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Cisco Unveils Industry’s First Predictive Services Powered by AI

New offerings designed to manage growing technical skills gap through unique expertise, intelligence and automation

OCTOBER 17, 2017

SAN JOSE, Calif.—October 17, 2017– Cisco today 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 a more 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 highly 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 up to 74 percent, resolve issues up to 41 percent faster and reduce operational costs by up to 21 percent according to the Cisco Optimization Services Executive Summary. 

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.
• 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.

Supporting Quotes

Alatau Services Technologies
“We have been working with Cisco Services for over nine years combining Cisco technical support with our own services and delivering the comprehensive services to our key customers. Through this partnership, we have built a strong collaborative relationship with Cisco experts. Combining Cisco Technical Services Advantage incident management deliverables along with our expertise and 24x7 local language support, we reduced the number of incidents on our customer’s network by 30 percent over the last three years. We look forward to a continued partnership with Cisco Services." 
Vitaly Sychev, Director, Alatau Service Technologies

Bell
“Having the right services engagement with Cisco enables us to sustain our customer experience levels and capture new customers. Cisco Business Critical Services provides the guidance and intelligence to configure new technology properly and reconfigure it safely during scheduled network changes, resulting in fewer issues and less downtime.”
Craig Hudgins, Senior Manager, Technology Architecture, Bell

Oncor
“Cisco Business Critical Services has been essential in our transformation to the Cisco Next-generation Agile Data Center. We were looking for more speed and agility to serve our 10 million customers. Cisco experts advised us through this transition, and with their new analytics and automation we’re better positioned to quickly adopt new technologies, and improve our customers’ experience.”
Tom Kelly, Director of Networks, Oncor

Additional Resources

Executive Blog: Cisco’s New Predictive Services (Joe Cozzolino)
Learn more: Cisco’s Services Landscape Report 
The Power of Services: Customer Success Stories
Cisco Innovators: James Leach and Ulf Vinneras
Read about: Cisco Services
Follow: Cisco Services on Twitter

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that has been making the Internet work since 1984. Our people, products, and partners help society securely connect and seize tomorrow’s digital opportunity today. Discover more at newsroom.cisco.com and follow us on Twitter at @Cisco.

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Cisco Delivers High Quality Wi-Fi Network Connectivity for over 20,000 Attendees at Mobile World Congress Americas, in Partnership with CTIA

OCTOBER 16, 2017

SAN JOSE, Calif. – September 26, 2017 – Cisco announces today it has collaborated with the GSMA, an organization which represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide and produces industry-leading events,  to successfully provide carrier-grade Wi-Fi network connectivity for its inaugural Americas event held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

The Cisco carrier-grade Wi-Fi solution allowed the GSMA to offer high-speed Wi-Fi services to more than 21,000 MWC Americas attendees as well as connectivity to participating exhibitors. Cisco has an ongoing partnership with the GSMA and has powered the Wireless LAN networks with its networking solutions for previous Mobile World Congress events held in Barcelona and Shanghai.

 “The GSMA has had a longstanding partnership with Cisco to provide the connectivity that is so critical to the success of Mobile World Congress events,” said Jon France, Information Technology Director, GSMA. “Cisco’s technology provided a robust, reliable network in a high-density and highly complex environment across the three sites of the Moscone Center. Together we delivered quality connectivity experiences for attendees and exhibitors.”

During the event, nearly 22,000 devices authenticated to the network, with 65 percent of them automatically roaming from their mobile operator’s cellular data network onto the event Wi-Fi network via Hotspot 2.0. Cisco has been an early proponent and ongoing supporter of Hotspot 2.0 in Wireless LAN solutions to enable highly secure and automatic authentication of mobile devices to the Wi-Fi network.   

“Delivering high-speed carrier-grade Wi-Fi service in a venue as large as the Moscone Center requires precise planning, monitoring and management,” said Yvette Kanouff, SVP/GM, Service Provider Business, Cisco. “In close collaboration with the GSMA and the Moscone Center, together we achieved another successful Mobile World Congress through the delivery of high-quality Wi-Fi connectivity. We are pleased to have been selected by the GSMA once again to make this happen and look forward to the possibility of collaborating in the future.”

