Cisco Plus: Accelerating Your Business Outcomes with As-a-service

If the last year has taught us anything, it is that every organization must be aligned to move with speed, agility, and scale to achieve required outcomes. You need the flexibility to quickly adapt to changing priorities, both expected and unexpected.

With the increase in remote workers, growth in IoT, data privacy and sovereignty challenges, and the rise in cyber threats, traditional networking and security has become even more complex. IT teams cannot continue working in silos and reacting in parallel to the same problems. More and more, our customers are asking Cisco to help tame the complexity, allowing them to focus on their core business objectives rather than IT.

Introducing Cisco Plus – Simple, Predictable, Intelligent

I am pleased to announce Cisco Plus, our new brand for cross-architecture solutions designed to be delivered as-a-service. Cisco Plus will provide unified subscriptions that are simple to use, deliver predictable outcomes, and provide intelligence from AI-driven insights and automation to drive performance and cost optimization.

We are embarking on an exciting transformation in IT and our team at Cisco is energized to know, as leaders in networking and security, that we can help our customers successfully blaze the network-as-a-service trail. To do so, Cisco is transforming across multiple fronts:

• Platform innovation: Our industry leading hardware, software, and services will continue to evolve with more common services across our technologies and greater extensibility so we can deliver more, better, and faster as-a-service solutions.
• Offer innovation: Our systems will allow us to rapidly convert technology components to complete unified services with the right financing models, giving our customers more choice on how to consume and use.
• Experience innovation: Our customer engagement model will be simplified and the entire way we go to market is being enhanced to bring our customers a completely new buying and operational experience with powerful dashboards that support the end-to-end lifecycle experience at our customers’ fingertips.

Why Plus? Plus means more – more speed, more scale, more agility, more value, more choice. Everything you expect from Cisco, PLUS.

Although you can continue to buy products and solutions as you do today, Cisco Plus offers more choices on how you consume technology. You can choose a delivery model tailored to your business. For example, Cisco Plus offers give you the flexibility to pay based on usage and can scale up and down as your needs change.

New Offer: Cisco Plus Hybrid Cloud

Cisco Plus Hybrid Cloud is our first offer under the Cisco Plus brand that delivers data center networking, compute, and storage technologies in a flexible consumption model. This offer demonstrates how we are simplifying the buying and operational experience. The flexible consumption model allows customers to pay as they use, or to pay as they grow.

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Journey to Network-as-a-Service

According to IDC, NaaS is “an emerging procurement model to consume network infrastructure via a flexible operating expense (OpEx) subscription inclusive of hardware, software, management tools, licenses, and lifecycle services.” Cisco views consumption an essential ingredient for as-a-service, but at Cisco, we are further differentiating our offers by shifting our focus from products to outcomes and experience that drive productivity, customer satisfaction, cost savings, and revenue acceleration.

Our vision for Cisco Plus NaaS solutions is to combine our best-in-class networking, security, and observability capabilities into single unified subscription services that are easy to consume and use, and more importantly, deliver an unparalleled experience. On our journey to NaaS, we will first focus on Cisco’s Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture, and will converge networking and security in the cloud with end-to-end observability from the user all the way to the application, over any cloud and any network. All core components of our SASE architecture are available in a single subscription service, which will be orderable at the end of 2021, and will provide the flexibility to easily transition to a unified subscription service in the future.

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Future Cisco Plus offers will provide:

• Seamless and secure onramps to applications and cloud providers
• Full stack observability from the infrastructure to the application
• Unified policy to ensure the right users have access to the right applications
• Security integrated across everything, not bolted on as another point solution
• IT optimization based on AI-driven insights to realize greater business benefit and improved ROI
• Flexible delivery models, including usage-based, pay per use or pay as you grow options
• Complete cloud-delivered solutions and management to solve the most challenging problems enterprises face today
• Integrated hardware, software, and services with API extensibility that can be onboarded simply
• Partners layering additional value and delivering their services faster

As Cisco transforms itself to delivering offers as-a-service, we will continue to operate with a partner-led motion. Partners are core to our strategy of providing global reach and meeting our customers’ unique objectives.

Putting Customers First

I hope you are as excited as I am about our journey to network-as-a-service. We are relentlessly focused on simplifying IT, providing greater choice and flexibility, and delivering a world-class experience for our customers.

Thank you for your trust in Cisco as we proceed together on this journey to cloud-native, flexible, and agile as-a-service offers that provide you unparalleled value.

Be sure to check out these sites for additional information:

cisco.com/go/sase

cisco.com/go/ciscoplus