Cisco+ overview
Q. What is Cisco+?
A. Cisco+ is, our new brand for cross-portfolio solutions as-a-service. It represents Cisco’s commitment to deliver our portfolio with as-a-service and consumption-based offers designed to simplify operations and gain IT agility. The initial offers will include hybrid cloud and will later expand to a broader catalog of services that will be built and delivered with our partner ecosystem.
Q. What are the benefits of Cisco+?
A. While other vendors are focused on consumption, Cisco is focused on outcomes and experiences.
With Cisco+, we continue to offer customer choice – including consumption, third party solutions and more. Cisco+ is designed to simplify IT by fitting and adapting to your operations – Simplified IT, your way.
The three core benefits of Cisco+ are:
Simple: Easy to consume and use with a cloud-first, unified experience that provides choice, allowing customers to pay as they use and change as they need.
In a world of rising complexity, you need easier ways to consume and run technologies across your diverse IT environment.
Cisco offers flexible delivery models tailored to your unique organization, so you can achieve your business goals. We simplify IT deployments with a cloud-first approach. And we provide choice, allowing you to pay as you use and change as you need.
Predictable: Highly secure and predictable services that deliver business results and consistent experience. Cisco future proofs your investments with a partner you can trust.
When running your business operations on another company’s platform, you need a partner that puts your business first and ensure objectives are met and costs are managed. Cisco has a proven track record to deliver the most highly reliable environments with best-in-class security built in. We help you connect, secure, and automate, so you can accelerate your digital agility and deliver results.
Intelligent: Services that adapt to customer requirements using insights and automation to optimize use, resolve issues quickly and protect the business.
Business cycles are difficult to forecast, and you need services that adapt to the dynamic rhythm of your organization. Cisco provides full-stack observability enhanced with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML).
Q. What are the initial offerings?
A. The Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud will include the following flexible consumption offerings:
● Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud for Edge Compute
● Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud for VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure)
● Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud for Virtualization
● Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud for Bare Metal Compute
● Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud for DC (data center) Networking
Additional details regarding flexible consumption offerings:
| Offer |
Description |
| Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud for Edge Compute |
● HyperFlex Edge
|
| Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud for VDI |
● Cisco HyperFlex
™ hyperconverged infrastructure with third-party VDI
|
| Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud for Virtualization |
● Cisco UCS servers and or HyperFlex virtual server infrastructure
|
| Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud for Bare Metal Compute |
● Cisco UCS
® bare-metal servers
|
| Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud for DC Networking |
● Cisco Nexus
® 9000 Series switches with Nexus Dashboard
● Cisco MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Switches with Cisco
® Data Center Network Manager
|
Q. What are the consumption models for the initial offerings?
A. For the initial offers, Cisco will provide a commerce portal that allows customers to choose from the buying model that best matches their business needs.
Pay as you use:
This model provides maximum flexibility on service capacity from 0-100% commit. It allows you to scale up or down as your business changes and is ideal for seasonal or hard-to-predict scenarios. You select a reserved service capacity for your organization and then can expand as your needs vary.
Pay as you grow:
Ideal for high-growth organizations, this model provides buffer for growth in services needed. It lets you commit to a known service capacity and allows flexibility to gain additional capacity as your business needs change.
Q. What countries are the initial offerings available in?
A. The initial as-a-service offerings are available as a limited release in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands.
Cisco+ benefits
Q. What is the vision for Cisco+?
A. Our vision includes the following:
● Radically simplify operations by unifying cross-architecture technologies from edge to cloud into a seamless as-a-service. Enable IT to accelerate business innovation while delivering a great customer experience
● Empower the most secure and agile IT, so that it can quickly adapt to changing business needs with flexible deployment options that fit their operations
● Connect and secure access to applications, data, and the internet for remote workers, fixed locations, workloads, and IoT or internet-facing devices
● Enable zero trust by verifying the identity of users and the health of their devices to secure access to applications
● Optimize IT investment to lower costs while ensuring the end user experience using machine intelligence
● Deliver services that customers can trust to run across their business with high security and reliability
● Provide the industry’s most extensible platform that allows partners to leverage Cisco assets with other capabilities to scale to customer unique business requirements
Q. What are the differentiators of the Cisco+ portfolio?
A.
World-class hardware, software, and APIs: Cisco delivers industry-leading technologies from Cisco and its technology partners across compute, storage, networking, automation, and cloud, designed to meet your diverse operating environment.
