Understanding all the announcements made at this year’s Cisco Live event is no easy task. After all, this is a highly technical conference primarily focused on communicating important new product updates and strategic corporate messages to our IT and networking professional clientele.
Thankfully, there are consistent themes woven throughout the press release, from extensible full-stack observability (FSO) platforms to generative AI-enabled Webex enhancements and more. Ironically, the theme is simplicity.
Cisco, like other companies in the world of enterprise IT hardware, software and services, understands how complex it is to create and manage modern applications and the infrastructure required to support them. is aware of The important thing is that we are currently working on solving that problem.
The company’s latest offerings are sprinkled with concrete efforts to simplify. Cisco is committed to making it easier to set up, manage, and troubleshoot applications and infrastructure from a conceptual, visual, and architectural perspective. Most importantly, the company’s latest efforts are designed to proactively ensure that hybrid multi-cloud (or on-premises) applications run as simply and consistently as possible.
Of course, translating theory and vision into reality isn’t always easy, but Cisco made significant progress towards these multi-year goals at this year’s show. For example, the new Cisco Networking Cloud Vision is beginning to integrate some of the company’s previously independent managed services into a single, coherent framework and user interface that also supports single sign-on. Its purpose is not only to create a unified look and experience for various management tools, but also to allow IT and network professionals to easily move between multiple tasks such as monitoring network traffic and automating operations. is to
The theme of simplicity was also evident in the upcoming Cisco Secure Access solution. It is a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)-based service designed to automatically create the most secure connections between various types of applications and their sources. As the company pointed out, a particular client may require different kinds of securityhis solutions depending on where his device is located and what kind of applications the end user wants to run. For example, some require VPNs, others require secure web gateways, cloud access security brokers (CASB), and so on. However, end users may not remember all of these choices. So the new Cisco solution makes the right choices completely transparently and automatically behind the scenes to ensure the best and most secure connection.
The company takes another step towards simpler (and better) application performance with the latest version of its Customer Digital Experience Monitoring (CDEM) solution. Incorporating the company’s Thousand Eyes network and application monitoring tools, the CDEM solution can not only troubleshoot performance-related issues when running certain applications, but also proactively tune network routes and more. You can also ensure the highest quality experience. Again, nothing is visible to the end user, but Cisco software does the magic behind the scenes to ensure a consistent, high quality application experience.
An interesting aspect of the CDEM solution is that it is based on an open standard set of data measurements known as MELT (Metrics, Events, Logs, Traces). This means companies can choose to mix and match other compatible solutions that also support his MELT. For Cisco, MELT data is used not only for observability but also for security monitoring, allowing a single data set to serve multiple purposes. This is an interesting example of how Cisco is leveraging new tools and architecture to greatly simplify an otherwise complex IT process.
The Customer Digital Experience Monitoring solution is just one part of the new extensible Full Stack Observability platform the company announced is now generally available. The platform leverages Cisco’s App Dynamics tools to collect network telemetry data from both client devices and backend servers and feed that information into Thousand Eyes. There is an insight that the company can use to set his KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of application performance and much more. etc. The observability platform is extensible, allowing both Cisco and third parties to create extensions like industry- or application-specific plugins. It’s a great example of how Cisco is combining its many technologies to create stronger, more insightful, and ultimately more useful applications.
On the collaboration front, Cisco has announced several AI-powered generation capabilities on the Webex platform. This makes it much easier to stay up-to-date on meetings and react if you’re a few minutes late for a video meeting. . The latter feature, aptly called “Catch Me Up,” provides a quick textual summary of what has happened or been said so far. For easy review of previous meetings you may or may not have attended, the new Webex will soon automatically generate intelligent summaries covering not only what was discussed, but also upcoming action items You will be able to Get out of the meeting. Quite frankly, this is an even better way to stay on top of things than the fast replay feature (1.5x/2x) that Cisco introduced earlier.
Cisco plans to use similar generative AI-based summarization capabilities in future versions of the Webex contact center solution. This new feature provides call summaries for new agents who take over contacts if the call is disconnected. You can also easily send the overview to the customer who made the initial inquiry. Additionally, by integrating corporate support materials into AI models that power these capabilities, we ensure that every support center agent is as informed and helpful as the most experienced experts in the group. can. I believe this kind of call center functionality could be one of the first killer applications of generative AI in the enterprise, and it’s great to see Cisco working on this.
At this year’s event, Cisco announced a wide range of additional new products and enhancements that do not have space here. But as the previous examples show, the company continues to make strides in the difficult task of making IT and networking tools for today’s professionals easier and more useful.
Disclosure: technology analysis research is a technology industry market research and consulting firm that, like all companies in the space, works as a client with many technology vendors, some of which may be featured in this article.
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