In over 20 years of hosting its Partner Summit, this is the first year that Cisco has held it in digital form. According to Cisco CEO, Chuck Robbins, who recently announced a breadth of new and up-to-date solutions at 2020’s summit: “The new platforms will help IT teams accelerate cloud adoption, increase automation, and transform their operations.” New solutions out by Cisco will enable IT managers to simplify their operations and gain consistency across on-premises, edge, and the public cloud via insights and automation. The latest software-delivered capabilities are set to accelerate the application and digital services delivery, too.
Introducing Cisco Intersight Kubernetes Service – a service that enables teams to automate the lifecycle management of open-source containers and containerized applications across any environment. This is all a part of the company’s attempt at simplifying application resources management through Intersight Workload Optimizer.
“It is a single tool that provides real-time, full-stack visibility, and insights that let customers balance application performance, cost, and it represents a major leap forward in the container ecosystem by driving speedy and consistent application innovation”
Intersight integrates with AppDynamics, the combination of which lets IT teams better manage functionalities across all infrastructure and applications, pre-emptively allowing them to stay ahead of issues that might impact the user experience. Cisco’s Nexus Dashboard is a new unified platform that lends insights and automation so companies can operate multi-cloud data center networks spanning on-premises, virtual edge, and cloud sites. Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), also new, makes it straightforward to secure network access across all domains. Cisco customers can even leverage the platform to identify IoT endpoints to enforce enterprise-wide policies.
Cisco also announced its most significant partner program updates in over a decade, hoping to heighten the partner experience and bring more on board. The reinvented Cisco Partner Program incorporates a unique Partner Experience Platform (PXP). The single gateway includes a number of resources for partners, Cisco wrote in a statement. According to the company, over the next 12-to-18 months, it will make what it calls ‘significant’ updates to its partner program structure by combining almost a dozen different partner programs into a single application.
“The new Cisco Partner Program will offer partners more opportunity to differentiate across the various aspects of their business from reselling to managed services to developer and advisor practices with Cisco”
Partners can collaborate through the platform on elements including co-selling, and gradual changes to Cisco’s partner program are set to roll out throughout the fiscal year of 2021 on a global scale. The Partner Experience Platform (PXP) is set for general availability for all global partners starting November 30, 2020. Cisco made countless other updates to its security solutions, including Cisco SecureX, a cloud-native security platform that became generally available back in June.
The platform has added more than 1,000 customers per month, according to Cisco Security. Partners have access to new ways of consumption, which lets customers spread the cost of Cisco Secure solutions out over time at rates as low as zero percent. Cisco’s popular Webex platform clocked in 590 million participants in September and is on track to reach well over 600 million in October. This number is nearly double what Cisco reported in march, which was at the time, also quite impressive. There were no significant updates made to the Webex platform at this year’s partner summit.
