all our customer’s licenses into one contract, with one renewal date, we can save customers millions.

Cisco’s True Forward makes scaling the usage of these solutions easy. Our customers do not encounter the punitive true ups that exist with other software vendors in the industry. Instead, they can overconsume and pay for overages on an annual or quarterly look-forward basis. Additionally, Cisco’s new Value Shift capabilities enable customers who under consume one technology to apply their investment to the overconsumption of another.

Accelerating agility

Digital transformation has never been more relevant, never been more critical, or strategically more important to business. As a leader, the opportunity to drive value within an organization is unprecedented: the potential global value of transformation could be as high as $100 trillion by 2025³.

Cisco is here to help leaders and organizations seize this opportunity and maximize the value of their technology. Visit Cisco.com to learn more about our software innovations and how we can help you accelerate your digital agenda in a cloud-first world.

Source

1. McKinsey, “How COVID-19 has pushed companies over the technology tipping point – and transformed business forever,” Oct 2020
2. AppDynamics, “App Attention Index,” 2019
3. World Economic Forum, “Digital Transformation of Industries Demystifying Digital and Securing $100 Trillion for Society and Industry by 2025,” Jan 2016