Cisco has announced a
new portfolio of services designed to put IT departments back in the driver’s
seat. Powered by AI, Cisco’s suite of predictive services anticipates IT
failures, mitigates risk, reduces maintenance costs, and assists organizations in
attaining the necessary skills to transform their businesses. Delivering both
advanced predictive and preemptive capabilities, Cisco’s new Business Critical
Services and High-value Services offerings will enable organizations to invest
more of their IT budgets on technology innovation amid a growing technical
skills gap that poses an imminent threat to business continuity and growth.
“Today’s
world is moving faster than ever, and to be successful, businesses must have
the right blend of IT talent and services,” said Chuck Robbins,
chief executive officer, Cisco.“By leveraging AI and machine learning to
address critical IT issues, Cisco’s new services offerings will truly help our
customers free up time to focus on the growing IT talent gap, and remain competitive
into the future.”
More than ever,
organizations look to heads of IT to create new revenue streams for their
businesses. Yet the shortage of digital skills and the technical skills gap are
putting organizations at peril of losing their competitiveness. Cisco’s new
suite of predictive services are differentiated by the unique expertise,
intelligence and automation that help minimize the impact of the skills gap and
free technical staff to focus on accelerating innovation.
Today
Cisco is launching two
new additions to the services portfolio: Business Critical Services and
High-value Services. These two new services offer the power and intelligence of
AI and machine learning to optimize IT talent, knowledge and skills and allow
organizations to solve their problems first and ultimately get closer to their
end user/customer.
Cisco Business
Critical Services:
Technology environments are increasingly more
complex and dynamic and organizations seek to aggressively address these
challenges. Cisco is introducing a new portfolio of subscription services,
Business Critical Services that goes beyond basic optimization to deliver
more capabilities including analytics, automation, compliance and security by
Cisco Advanced Services’ technology experts to enable secure, efficient, and
agile technology environment. Business Critical Services will help minimize
human error and help extract the most value from products and solutions while
creating a secure IT environment. These next-generation optimization services
enable organizations to:
· Reduce complexity and cost through automation, orchestration, and
technical expertise.
· Accelerate business agility and
transformation through advanced
analytics and machine learning capabilities to deliver critical insights that
prioritize infrastructure and application recommendations.
· Reduce risk with automated compliance and remediation
services, coupled with a robust security portfolio including incident response
for threat protection.
These new Business
Critical Services seek to help reduce downtime by 74 percent, resolve issues 41
percent faster and reduce operational costs by 21 percent according to IDC’s
Business Value Study 2017.
Cisco High-value
Services:
To help organizations
better utilize advanced software, solutions, and the network, Cisco is
delivering next-generation Technical Services, called high-value services. This
portfolio builds on our industry leading product support services with
offerings that use analytics, onboarding, expertise, and scale to deliver more
proactive and prescriptive services, enabling our customers to realize higher
value, faster, from their IT investments.
· Software Support: provides support for
Cisco software. New high-value services features includes: Multi-level service options enhanced and
premium, in addition to basic level (reactive) support.
· Solution Support: provides centralized
support for Cisco hardware, software and third-party partner solutions from
first call to resolution. Solution Support is the default service offering for
Cat 9K/DNA enhancing the customer experience.
· Network Support: Technical Services (TS) Advantage provides
network-level support.
According to IDC's
2017 Global Digital Transformational (DX) Leader Survey, a lack of digital
skills in the organization was cited as the single largest challenge to
successfully implement digital transformation. Correspondingly, companies
seeking to implement digital transformation are creatively looking to other
sources of talent to enable their digital strategies. IDC forecasts $6.3T
in direct digital transformation investments over the period 2017-2020. $2.6T
of this investment is being budgeted and spent exclusively on third party
services firms with expertise in digital transformation.
Chris Barnard of IDC says: “The landscape
is evolving too fast for some businesses to keep up with digital
transformation, as a result they rely on their larger vendor partners with the
skills, expertise and capabilities to help address these talent gaps. By
leveraging IT vendors with strong knowledge and a breadth and depth in IT skill
sets, organizations are able to get up to speed, adjust to changing market
conditions and ultimately focus on innovation.”
According to Cisco’s recent Services landscape
report, the top benefits enterprise organizations are looking to achieve from
IT services include filling key talent or skills gaps, gaining access to unique
expertise or capabilities and refocus internal staff on other priorities.
Additionally, the strategic challenges where IT services are most important in
helping to address include allowing IT to focus on strategic priorities rather
than keeping systems running and increasing the speed at which they implement
new technology to support business priorities.
As the company’s
second largest business, Cisco Services delivers the experience, talent and
skills where the customer needs it. Cisco
Services augments a team and provides the innovation, expertise, flexibility,
learnings and dedication to service quality to help customers accelerate
business growth while minimizing risk. The offerings span every stage of IT
lifecycle – from advisory to optimization to training and technical services
and across every major IT architecture.
Channel partners: Partners are vital to the Cisco Services
business. Whether a Cisco partner has an existing Services practice or looking
to build one, Cisco is enhancing its services portfolio to support its partners
to deliver end-to-end customer solutions. With Business Critical and High-value
Services, partners can unlock services opportunities that will deepen their
relationships and attract new customers.
