Highlights:

  • The new products aim to simplify IT management and operations.
  • Cisco is advancing its networking platforms to guarantee customers can logically and securely transition toward cloud-based operating models.

Cisco Systems, which is moving deeper into developing machine learning and analytics to add predictive capabilities to its networking management platform, recently announced new cloud management networking and unified tech capabilities. The new capabilities offer a unified experience across the Cisco Meraki, Cisco Catalyst and Cisco Nexus portfolios. The California-based company also unveiled a new ThousandEyes WAN Insights product designed to forecast and optimize WAN performance proactively.

Earlier in 2022, Cisco introduced Cisco Predictive Networks, an initiative to bring predictive capabilities across the company’s portfolio of products and offerings, including Meraki, Catalyst and Nexus. Cisco Predictive Networks is designed to improve reliability and performance by predicting application and network issues before they occur – problems that include security breaches and hardware and software bottlenecks.

Cisco is also looking to address several challenges, including higher than ever user expectations, overwhelmingly complex IT environments, and a growing number of disparate connections businesses rely on.

The company said, “This has resulted in a network and overall IT experience that is more fragmented, less secure and increasingly difficult to scale.”

Cisco added that due to the unpredictable nature of the present business environment, organizations have to depend on digital experiences to increase workforce productivity and ensure that they exceed expectations for customers and partners. According to the firm, unified systems that bridge the gap between technologies, locations, teams and devices of an organization will help IT teams build a business with better productivity, agility and resiliency.

“Our customers choose to run their businesses on Cisco technology because we sit at the intersection of networking, security and cloud,” said Todd Nightingale, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco enterprise networking and cloud, in a statement. “We believe the network is the foundation for the modern enterprise and must deliver agility through simplicity.”

The future is cloud managed

Cisco is advancing its networking platforms to allow customers to logically and securely transition toward cloud-based operating models.

Cisco acquired ThousandEyes in August 2020, during the first major upswing of the COVID-19 pandemic. The internet and cloud intelligence platform of ThousandEyes expands administrative visibility into the digital delivery of applications and services over the internet and cloud. It helps organizations visualize any network, collaborates and solves problems with service providers and surfaces actionable insights.

Cloud Management for Cisco Catalyst has been developed to allow customers to keep track of select Catalyst switches and manage select Catalyst wireless devices via the Meraki dashboard. With this, it aims to offer greater visibility and flexibility to the customer experience.

Cisco Nexus Cloud is a cloud-managed platform delivered as a service whose goal is to offer a convenient way to deploy, manage and operate cloud networking. Nexus Cloud is supported by Cisco Intersight and is designed to give more power to the customers to manage across public cloud, private cloud and edge computing environments.

Cisco Nexus Cloud will most likely be available in the fall of 2022.

Mohit Lad, co-founder, and GM of Cisco ThousandEyes, recently wrote in a blog post, “The world has truly changed during the pandemic, and digital transformation has accelerated for most companies. We are now supporting employees in offices and homes, collaborating using applications hosted in the cloud and outside IT environments. We do this while continuing to help the business operate at the same level or better than pre-pandemic. We are now living in a different world compared to two years ago, so we challenged ourselves to find new ways to empower our customers to thrive in this new reality.”

A concept for predictive networks

According to Cisco, superior digital experiences are the most important factor now.

“Poor customer or employee experiences leave lasting and damaging impressions,” Cisco said. “IT teams need access to offerings that will allow them to shift away from reacting to networking issues and instead be proactive to prevent the issues impacting their business.”

ThousandEyes WAN Insights is Cisco’s first step toward delivering on its predictive networks vision. The company aims to empower enterprise IT to shift from reactive to preventative-based networking, assurance of application experience and improve operational efficiency.

Cisco announced that ThousandEyes WAN Insights would soon be available to SD-WAN customers.