Cisco Unveils Cisco Plus - its As-a-Service Strategy

To help customers connect, secure and automate to accelerate their digital agility in a cloud-first world, Cisco has announced Cisco Plus, the company’s unique as-a-service strategy, bringing new flexible buying and consumption models to customers.

Introducing Cisco Plus: It’s Cisco, Plus So Much More
To meet its customers’ needs, Cisco is transforming its go-to-market strategy for hardware, software, and services. New buying and operations experiences from Cisco Plus provide simpler consumption and use of the Cisco portfolio. Cisco Plus will offer best-in-class networking, security, compute, storage, applications and observability solutions as-a-service with unified subscriptions that are easy to consume, simple to use and deliver an unparalleled experience.

Driving to Network-as-a-Service (NaaS): Network-as-a-Service is a cloud model which enables customers to easily operate and maintain the outcomes they expect to get from the network, without owning, building and maintaining their own infrastructure. As IT teams strive to provide consistent, secure access to their growing remote and mobile workforce with less complexity, they want the benefits of NaaS models. They need a simple and reliable approach to protect and connect people across the hybrid workplace. Cisco Plus NaaS solutions will provide:

Seamless and secure onramps to applications and cloud providers
Flexible delivery models, including pay-per-use or pay-as-you-grow options

End-to-end visibility from the client to the application to the ISP
Unified policy engine to ensure the right users have access

Security across everything, not bolted on as another point solution
Real-time analytics providing AI/ML-driven insights for cost and performance tracking

API extensibility across the technology stack

Partners layering additional value and delivering their services faster
The NaaS rollout will first focus on a cloud-based solution as-a-service for secure access service edge (SASE). The Cisco SASE offer currently available enables customers to easily leverage future services with investment protection. Cisco is planning limited release NaaS solutions later this calendar year that will unify networking, security and visibility services across access, WAN and cloud domains.

“I believe every organization would benefit from simplifying powerful technology,” said Todd Nightingale, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Networking and Cloud, Cisco. “Network-as-a-service is a great option for businesses wanting to shift to a cloud operating model without a heavy lift. Cisco is leading the industry in its approach with Cisco Plus. Together with our partners, we intend to offer the majority of our technology portfolio in the simplest, most flexible way: cloud-driven, cloud-delivered, cloud-managed and as-a-service.”

Initial Offer: Cisco Plus Hybrid Cloud
Available mid-year 2021, the Cisco Plus Hybrid Cloud solution as-a-service includes Cisco’s entire data center compute, networking and storage portfolio in addition to third-party storage and software, bridging on-premise, edge and public cloud. It features a flexible consumption model and a full lifecycle suite of services through Cisco Customer Experience (CX) and with partners. Customers can choose the level of services they desire for planning, design and install. Matching a wide range of customer needs, Cisco Plus Hybrid Cloud offers extremely flexible payment options, with order delivery within 14 days. Initial as-a-service offers will be available as a limited release in Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, UK and the U.S.

Cisco Plus Experience Built on CX Cloud
Later this year, as-a-service customers will be able to engage quickly and easily with Cisco via the Cisco Plus Experience, a self-service engagement portal built on Cisco CX Cloud that allows customers and partners to learn about, consume and track usage of Cisco’s as-a-service portfolio. The intuitive interface will include a marketplace where customers can choose from a broad catalog of Cisco and partner services.

Continuation of Partner-First Model
Cisco Plus will leverage the existing partner ecosystem to help more customers get access to the outcomes they need. Cisco and its partners bring over 20 years of experience, delivering over 2,300 service offers together. Cisco Gold Provider program partners will play a key role in delivering Cisco Plus offers, accelerating their as-a-service practices. Other Cisco partners can also benefit from selling and supporting more complete Cisco experiences.

Industry Response

“As enterprises recommit to their digital transformation strategies, they are increasingly looking for more cloud-like, flexible consumption models for procuring and managing their IT, cloud and network infrastructure. These “as-a-service” deployment options provide much needed flexibility and scalability, along with a simplification of network deployments and ongoing operations. Cisco’s transition to as-a-service via Cisco Plus shows the company is committed to meeting customer needs for predictable costs, cloud-like agility, first-class security, and more.” — Rohit Mehra, Vice President of Network Infrastructure, IDC.

"With Cisco Plus, we couldn't be more excited that Cisco is diving deeper into the as-a-service era, helping us in our transformation to deliver IT as a service to our customers. In this way, we are better equipped to help our customers simplify their IT operations, and free up resources to invest in innovation of their core business." — Jeffrey den Oudsten, CTO Office Solutions Director, Conscia Nederland

"There's always been a push and pull in how to operationalize and finance IT infrastructure. Cisco Plus is the matching pair to a cloud operating model. Delivering Cisco Plus across the majority of Cisco's portfolio helps us at Insight to further deliver the transformation to a cloud operating model our clients want. With Cisco Plus, organizations can not only operate their infrastructure as a cloud, but also consume it in a similar fashion, enabling a true hybrid, multi-cloud.” — Juan Orlandini, Chief Architect Cloud + Data Center Transformation, Insight

“At Presidio, we have seen this shift coming for a long time. Our customers are very clear: They want to consume reliable, best of breed infrastructure with consumption-based financial models. And with the launch of Cisco Plus, Presidio and Cisco in partnership are doing just that.” — Raphael Meyerowitz, Engineering VP, Office of the CTO, Data Center, Presidio