Cisco’s new digital convergence

July 22 2022
 

Cisco has unified technologies throughout the decades to provide new value and solutions to its customers and partners. Observability is Cisco’s new convergence frontier.


Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines “convergence” as the merging of distinct technologies, industries or devices into a unified whole.

With over 23,000 active patents, Cisco has a rich heritage of unifying technologies to deliver new value to customers and partners. In 2009, for instance, Cisco converged siloed storage devices and protocols into the fabric of a Unified Computing System, reducing cost and improving scale. Today, Cisco continues to bridge technical islands and create innovative solutions.

Observability: Cisco’s new digital convergence frontier

Observability is one of the strategic pillars that define Cisco’s solution strategy and enables the delivery of quality digital experiences anywhere, every time. Last year, adding to Cisco’s all-in bet on observability, Cisco CFO Scott Herren told the investment community to measure Cisco on a new category, “Application Experience.” Cisco’s last three acquisitions, Epsagon, Replex and Opsani, added resources and features to the observability platform.

At Cisco Live, the annual technology conference in June 2022, Liz Centoni, EVP, Chief Strategy Officer & GM, Applications, unveiled to over 25,000 attendees the new cloud native observability capabilities through AppDynamics Cloud for its full-stack observability solution. She boldly stated that Cisco is all in on observability, with a vision for a standard operating model that views the entire technology stack regardless of location or scale.

AppDynamics Cloud was designed to meet cloud native environment scaling needs and complement existing AppDynamics application performance monitoring. With deep insight into the user experience, full-stack observability is a solution that adds value across the entire business with real-time insights that benefit brand loyalty and revenue.

Cisco’s full-stack observability builds a bridge for Cisco partners and customers from observing the technology to visibility into the businesses’ health. For any business transaction or application the solution sees, it can tag and create real-time dashboards. From revenue waiting in a shopping cart to the number of trades pending to the number of mortgages waiting to be underwritten to oil moving through a pipeline to the number of players in a gaming experience, whatever a business cares about, if information is in the application, full-stack observability can correlate the technology performance within the context of the business result.

Observability across-the-stacks

Cisco continues to make advancements to achieve its vision for a unified operating model with integrations in every major architecture. With devices across enterprise networking, collaboration, data center and security intelligently reporting in, Cisco can provide insights through in-depth performance analysis on issues like real-time security threats and traffic latency across the entire application stack.

Full-stack observability combines network, compute, storage, security, cloud and application insights and adds business context. Full-stack observability is the new frontier for high-value partner practices and technologists that can elevate and translate beyond the “this server is broken” to “here is what is impacting the business in this way.” Already, some full-stack observability customers see a 40% reduction in severity 1 issues, with some boasting 90%.

This convergence creates new capabilities where the health of technology is viewed in business context. For example, if there is a delay in trading, it impacts revenue. If there is a slow server in a gaming experience, it causes users to switch games. If there is a mobile application delivering a poor experience on a specific page or interaction because of a confusing interface, the abandoned page or interaction may be identified. These are tangible and measurable business impacts. Full-stack observability allows customers and partners to observe beyond the technology performance to offer insights into business performance, pinpointing issues in real-time.

Today, most network, security, infrastructure, storage, application, cloud and business operations teams are generally siloed with separate niche tools that often don’t easily share information. Now, Cisco and its rich ecosystem of partners are all in on delivering the next era of convergence full-stack observability makes possible.

Charlie DeMarco is a technical business leader with over 20 years of experience in systems engineering, worldwide sales, service, customer success, business development, operations and marketing in enterprise, commercial and public sector verticals. His focus on creating a culture of shared success with partners, customers and teams is the cornerstone of his work. Charlie combines extensive experience in full-stack observability, cloud, mobility, networking, security and data center operations with a history of exceptional results, building thriving teams, delighting customers, strategic planning and sales execution.

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