Applications Infrastructure Portfolio Guide

Enterprise Agreement Applications Infrastructure Portfolio Guide

Deliver superior application experiences.

Deliver superior application experiences for users through industry-leading full-stack observability with deep business context supported by efficient hybrid cloud operations. The Applications Infrastructure portfolio helps you simplify IT operations and manage complex environments while embracing cloud-native innovations. Your teams can maintain the necessary continuity and security across the business without inhibiting agility. They can exceed expectations by proactively resolving issues before they impact digital experiences and expedite the delivery of new services.

The new Applications Infrastructure suite allows you to adopt cloud services at your own pace without the risks and limitations of vendor lock-in. It gives you multiple licensing and delivery models, providing flexibility so you can easily adapt and deliver the innovations your business needs.

Introduction

The Cisco® Enterprise Agreement (EA) comprises six portfolios that encompass our software and services suites. These include Networking Infrastructure, Applications Infrastructure, Collaboration, Provider Connectivity, Security, and Services. An EA offers you more than just a service agreement or buying program; it brings you the power and breadth of our entire software and services portfolio under a single, simplified agreement. It gives you easy access to the Cisco technologies you need to scale rapidly and accelerate at the speed of business. Not only does an EA simplify purchasing, it also offers you a future-ready software subscription strategy that delivers greater value, agility, and flexibility for your organization.

  • One agreement

    The Cisco EA is designed to cover your entire organization. When you purchase through an EA, the EA Program Terms will apply from your initial purchase to any future purchases you make within the term of the agreement. With Cisco’s EA management platform, you can manage your Cisco EA from one place with complete visibility and granular control.

  • Easier expansion

    The Cisco EA makes it easy to invest in the technology to support accelerated business transformation when you need it. Add additional software and services to your existing contract without another enterprise-wide commitment. It includes flexible commitment levels and lower spending minimums so you can respond to business changes rapidly.

  • Comprehensive solutions

    Organizations can combine suites from the six portfolios available in a Cisco EA to create a custom solution to address business needs. Complementing the bespoke ability customers have to meet their needs, Cisco offers solutions specifically designed to address the network security threats customers face today.

  • Exceptional value

    The Cisco EA delivers preferred pricing that rewards increased commitment with invaluable benefits, including pricing incentives, financial predictability, and investment protection. Maximize your investment with access to exclusive offers such as multisuite discounts.

  • Simple membership

    Get all the benefits of the Cisco EA for as little as $100,000 total contract value. The Cisco EA makes it easy to invest in technology when you need it.

Shift to a more agile application infrastructure

From hybrid cloud architectures to application experiences, enterprise-wide full-stack observability to low-code workflow design, Cisco’s broad portfolio of applications can address your most pressing technology requirements and help your business meet its strategic objectives.

The new Cisco EA makes it simpler to get the applications your business needs today, and lets you adjust with agility as those needs shift. It also enables your organization to deploy critical cross-technology solutions more easily and effectively, such as combining with collaboration tools for hybrid work or leveraging networking technologies for more efficient data center operations.


Suites

Cisco Applications Infrastructure subscription solutions

Under the new EA, the subscription solutions for our Applications Infrastructure portfolio include the following:

  • Cisco Intersight®
  • Cisco ThousandEyes®
  • Cisco AppDynamics®
Intersight

Cisco Intersight is a cloud-based IT operations platform for managing and automating compute, storage, and networking infrastructure throughout its lifecycle—wherever it is—from one place. It is for Cisco UCS® and Nexus customers who need to simplify the operations of their on-premises, cloud, and edge infrastructure to support outstanding digital experiences and drive growth.

You can subscribe to the following Intersight services:

  • Intersight infrastructure service

    Deploy, manage, and support your distributed environment via the cloud service, a connected virtual appliance, or an air-gapped private virtual appliance.

  • Intersight workload optimizer

    Continuously optimize application resources across on-premises, public cloud, and edge environments to support always-on applications at the lowest cost.

  • Nexus Cloud

    Configure, operate, and analyze your cloud-native and hybrid-cloud data center environments.

