Forbes Column

June 8, 2023
Cisco Drives Towards IT Simplicity

By Bob O'Donnell

Trying to make sense of all the announcements that came out of this year’s Cisco Live event is no easy task. It is, after all, a highly technical conference that’s primarily focused on bringing important new product updates and strategic company messages to its IT and networking professional customers.

Thankfully, there is a consistent theme that weaves throughout press releases ranging from an extensible full stack observability (FSO) platform to generative AI-enabled Webex enhancements and much more. Ironically, the theme is simplicity.

Like others in the world of enterprise IT hardware, software and services, Cisco has recognized how extraordinarily complex it is to create and manage modern applications and the infrastructure necessary to support them. Importantly, it’s now working to fix that problem.

Sprinkled throughout the company’s latest product offerings are tangible efforts at simplification. From a conceptual, visual and architectural perspective, Cisco is working to make setting up, managing, and troubleshooting applications and infrastructure easier. Most importantly, the company’s latest efforts are designed to proactively ensure that hybrid multi-cloud (or even on-premises) applications run as simply and consistently as possible.

Of course, translating theory and vision into reality isn’t always easy, but Cisco made important progress towards these multi-year goals at this year’s show. The new Cisco Networking Cloud vision, for example, starts to bring together several of the company’s previously independent management offerings into a single, consistent framework and user interface that also supports single sign-on. The idea is to not only create a uniform look and experience for its various management tools, but also to make it easier for IT and networking professionals to move among several tasks, such as network traffic monitoring and automating operations.

The simplicity theme was also apparent in the forthcoming Cisco Secure Access solution, which is a zero-trust network access (ZTNA)-based service designed to automatically create the most secure connection between various types of applications and their sources. As the company pointed out, depending on where a given client device is located and what type of application the end user wants to run, a different type of security solution may be required. Some may require a VPN, for example, while others might need a secure web gateway, cloud access security broker (CASB), or something else. End users can’t possibly remember all these choices, however, so the new Cisco solution automatically makes the right choice in a completely transparent and behind-the-scenes way, ensuring the best and most secure connection.

The company took another step towards simpler (and better) application performance with the latest iteration of its Customer Digital Experience Monitoring (CDEM) solution. Now incorporating the company’s Thousand Eyes network and application monitoring tools, the CDEM solution can not only troubleshoot performance-related issues if problems come up when running certain applications, it can also proactively adjust things like network routes to ensure the best quality experience. Again, the end user doesn’t see anything, but the Cisco software does its magic in the background to ensure that they have a consistent, high-quality application experience.

What’s interesting about the CDEM solution is that it’s based on an open standard set of data measurements known as MELT (Metrics, Events, Logs and Traces), which means that companies can choose to mix and match other compatible solutions that also support MELT. In Cisco’s case, they’re using the MELT data not only for observability but security monitoring as well, allowing a single data set to be used for multiple purposes. It’s an interesting example of how Cisco is leveraging its new tools and architectures to make often complicated IT processes much easier.

The Customer Digital Experience Monitoring solution is just part of the newly extensible Full Stack Observability platform, which the company announced is now generally available. The platform leverages Cisco’s App Dynamics tool to gather network telemetry data both from the client device and backend servers and feeds the information to Thousand Eyes, where insights can be made that allow companies to do things like set KPIs (key performance indicators) for application performance and much more. The observability platform is also extensible, allowing both Cisco and third parties to create industry or application-specific plugin-like extensions. It’s a great example of how Cisco is tying together a number of its technologies into more powerful, more insightful, and ultimately, more useful applications.

On the collaboration side of things, Cisco unveiled several generative AI-powered features in its Webex platform that will make it much easier to stay up-to-date with meetings or get caught up if you’re a few minutes late to a video conference. Appropriately called “Catch Me Up,” the latter feature can give you a quick text summary of what’s happened and been said so far. To get a quick refresher on previous meetings that you have either have been a part of or weren’t able to attend, the new Webex will soon be able to automatically generate intelligent summaries that not only cover what was discussed, but the action items coming out of the meetings as well. Frankly, it’s an even better way of staying on top of things than the speedy playback features (1.5x/2x) that Cisco previously introduced.

Cisco plans to use similar generative AI-based summarization capabilities in a future version of its Webex Contact Center solution. The new feature will provide a quick summary of a call to a new agent who may take over the inquiry in the event the call gets disconnected. It also enables an easy way to send a summary to the customer who made the initial inquiry. In addition, by integrating a company’s support materials into the AI model powering these features, you can make all the support center reps as informed and helpful as the most experienced experts in the group. I’m convinced that these kinds of call center features could end up being one of the first killer applications for generative AI in the enterprise so great to see Cisco making these efforts.

Cisco introduced a huge range of additional new products and feature enhancements at this year’s event that I just don’t have the space to cover here. But as the aforementioned examples illustrate, the company is continuing to make progress on the challenging task of making today’s professional IT and networking tools easier to use and more useful.

Disclosure: TECHnalysis Research is a tech industry market research and consulting firm and, like all companies in that field, works with many technology vendors as clients, some of whom may be listed in this article.

Here’s a link to the original column: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobodonnell/2023/06/08/cisco-drives-towards-it-simplicity/

Forbes columnist Bob O'Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, a market research and consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community.