5 New Cisco Services That Partners Need To Know

Cisco's New Services

Cisco launched a new portfolio of services touting it as the industry's first predictive services powered by artificial intelligence. The networking giant said the suite of services can anticipate IT failures, mitigates risk, reduces maintenance cost and helps customers address their technology skills gap around digital transformation. Partners can resell these services or put them on top of their own existing services.

Cisco Services business generates around $12 billion in annual revenues for the San Jose, Calif.-based network leader, according to Joe Cozzolino, senior vice president of Cisco Services. "Services is the second largest business in Cisco. It's one of our better kept secrets," said Cozzolino.

CRN takes a deep dive into five new Cisco services unveiled on Tuesday that partner need to know.

Business Critical Services

Cozzolino said Business Critical Services is the next-generation of optimization services. The subscription-based service goes beyond basic optimization to deliver professional services with more capabilities including analytics, automation, compliance and security. Partners can now wrap services around optimization capabilities on the front and back end. Cisco said the services reduces downtime by 74 percent, resolve issues 41 percent faster and reduce operational costs by 21 percent

"The Business Critical Services is a single platform that allows a customer to take any, or all, of those optimization capabilities and flex it," said Cozzolino.

Wake Up Dashboard

As part of the Business Critical Services, Cisco is launching a cloud-based dashboard, dubbed the Wake-Up Dashboard.

"It's contentiously running. It's contentiously probing the network. It's an insight engine that connects all aspects of the Cisco products in the network – I don't care if that's security firewalls, threat protection, the physical network itself – we actually run the analysis diagnostic," said Cozzolino.

Cisco piloted the offer in a large bank customer and was able to predict 32-hours in advance that a major outage was going to occur due to dissimilarities in software revisions in different products. "We're moving from what was reactive and proactive, to actually predictive," said Cozzolino. "It's moving to that domain where we can predict problems before they happen and resolve them before it happens."

Software Support

A new "High Value" technical service Cisco is offering is Software Support. The service provides support for Cisco software. New services features include multi-level service options enhanced and premium in addition to basic level support.

"When you get into software and SaaS, cloud-based services for our channel partners is another area with double-digit growth and a real need from the enterprise domain," said Cozzolino.

Solution Support

Another new technical service is Cisco's Solution Support. The service provides centralized support for Cisco hardware, software and third-party partner solutions from the first call to resolution. The service provides multi-vendor support for other technologies inside an environment like Splunk or Hadoop.

"For the customer, that means one phone call to make. We deal with the complexity across all of those third-party applications in an environment and get to a resolution," said Cozzolino. "Now we have the opportunity to not just support a specific product, but with Solution Support, we have an ecosystem that broadens the integration capability on the front end. So we're doing it for an ecosystem, not just for a specific singular product."

Solution Support is the new default service offering for Cisco's Catalyst 9000 and Digital Network Architecture (DNA).

Network Support

The third "High Value" technical service is Network Support for networking. The proactive support leverages data analytics to optimize a customer's network reliability.

"We say you have make these upgrades – whether it's end of life product or software upgrades – [and] if you follow all of our recommendations, we will guarantee resiliency in the network," said Cozzolino.

Training And Enablement To Come

Cozzolino said Cisco is intentionally revealing the new services right before the Cisco Partner Summit taking place from Oct. 31 to Nov. 2. He said the partner training and enablement pieces would be unveiled during the conference.