Tauni Odia and Stephen Orr presented Cisco’s Digital Experience Assurance (DEA) and outlined the company’s strategic direction on this context.
Tauni passionately emphasised the importance of delivering Digital Experience & Assurance (DEA) capabilities and showcased a comprehensive suite designed to ensure optimal digital experiences for end-users. It leverages advanced technologies to predict, analyse, monitor, optimise network performance and application delivery.
Client & Digital experience-What does it look like ?
Cisco has engaged in multiple discussions with customers and ecosystem partners on how to enhance their digital experience. They have integrated this feedback into their product management strategy, focusing on measuring digital experiences and embedding these insights into their solutions.
One key aspect of this strategy is showcasing the integration of Meraki, ThousandEyes, and Splunk dashboards, demonstrating how these tools can work together to achieve superior digital experiences.
The integration of Meraki, ThousandEyes, and Splunk aims to provide additional insights beyond customer network. It will be interesting to see how Cisco positions these solutions and offerings with Splunk, enabling customers to gain meaningful insights of critical application performance essential for their organisation.
Vision is to take the telemetry data from the entire echo system and deliver end to end visibility which has been missing from a long time. This provides an organisation the tools required to gain insights into required data and predict any anomalies before it can cause an impact or identify the root cause .
One of the main challenges in networks is identifying the source of issues, which involves client devices, LAN, Data centre, Server, infrastructure services (ie DNS, DHCP, NAC), WAN, Service providers and application hosting platforms. Cisco plans to integrate this with data lake and leverage the power of ML & AI to provide closed loop operations across their partner and 3rd party eco systems.
Meraki Assurance Overview is currently in private beta, consolidating all data into a single platform for comprehensive visibility. It simplifies the process of assessing a site’s overall performance by providing insightful metrics. Users can drill down through the stack to obtain detailed insights as needed. While full end-to-end integration isn’t necessary, the use of few Cisco or Meraki products is required, though they don’t need to cover the entire stack.”
Meraki dashboard will have the wireless health tab, switching tab, infrastructure tab and application tab.Presenting the New org alert page with Enhanced trends and Analytics, with centrally managed alerts, we can enable alerts via SMS, email, messaging and other communication mediums.
Looks like they will be integrating some features from catalyst centre with existing Meraki capabilities. This will allows users to predict, detect anomalies, config changes, alerting etc. This also provides historic visibility and insights into the focus area .This may also allow Suggesting actions with alerting .
What alerting integration is currently possible ? Having web-hook allows you to integrate alerts with other 3rd party service management dashboard like Service now and other open source platforms.
Stephen Orr presented Cisco’s direction in general for integrating ThousandEyes not just with Meraki but also with other platforms to benefit the overall network and application usage.
ThousandEyes agents provides necessary data from Client, LAN, WAN into the Meraki dashboard and extending that to cloud eco system will ensure comprehensive data feedback. This integration will enable insights to determine the Mean Time to Innocence and resolve issues before they impact users. This will also gather application and server alerting via ThousandEyes monitoring into Meraki dashboard to provide an overview of not just Network but also external Applications hosted internet.
Thousand eyes agents can be installed on laptop, Meraki, MX, Catalyst Switches, Routers and integrates to SAAS platform.
Splunk: What does Splunk bring to the table .
Splunk aims consolidates data from various domains, platforms, and infrastructure services into a unified platform, enhancing observability. It offers powerful visualization through machine learning and dynamic alerting capabilities. As the solution evolves, integration will become more seamless, addressing key customer needs more effectively.
A notable takeaway from MFD11 was that, for the first time, Cisco presented a roadmap with expected delivery timelines. This transparency enables partners and customers to anticipate upcoming solutions and plan their integrations accordingly.”
My Conclusion :
Looks like Cisco is finally heading in the right direction by consolidating its capabilities from on premises and cloud and integrating them into a single unified platform.
As Cisco pursues their vision, it will be interesting to see how they develop, considering the intricate integrations needed for complete end-to-end visibility. Cisco is striving to provide a seamless and comprehensive digital experience for their customers. This will involve a substantial investment to enhance the AI and ML framework within the existing Meraki architecture. Additionally, there may be a need for an uplift in compliance, data ethics, and security.
It appears that Cisco is actively fostering collaboration among its vast internal business units to achieve a unified vision using a single platform. Hope this initiative aims to streamline multiple licensing, integration capabilities, open source and consolidating them into more user-friendly solutions.
Cisco’s product roadmap promises ubiquitous visibility by leveraging the integration of acquisitions made over the past decade. While the challenge lies in seamless integration across diverse network components, Cisco’s CX initiatives holds the key to bridging this gap and deliver this to customers .
The elevation of Meraki as Cisco’s single unified platform will empower the company to advance effectively with its product roadmaps and retain its existing customer base with a joint focus on on-premises portfolio. This strategy aims to provide significant coverage for both current and future customer needs.
Despite the complexity, successful adoption of these offerings is essential for customer and product success, especially those with heterogeneous vendor environments. Cisco’s commitment to facilitating end-to-end integration from a single vendor and latest hardware is poised to benefit customers . it will be interesting to see how far Cisco will go to achieve these objectives for existing customers operating in mixed-vendor environments.
It will undoubtedly require a collaborative effort from Cisco, ecosystem partners, and customers to ascertain the desired outcomes following these integrations.
On a positive note, never before we have seen so many companies rushing to embrace and enhance their client experience, with enhancements to ML/AI eco system and the possibilities are limitless.
Only Time will reveal how far Cisco will pursue this objective and be successful in this journey!!!
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