Cisco Live is always one of my favorite weeks, and this year did not disappoint. As someone who has been with Cisco for over two decades, this event was especially significant for me, as it marked my first Cisco Live US leading Cisco AppDynamics and Full-Stack Observability.
Cisco Full-Stack Observability
I heard over and over again throughout the week how the complexity of our environments and tooling is increasing, and Cisco’s innovations are here to help simplify the digital world. Full-stack observability has been a focal point for Cisco over the past year — and the 60+ sessions, demos and talks dedicated to full-stack observability at this year’s event underscored Cisco’s commitment to empowering businesses with holistic observability capabilities.
The Cisco Observability Platform was officially launched at Cisco Live. This comprehensive observability solution enables organizations break down silos and reduce friction among ops teams, helping them gain deep insights into their complex environments and facilitate proactive monitoring, troubleshooting and optimization.
This event was also the perfect opportunity to share more about our end-to-end customer digital experience monitoring capabilities. The newly available bi-directional integration of Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes will drive powerful customer digital experience monitoring. And, with Cisco’s intent to acquire Smartlook, we’ll be able to further strengthen the offering with Smartlook’s Real User Monitoring, which utilizes session recordings with event-based analytics.
The Full-Stack Observability message was received very well by all the customers we spoke to. Over the course of the week, my leadership team and I had numerous customer meetings, booth conversations and one very fun customer appreciation party! The theme throughout all the conversations was clear – Cisco Full-Stack Observability is a differentiator.
And speaking of customers, congratulations to Cisco AppDynamics customers, the State of Indiana and Carhartt, for receiving Cisco Global Customer Advocate Awards. In addition to the State of Indiana and Carhartt, Chevron, U.S. Bank, T-Mobile and Royal Caribbean – as well as some valued partners, like NTT and CloudFabrix – participated in events alongside us throughout Cisco Live.
Cisco Live Trends — and where you’ll find them in Full-Stack Observability
After spending the week attending sessions, talking to customers and exploring the show floor, there were a few trends that stood out.
One of the prominent trends that emerged was the increasing focus on security, with the recognition of the need for a comprehensive, end-to-end approach that includes observability. With the evolving threat landscape, organizations are expected to spend $200 billion on data security and risk management products this year. This is why it came as no surprise that our Business Risk Observability solution, which is an industry-first evolution in the application security capabilities of Cisco Full-Stack Observability, drew a lot of attention at this year’s event. Business Risk Observability allows teams to generate an application-based business risk score to help mitigate vulnerabilities in applications or services that have a high likelihood of exploitation.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) was another major theme and was integrated into many new innovations announced at Cisco Live. For example, AI is leveraged in the Cost Insights module on the Cisco Observability Platform, which provides visibility and insights into application-level costs alongside performance metrics, allowing organizations to identify and eliminate unnecessary costs.
Not just a buzzword – sustainability showed up throughout the event in various ways, from elimination of waste and single-use plastics to new innovations, like Kanari’s Capacity Planner and Forecaster solution, which is one of the first partner-built solutions on the Cisco Observability Platform. This solution helps businesses gain visibility into capacity planning, forecasted events and risk factors, enabling sustainable and resilient resource management.
Groundbreaking innovations fueling digital transformation
The world is becoming increasingly complex, but the cutting-edge innovations and thought leadership showcased throughout Cisco Live will continue to help drive the world forward. From security and AI to sustainability and transformative partnerships, the conference offered a glimpse into the future of technology. I’m looking forward to seeing how insights gained at Cisco Live will help shape the future of technology and fuel the ongoing digital transformation journey for organizations worldwide. If you missed it, you can read the press release of announcements and rewatch on-demand sessions, including my Innovation Talk, Elevating and Securing Digital Experiences for Your Business, on ciscolive.com.
Ronak Desai is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco AppDynamics and Full-Stack Observability and is responsible for leading the overall AppDynamics strategy and operations and driving operational efficiency and delivery, as well as helping Cisco in achieving its vision for Full-Stack Observability.
Prior to joining AppDynamics, Ronak was SVP of Cisco’s Cloud Networking Engineering organization, where he spearheaded major strategy and technical shifts across Cisco’s networking portfolio of products and services, including ACI to ACI Anywhere, 400G offerings, Cloud APIC, Nexus Dashboard and more. Ronak has held additional engineering leadership roles at Insieme Networks — which was acquired by Cisco in December of 2013 — where he was responsible for the development and architecture for the ACI controller and Nexus 9000, Hybrid cloud solutions. He helped drive the development of NX-OS, Nexus 7000, MDS9000 and SAN-OS (the pre-cursor to NX-OS).
Ronak lives in Oakland, California, and enjoys hiking and mountain biking. He holds 50 patents, many of which are currently embedded in the solutions Cisco provides to address the dynamic needs of worldwide customers and technology partners every day.