Additonal Key Highlights:

• Cisco worked with the Moscone Center to augment the existing network with nearly 360 Cisco Aironet Access Points and over 145 Cisco Catalyst 9000 Series next generation switches, covering Moscone Center’s North, South and West exhibit halls.
• Cisco managed the Network Operations Center in Moscone South hall where dashboards showed attendees some of the real-time network performance and analytic metrics.
• Cisco also demonstrated Software-Defined Access (SDA), an innovative, next generation architecture for simplifying network operations, streamlining device provisioning and host onboarding, and automating policy and segmentation.
• An analysis of the MWC Americas network data traffic reveals some interesting metrics from the three-day event:
  • Nearly 22,000 Internet-enabled devices were connected
  • 500 MB per second of peak Internet traffic was achieved
  • 7.5 terabytes of data were carried throughout the conference
  • 78 percent of clients connected via 802.11ac protocol
  • Average data traffic per client was 227MB
  • Average Session Time per user was 48.42 minutes

Cisco Delivers High Quality Wi-Fi Network Connectivity for over 20,000 Attendees at Mobile World Congress Americas, in Partnership with CTIA

OCTOBER 16, 2017

SAN JOSE, Calif. – September 26, 2017 – Cisco announces today it has collaborated with the GSMA, an organization which represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide and produces industry-leading events,  to successfully provide carrier-grade Wi-Fi network connectivity for its inaugural Americas event held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

The Cisco carrier-grade Wi-Fi solution allowed the GSMA to offer high-speed Wi-Fi services to more than 21,000 MWC Americas attendees as well as connectivity to participating exhibitors. Cisco has an ongoing partnership with the GSMA and has powered the Wireless LAN networks with its networking solutions for previous Mobile World Congress events held in Barcelona and Shanghai.

 “The GSMA has had a longstanding partnership with Cisco to provide the connectivity that is so critical to the success of Mobile World Congress events,” said Jon France, Information Technology Director, GSMA. “Cisco’s technology provided a robust, reliable network in a high-density and highly complex environment across the three sites of the Moscone Center. Together we delivered quality connectivity experiences for attendees and exhibitors.”

During the event, nearly 22,000 devices authenticated to the network, with 65 percent of them automatically roaming from their mobile operator’s cellular data network onto the event Wi-Fi network via Hotspot 2.0. Cisco has been an early proponent and ongoing supporter of Hotspot 2.0 in Wireless LAN solutions to enable highly secure and automatic authentication of mobile devices to the Wi-Fi network.   

“Delivering high-speed carrier-grade Wi-Fi service in a venue as large as the Moscone Center requires precise planning, monitoring and management,” said Yvette Kanouff, SVP/GM, Service Provider Business, Cisco. “In close collaboration with the GSMA and the Moscone Center, together we achieved another successful Mobile World Congress through the delivery of high-quality Wi-Fi connectivity. We are pleased to have been selected by the GSMA once again to make this happen and look forward to the possibility of collaborating in the future.”

Additonal Key Highlights:

• Cisco worked with the Moscone Center to augment the existing network with nearly 360 Cisco Aironet Access Points and over 145 Cisco Catalyst 9000 Series next generation switches, covering Moscone Center’s North, South and West exhibit halls.
• Cisco managed the Network Operations Center in Moscone South hall where dashboards showed attendees some of the real-time network performance and analytic metrics.
• Cisco also demonstrated Software-Defined Access (SDA), an innovative, next generation architecture for simplifying network operations, streamlining device provisioning and host onboarding, and automating policy and segmentation.
• An analysis of the MWC Americas network data traffic reveals some interesting metrics from the three-day event:
  • Nearly 22,000 Internet-enabled devices were connected
  • 500 MB per second of peak Internet traffic was achieved
  • 7.5 terabytes of data were carried throughout the conference
  • 78 percent of clients connected via 802.11ac protocol
  • Average data traffic per client was 227MB
  • Average Session Time per user was 48.42 minutes

Telenor and Cisco introduce ‘WorkingGroupTwo’

OCTOBER 05, 2017

SAN JOSE and FORNEBU, October 5, 2017 – Telenor and Cisco today announced their support to launch“WorkingGroupTwo” (WG2), a new business entity that will offer mobile operators a cloud solutions platform designed to radically increase product innovation and reduce time to market.

Many mobile operators have struggled to bring new innovative services to market fast enough. The launch of the WG2 platform will help accelerate the pace of product innovation in order to stay relevant for customers. Using the platform, mobile operators will be able to quickly launch new services across IoT and other industry verticals, and better position their business to sell to enterprise customers. 

“The “WorkingGroupTwo” platform is a Telenor innovation. I am proud that we as a company are able to leverage new technologies to make a pioneering telco platform with the potential of bringing the whole industry forward. We are firmly committed to supporting “WorkingGroupTwo”, and want to give the entity the freedom to unleash wider industry eco-system dynamics. For this reason we have also set up a strong global partnership with Cisco,” said Sigve Brekke, CEO of Telenor Group.

“Cisco’s partnership with Telenor to launch “WorkingGroupTwo” demonstrates how we are driving positive change for our customers,” said Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco.  “Our joint efforts will help mobile operators automate the delivery of mobile cloud services and deliver innovation at a faster pace.”

Erlend Prestgard has been appointed CEO of “WorkingGroupTwo”.

“Our aim for the new company is that it will bring the internet ecosystem dynamics closer to the telco industry. We want it to be easy to become an operator, and to make new products. Our mission is to expose the powerful capabilities of operators to a wider community, and together with partners, we hope to build products that consumers have never seen before,” said Prestgard.