Flexible consumption: With Cisco+, you can pay as you use, to get the flexibility to grow and shrink capacity utilization on demand, or pay as you grow, to get growth capacity for your increased IT needs while scaling up on your own terms without breaking the bank or having to continuously over-provision.
Simple dashboard views on service usage: Cisco makes it easy to track service usage through a single pane, allowing you to understand business trends and determine future investments. Cisco and Cisco partners optionally offer professional and managed services to deliver as-a-service outcomes, depending on your preference.
Artificial intelligence for optimizing service: Not only do you pay for what you use, but Cisco’s machine-intelligence solutions will help tell you the best way to run your applications and workloads to optimize for performance and minimize expenditure.
Ecosystem choice: Cisco and our certified partners bring a large technology ecosystem to enable you to run operations according to the needs of your business.
Q. How does Cisco+ affect other buying options from Cisco?
A. Cisco focuses on providing customer choice and will continue to provide multiple options for consuming Cisco products, including hardware and software buying options, enterprise agreements, leasing, and more.
Cisco+ strategy
Q. What is the Cisco+ Experience portal?
A. As we continue to deliver on our as-a-service strategy, we will introduce the Cisco+ Experience in the near future. This is a self-service engagement portal that will simplify and facilitate the entire customer lifecycle experience. It will allow customers and partners to learn about, trial, consume, adopt, upgrade, and track usage of Cisco’s as-a-service portfolio. Customers transform from buying products and solutions to an end-to-end experience and outcomes with a flexible consumption model using this intuitive interface. Services can be easily ordered and quickly deployed on site by Cisco and our channel partners.
Q. What is Cisco's vision for Network as-a-Service (NaaS)?
A. Our vision for Cisco+ NaaS solutions is to combine our best-in-class networking, security, and observability capabilities into unified subscription services that are easy to consume and use, and more importantly, deliver an unparalleled experience.
Future Cisco+ offers will provide:
● Seamless and secure on-ramps to applications and cloud providers
● Full stack observability from the infrastructure to the application
● Unified policy to ensure the right users have access to the right applications
● Security integrated across everything, not bolted on as another point solution
● IT optimization based on AI-driven insights to realize greater business benefit and improved ROI
● Flexible delivery models, including usage-based, pay per use or pay as you grow options
● Complete cloud-delivered solutions and management to solve the most challenging problems enterprises face today
● Integrated hardware, software, and services with API extensibility that can be onboarded simply
● Partners layering additional value-add functionality and delivering their services faster
On our journey to NaaS, we will initially focus on Cisco’s Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture. Cisco will converge networking and security in the cloud with end-to-end observability from the user all the way to the application, over any cloud and any network. All core components of our SASE architecture will be available in a single offer, which will be orderable by mid-CY21. We will offer the flexibility to easily transition to a unified subscription service in the future.
Cisco SASE offer
Q. What is included in the Cisco SASE offer?
A. The Cisco SASE offer combines the core components of a SASE architecture, including:
● Cloud security with Cisco Umbrella
● SD-WAN powered by vManage or Meraki
● Zero Trust Network Access with Cisco Secure Access powered by Duo
● Observability with ThousandEyes
The Cisco SASE offer provides an easy way to purchase the complete Cisco SASE architecture today, with the ability to transition to a single subscription service in the future.
Q. How are the Cisco SASE offer and a Cisco DNA Premier subscription different?
A. The Cisco SASE offer is a more complete SASE offering than a Cisco DNA Premier subscription. While both include Cisco Umbrella and SD-WAN, only the Cisco SASE offer includes Zero Trust Network Access with Cisco Secure Access powered by Duo, and deep network performance visibility with ThousandEyes. The SASE offer provides more flexibility in taking advantage of Umbrella enhancement features (such as L7 CDFW and in the future options for DLP add on or SIG Advantage) and permits greater flexibility in selecting license quantities (Cisco DNA Premier offers fixed license counts). Additionally, the Cisco SASE offer is available with Meraki devices, where Cisco DNA Premier is not.
Q. If I buy the Cisco SASE offer, what happens to my investment once the single subscription service becomes available?
A. The Cisco SASE offer provides all of the core building blocks of a secure access service edge architecture today, making it easier than ever to begin your journey to SASE. This offer allows organizations to start using all of the core SASE components immediately. Cisco will look to include a built-in investment protection mechanism to support customer transition to the single subscription service, once available.
Next steps
To learn how Cisco+ can help your organization on its journey, please contact Cisco Sales or your Cisco registered partner.
For more information, visit cisco.com/go/cisco+ and review the Cisco+ End User Program Terms and the Cisco+ Hybrid Cloud End User Offer Specific Terms.