It was great to be back in person for the Cisco Live 2022 annual conference that happened in Las Vegas from June 12 to June 16, 2022. CloudFabrix is a Cisco solution partner and we had our booth #3645 on the show floor where we showcased our Robotic Data Automation Fabric (RDAF) and how it can help accelerate AIOps and Observability projects. We got a lot of interest from many enterprises, partners, and community members. More on that later, but in this blog, I just wanted to discuss Top-10 key announcements or highlights from Cisco Live 2022 conference. Disclaimer: These are my own perspectives and observations.
As CloudFabrix had a booth on the show floor and with whatever little bit of time I got during the breaks I tried to tune into the keynote, visit a few Cisco booths and talk to other Cisco experts, reviewed some content offline, and came up with this list. I focused only on Cloud, Applications, Datacenter, and Security.
Keynote
It was great to see Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins opening up with these remarks
Can I just tell you, how happy I am – that I am not standing in a studio in San Jose looking into a blank camera and hoping that someone out there is paying attention. It is great to be here. 16,000 of us back together – an amazing time
Chuck Robbins, Chairman & CEO, Cisco Systems, Inc.
There was a huge applause from the crowd and I think everybody in the room could really resonate with what Chuck was saying – given we have been going through with pandemic for the last two years.
Before we go to announcements, a common theme I found is that Cisco is embracing Cloud-Delivered and Cloud-Managed principles big time. Rightly so – this is where the industry is going, and this is what customers want! Look at the first 5 announcements/highlights and let me know if you see otherwise!
1) Meraki Cloud for Catalyst
What it is: Cloud Management for Catalyst Switches
My take:
This is a long time coming. Cloud management is the way to go! Cisco tasted the success of the cloud management mantra very early on with the Meraki acquisition, which essentially makes networking so simple to manage – that even if you have no IT or lean IT, you can completely run the show. In our office HQ, we use Meraki – and guess what, we don’t have dedicated IT, a couple of our solution and QA guys just double up as IT and fully manage our network.
Meraki Cloud makes it easy to manage Catalyst switches and should definitely help solidify Catalyst’s position even further in the industry.
2) Nexus Cloud
What it is: Cloud Management for Nexus Switches (both ACI and Traditional)
My take:
Nexus Cloud will provide day-2 operations and management on the Cloud. Another great Cloud management initiative. Nexus portfolio is huge and Nexus cloud will prove to be a great option for a lot of customers. Existing solutions like APIC and Nexus Dashboard are all still going to be there. Nexus team picked Intersight as the platform of choice to provide all the foundational capabilities, PaaS services, orchestration, monitoring, etc. instead of reinventing the wheel. Makes perfect sense!
3) AppDynamics Cloud
What it is: Application Performance Monitoring and Observability for Cloud-Native Apps
My take:
As more and more customers are developing cloud-native and microservices-based applications, AppDynamics Cloud targets those sets of customers. It appears that the current AppDynamics and AppDynamics Cloud will have separate user interfaces and the unification is going to happen over time. CloudFabrix has deep integration with AppDynamics, Intersight, ThousandEyes, and other Cisco products, along with other 3rd party products – and by efficiently correlating and enriching data from multiple domains, we can provide more contextual data for AIOps processing and data lake ingestions.
4) CX Cloud
What it is: Customer Experience, Insights, and Success delivered on Cloud
My take:
CX as an organization is the traditional Advanced Services (AS) and Technical Assistance Center (TAC) put together. CX Cloud provides customers insights around asset utilization, lifecycle events, capacity, optimization, risk mitigation, advisories, case management, etc. – across various portfolio products like Datacenter, UCS, Networking, etc. Customers need to have Success Track to get onboarded onto CX Cloud
5) PX Cloud
What it is: Partner-led and partner-delivered CX cloud
My take:
PX cloud is the customer experience delivered and managed by partners. Here partners get to see all their customers and manage onboarding, contract status, aggregate insights, lifecycle insight, success tracks, and more. See the PX Cloud blog for more info
6) Full-Stack Observability (FSO)
What it is: Bringing together AppDynamics + ThousandEyes + Intersight to deliver end-to-end observability
My take:
FSO is definitely a move in the right direction to bring all 3 products together to provide better business outcomes and end-to-end observability.
AppDynamics – tells you what is going on within apps/workloads
ThousandEyes – tells you what is going on in the network and WAN
Intersight – to take optimization/orchestration actions across hybrid cloud
CloudFabrix has integrations with all these 3 Cisco FSO pillars and along with integrations with other third-party infrastructure, PaaS, cloud, and microservices tools we can build application or service context-rich operational data to accelerate incident response, dependency mappings, impact map, and more.
7) ThousandEyes WAN Insights
What it is: Predictive insights and actions for a better WAN experience
My take:
ThousandEyes has been a rock-solid acquisition for Cisco. ThousandEyes occupies a unique sweet spot within Cisco’s portfolio – focusing primarily on internet and WAN circuits. This way there is the least amount of overlap with traditional network monitoring tools. For example, for network monitoring and analytics within the Enterprise DC, multiple tools exist within Cisco: DNAC, NDFC, APIC, Stealthwatch, Tetration, and Outside of Cisco: SolarWinds, ScienceLogic, LogicMonitor, PRTG, Zabbix, etc. ThousandEyes doesn’t overlap with any of these tools because of its focus outside DC, primarily on internet/WAN monitoring. The current WAN insights announcement, takes it up even further, with predictive alerting and forecasting.
8) Nexus 400G (800G ready)
What it is: 400G line card for Nexus 9K family and is 800G-ready
My take:
With the wide adoption of 5G, AI/ML, advanced telemetry capabilities, 8K video, etc. need for such high speeds is imminent. It is great to see the line cards are forward compatible with 800G line cards. For more details see this Nexus Evolution video:
9) Cisco+ Secure Connect Now
What it is: Turnkey cloud-delivered SASE solution
My take:
It brings together the power of networking with Meraki and the power of security with Umbrella. SASE is a great enabler for hybrid work and this solution makes it very easy to deploy, onboard, and operate secure access services in a cloud-delivered model with unified security + networking + monitoring. Learn more in this Cisco+ Secure Connect Now for Simplified ZTNA and SASE video
10) Emerging Technology & Incubation (ET&I) Apps
What it is: Set of apps that are being incubated in the ET&I division
Telescope: Cloud-native Application Troubleshooting
Calisti: Service Mesh Manager
Panoptica: Secure Application Cloud
Great Bear: Edge Services platform – Platform to deploy and create Edge AI and Edge Services.
API Clarity: Monitors API usage using service mesh technologies
My take:
This division within Cisco is focused on incubating small groups within Cisco to work on emerging technologies and develop apps or platforms, that can possibly be integrated into the broader Cisco portfolio later on or used as freemium/utility apps. Some products really caught my eye, especially the Great Bear platform which is an Edge Services platform (yet to be released) that help automate, provisioning, monitoring of edge app/container deployments and build curated edge services. Examples that were talked about are digital signage – you can create and possibly commercialize ads, or signs at small retail stores, mom & pop shops, satellite towers, etc. with a very small resource footprint across hundreds and thousands of sites.
Wrap
Ok, that’s a wrap. Please share your Top-3 announcements in the comments, and also feel free to share any major announcements that I may have missed in other areas like Collaboration, WebEx, IoT, etc. If you are curious to know how CloudFabrix complements Cisco products Contact Us
