Cisco launches Cloud managed services and full software solution suites

Cisco is announcing:

An expansion of its cloud managed IT solution, Cisco Meraki, to the entire IT infrastructure, going from managing wireless networking to managing switching, security and mobility. Meraki has also expanded beyond Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) to a solution now operational for large scale enterprises. It has new features tailored to this segment.
· The general availability of Cisco ONE Software – a comprehensive portfolio of software suites that offer access to ongoing new software innovations, IT automation, open APIs for application development and flexible consumption models. Part of the Cisco ONE Software suite, the Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud suite is a new hybrid cloud software solution that brings together the security and control of a private cloud with the self-service and automation of a public cloud.

“The advent of cloud services has opened up options for organisations in purchasing, consuming and managing IT, including networking,” said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. “People require flexible consumption models – enabling services on demand and greater IT services reach. Software is paramount – giving customers the ability to go-to-market faster, make changes quickly and harness the analytics and intelligence from their IT infrastructure.”

Cloud Managed IT – Cisco Meraki

The cloud-managed IT model is a choice for customers looking to manage their IT infrastructure, users, end devices, and applications from one central dashboard. By doing so, customers benefit from faster IT deployments, full global business visibility, on-demand scalability, and lower IT costs.

When Cisco acquired Meraki in 2012 for $1.2b it was best known as a wireless company. Since then, the portfolio has expanded, extending across the entire IT spectrum, including wireless access points, Ethernet switches, security appliances, and enterprise mobility management.

Meraki was originally targeted at the mid-market segment. With customers moving more and more of their IT needs to the cloud, Cisco Meraki is now available for large scale enterprise environments that have distributed branch offices requiring fast IT and application deployment, operational consistency, streamlined “over-the-web” feature delivery, and ease of management. We have rolled out new features and products, tailored to meet large-scale enterprises, including:
New 802.11ac indoor and outdoor access points with integrated Bluetooth Beacons to enable location–aware applications
Comprehensive Unified Threat Management solution for non-stop threat identification and accelerated mitigation through integration of Sourcefire technology
New mission-critical switch features to address evolving customer needs around redundancy, high reliability, and campus connectivity.
Intelligent WAN solution on the MX security appliances to deliver an uncompromised user experience over any connection as applications move to public, hybrid clouds and mobile users increase in the branch.

Heraeus Kulzer GmbH is one of the world’s leading dental companies with its headquarters in Hanau, Germany. Its dental materials and digital services divisions supply dentists and dental technicians with an extensive product range, covering cosmetic dentistry, tooth preservation, prosthetics, periodontology and digital dentistry. Heraeus Kulzer has been part of the Japanese Mitsui Chemicals Group since July 2013 and is building up a new IT organisation with global IT services and applications.

“We were looking for a solution that enabled us to instantly roll out our own IT network and security infrastructure globally,” said Thomas Gessler, CIO at Heraeus Kulzer. “Cisco Meraki supports our vision of having a flexible and innovative IT infrastructure that follows our business needs.”

Cisco Meraki can be combined with Cisco’s on premise solution into a hybrid IT model. Customers can benefit from cloud-managed simplicity and speed as well as the robust functionality of our on premise solution.

Cisco ONE Software and Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suites
Cisco ONE Software is a portfolio of networking and infrastructure software across three solution domains: the data centre, Access and WAN. Data centre covers both networking and compute (UCS); Access covers wired switching and wireless, and WAN covers Intelligent WAN (IWAN) to connect branches and campus. These suites run on Cisco’s networking hardware and address relevant IT use cases.

Cisco ONE Software transforms the current purchasing and consumption model for network infrastructure software from 100s of a la carte, separately priced software features to simple, solution-based suites. It gives customers the choice to buy and consume networking and infrastructure software that is tailored to their budget and investment strategy. Software can be purchased via perpetual licenses, subscription licenses to distribute spend over time as an operational expenditure, or through an Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) to provide enterprise wide access to the suites.

A key benefit of Cisco ONE Software Suites is license portability. Customers don’t have to repurchase new software when they upgrade their hardware within the same family. License portability entitles customers to move software licenses to the new hardware, enabling significant cost savings and access to ongoing innovation as new features are released.

Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud suite is a software solution that makes hybrid cloud simple by giving the security and control of a private cloud and self-service and automation of a public cloud. Customers are looking for on-demand and real-time services. When accessing cloud services the increasing expectation is that these are provided easily online. Within IT this means the integration of key elements such a service catalogue for on-demand services, infrastructure configuration and policy automation, workflow automation to orchestrate the cloud, as well as support for hybrid architectures and multi-hypervisors.

Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite brings all this together in one simple package and benefits the three key stakeholders of an enterprise hybrid cloud environment – end users, IT leaders and application developers.
End users benefit from fast access to key IT services through self-service, on demand portals
IT leaders can automate their infrastructure, provision and manage applications. They get visibility and management of cloud services, and have the ability to move workloads across clouds with the same policy and security.
Application developers have access to simple drag and drop tools to accelerate the development of applications.

Stefaan Hinderyckx, Director Networking and Security, Europe at Dimension Data: “With Cisco ONE we can sell software that is tied to IT outcomes. In addition to more attractive prices, we can offer customers more valuable service agreements and manage the lifecycle of those better. As a result, the customer benefits from better service and we benefit from recurring revenues and faster refresh cycles.”
Cisco ONE is available for general availability, under a perpetual license, immediately. Subscription offers will be made available soon.

A key stepping stone in our journey to deliver Fast IT to our customers is to accelerate automation. “With Cisco Meraki and Cisco ONE, we offer a portfolio of software-based solutions, a range of deployment models, and multiple purchasing options to partners and customers,” said Gordon Thomson, Managing Director of Enterprise Networking at Cisco EMEAR. “Cloud plays a significant part in this. Security underlines everything we do. With our new flexible consumption of software and managed IT services – from the cloud to the data centre to the device – we can help our customers truly go fast, and make amazing things happen.”