Learn more about Intersight

Cisco ThousandEyes

Cisco ThousandEyes allows you to instantly identify what is impacting user experiences across any domain—even those you do not own or control. From application experience to hop-by-hop network path and performance, Cisco ThousandEyes provides end-to-end visibility into every user and any application, over any network. Now you can enhance the value of your digital investments and leverage them to drive differentiation in the market. Cisco ThousandEyes offerings include:

  • Network and application synthetics

    Provides hop-by-hop visibility across LAN, WAN, internet, and cloud networks correlated with Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing and web and API transaction experience metrics.

  • End user monitoring

    A client-based endpoint agent that monitors user-specific application experience and end-to-end network path, from Wi-Fi to ISP to VPN gateway to destination service.

  • Internet insights

    Collective network telemetry from ISP, cloud, and edge service providers powers real-time internet outage detection.

Learn more about Cisco ThousandEyes

AppDynamics

Cisco AppDynamics is an industry-leading business observability platform and a key component of Cisco’s solution for full-stack observability with business context. AppDynamics helps prevent digital performance issues by monitoring cloud-native technologies and traditional infrastructure to understand exactly what drives user experiences and impacts the bottom line for businesses.

Core AppDynamics products and capabilities include:

  • Business performance monitoring

    Correlate full-stack performance with key business metrics such as conversions and quickly resolve issues before they impact the bottom line with business analytics from Business iQ.

  • User experience monitoring

    Visualize the digital experience between your mobile and browser users and your mission-critical applications to help ensure a seamless, hassle-free experience at every touchpoint.

  • Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

    Pinpoint root causes of application problems in real time, from third-party APIs down to code-level issues, so your IT teams can quickly identify what’s most affecting your key business metrics.

  • Infrastructure performance monitoring

    Visualize every component of your infrastructure — from server to database to hybrid and cloud-native environments — to support optimal application performance.

  • Application security

    Detect application code and security vulnerabilities in minutes — not months — with unified business, performance, and security insights from Cisco Secure Application.

  • Cloud-native monitoring

    Observe and navigate from the service layer down to your Kubernetes infrastructure and cloud provider platforms with continuous context to get a dynamic view of all your cloud-native environments.

Learn more about AppDynamics


Eligibility requirements

EA eligibility requirements

To make EA more accessible, we've lowered its minimum eligibility requirements by reducing the required commitment across an organization as follows:

Term minimum: 3- and 5-year terms with a 7-year exception
Contract value: $100,000 net at program level, after discount and post-installed base credits at program level

Fully committed suite Partially committed suite
$50,000 minimum net requirement pre-IB credits. No minimum requirement.
Customers receive all EA benefits for committed suites. Limited benefits for partially committed suites.

ThousandEyes: Requires full commitment spend minimum ($50,000) and a minimum of one of the following:

  • 4,000 units & 0 users (advantage or essentials)
  • 2,000 units & 100 users advantage OR 150 users essentials
  • 1,500 units & 250 users advantage OR 550 users essentials
  • 0 units & 250 users advantage OR 550 users essentials

Popular add-ons, software support, and available services

Accessing security and services for applications infrastructure

One of the primary benefits of the new EA is that it makes it easier to quickly bring into your environment a broad array of technologies from across Cisco portfolios.

  • Security portfolio offerings

    The close, intertwined relationship between applications and security often leads Cisco customers to take advantage of solutions from the Security portfolio, such as Zero Trust, and Cloud and Network Security, and Secure Platform and Response.

  • Solution support

    Cisco Customer Experience (CX) has a portfolio of end-to-end services that provide world-class expert guidance and digital intelligence to help our customers drive business outcomes faster. Our Solution Support provides centralized support across more than 30 solutions and more than 250 products.


Available portfolios

Easy access to other Cisco subscription portfolios

Now that the new EA brings all Cisco portfolios under one agreement, it’s easier for you to access our full complement of technologies and innovations and be ready to respond to changes in your industry.

Networking infrastructure portfolio

As a worldwide leader in networking, Cisco’s Networking Infrastructure portfolio serves the broadest range of networking needs across industries and segments. Our networking solutions help you quickly adapt to change and simplify and scale operations, while also protecting against service degradation and threats.

Plus the new Cisco EA brings together our industry-leading Cisco DNA software, Meraki®, and cloud networking offerings to supercharge your business. Your organization can more easily, quickly, and effectively implement critical cross-technology solutions, such as security and services. And you can dynamically adjust and adapt your networking infrastructure to keep pace with your network’s expanding and evolving demands.

Collaboration portfolio

Webex Suite delivers the calling, meeting, messaging, and events tools you need to bring people together easily and help them to work together productively. At the same time, it helps you meet increasingly complex security and compliance requirements, which are key to keeping your information safe and secure.

The new Cisco EA makes it easy to get a holistic collaboration enrollment with a single contract, standardized across your entire enterprise and with a higher level of comprehensive support. It also makes it easier to take advantage of Cisco collaboration solutions when you enroll for one of the other Cisco solution portfolios covered by the EA, including Networking Infrastructure and Applications Infrastructure.

Security portfolio

Cisco security solutions, known as Cisco Secure, take an integrated platform approach to radically simplify your security. They apply intelligence to anticipate the changing needs of your business and provide the protection you need everywhere so you can work anywhere. Our broad portfolio of security solutions protects organizations at the user, device, network, and application/data levels.

Plus the new Cisco EA makes it easy to get a holistic security enrollment with a single contract, standardized across your entire enterprise and with a higher level of comprehensive support. It also makes it simpler to take advantage of Cisco Secure when you enroll for one of the other Cisco solution portfolios covered by the EA, including Networking Infrastructure, Collaboration, and Applications Infrastructure. The new EA also makes it possible to combine portfolios in ways that support cross-architectural solutions. For example, a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) implementation might incorporate offerings from the Networking Infrastructure, Security, and Services portfolios.

Services portfolio

Customers like you have told us they feel pressure to defend investments and ROI, that a skills gap is slowing transformation, and that IT projects are more complex than ever before, increasing risk.

We designed Cisco Success Tracks to provide you with a more tailored approach to removing the roadblocks of today’s most critical technology challenges with the agility to navigate change. Success Tracks is a suite of success services connecting you to the right expertise, insights, learning, and support at the right time to accelerate success.

The Services portfolio, featuring Success Tracks, can help you get more value from your Cisco Enterprise Agreement. Simplify contract management by pairing the Services portfolio with one or more software portfolios, and you converge software and support for both software and hardware to one agreement, one renewal date, and one set of terms.

Provider connectivity portfolio

As a global leader in networking, Cisco’s Provider Connectivity portfolio offers wide area network, metropolitan area network, and data center interconnect solutions for Enterprises, Public Sectors, and Service Provider agreements.

From connecting private or public sector networks to distributed sites, connecting data centers, colocation sites or cloud providers using routing and optical technologies to support mission-critical traffic, to providing real-time data to identify and address service issues, our networking solutions help you quickly adapt to change, simplify operations, and drive outstanding customer experience.


Financial benefits

Financial benefits of the new EA

In addition to delivering on technology and business needs, the new EA offers financial benefits designed for the needs of enterprises. The following are a few examples:

Financial flexibility

As with technology, financing increasingly needs to be more dynamic. The new EA delivers new levels of flexibility for financing, such as flexible terms and volume ramp options.

Financial predictability with true forward

The financial predictability of True Forward makes the EA stand out from other agreements. Unlike enterprise license agreements that require you to true up every year, the new EA doesn’t retroactively charge for a year’s extra usage if it stays within 15 percent of the initial order. This saves you from potentially having a large, unexpected bill at your contract anniversary—as frequently happens with other vendors. Instead, we work with you to update your next year’s contract to bring it closer in line with your actual usage.

Read the True Forward FAQ

Cisco Capital

Flexible payment solutions to help you achieve your objectives

Cisco Capital® makes it easier to get the right technology to achieve your objectives, enable business transformation and help you stay competitive. We can help you reduce the total cost of ownership, conserve capital, and accelerate growth. In more than 100 countries, our flexible payment solutions can help you acquire hardware, software, services and complementary third-party equipment in easy, predictable payments. Learn more.