About Telenor

Telenor Group is one of the world’s major mobile operators. We keep our customers connected in 13 markets across Scandinavia, Central Eastern Europe, and Asia. More than 30,000 employees are committed to responsible business conduct and being our customers’ favourite partner in digital life. Connecting the world has been Telenor’s domain for more than 160 years, and we are driven by a singular vision: to empower societies. 

About Cisco 
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that has been making the Internet work since 1984. Our people, products, and partners help society securely connect and seize tomorrow's digital opportunity today. Discover more at newsroom.cisco.com and follow us on Twitter at @Cisco.

About “WorkingGroupTwo” (WG2)

“WorkingGroupTwo” is a company offering a mobile-core-network as-a-service and as-a-platform. WG2 combines the use of modern technologies with the reach of mobile operators to create new offerings. Our purpose is to radically enhance the innovation capacity of the mobile industry by making mobile telecom services even more relevant and useful to customers. Board and employees own about 5% of the company, with Telenor and Digital Alpha LLC owning the remaining shares in equal proportion.

Birger Magnus has been appointed Chairman of the Board of WG2.

Leading Netherlands Cloud Hosting Provider Uniserver Accelerates Datacenter Network Provisioning Using Cisco Virtual Topology System

OCTOBER 04, 2017

San Jose, Calif. October 4, 2017— With the goal of continuing to serve its customers with quality and innovative cloud and business solutions, Netherlands-based cloud hosting provider, Uniserver, is partnering with Cisco to help drive its network innovation to achieve greater programmability and accelerate provisioning for its data center network fabric.

Uniserver has deployed Cisco Virtual Topology System (VTS), a standards-based, open software-overlay management and provisioning system that will bring sophisticated network provisioning for virtual and physical infrastructures. This capability has enabled Uniserver to reduce the time to deploy new services with high scalability and flexibility.

"Continuously innovating and investing in new network technologies is essential to provide our customers with quality services and offer the most reliable cloud infrastructure,” said Chango Eersel, Director Operations, Uniserver. “With the support from Cisco, VTS and Quanza Engineering our automated data center network has allowed us to rapidly offer new services and solutions to our customers and partners.”

With the deployment of Cisco VTS, Uniserver has also benefited from:

• Increased simplicity and a repeatable process for high-quality, error-free provisioning.
• Transparent Integration, providing support for existing multivendor infrastructure and operational systems like OpenStack and vCenter.
• Faster network provisioning.

“Our focus is to help service providers such as Uniserver, as well as enterprise operations teams, reduce network configuration complexity and enhance the agility of their multi-tenant cloud environments,” said Jonathan Davidson, SVP/GM Service Provider Networking, Cisco. “This is in line with their mission of simplifying complex IT, and we are pleased to help enable Uniserver provide quality of service to its partners through the adoption of this technology. We are committed to continuing to support them in their network transformation journey.”

Cisco is leading the disruption in the industry with our technology innovations in systems, silicon, optics, services and security, and our unrivalled expertise in mass-scale networking, automation, optical, cable access, video, and mobility.  This enables service providers, media and web companies to reduce cost and complexity, help secure their networks, and grow revenue.

Additional Supporting Resources

• Blog: State of the Art Network for Uniserver
• Blog: Uniserver Makes Cloud Infrastructure Look Easy
• Cisco Virtual Topology System
• Cisco Service Provider business

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that has been making the Internet work since 1984. Our people, products, and partners help society securely connect and seize tomorrow's digital opportunity today. Discover more at newsroom.cisco.com and follow us on Twitter at @Cisco.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.  

Cisco Completes Acquisition of Springpath

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Cisco announced today that it has completed its acquisition of Springpath, Inc., a Sunnyvale-based leader in hyperconvergence software. Springpath has developed a distributed file system purpose-built for hyperconvergence that enables server-based storage systems. The acquisition allows Cisco to continue to deliver next-generation data center innovation to its customers, and aligns with its overall transition to providing more software-centric solutions.

Cisco's acquisition of Springpath is the culmination of the long-standing strategic relationship between the two companies, having worked together since 2016 to launch and deliver HyperFlex, the industry's first fully integrated hyperconverged infrastructure system.

The acquisition will allow Cisco to continue to grow its computing business, enabling more customers to realize the benefits of simple and economic software-defined infrastructure. As part of Cisco, it will serve as a meaningful addition to Cisco's data center portfolio and will help Cisco provide simplicity and agility to its data center customers.

Cisco acquired Springpath for $320 million in cash and assumed equity awards, plus additional retention-based incentives.

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that has been making the Internet work since 1984. Our people, products and partners help society securely connect and seize tomorrow's digital opportunity today. Discover more at thenetwork.cisco.com and follow us on Twitter at @Cisco.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may be deemed to contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding the acquisition allowing Cisco to continue to deliver next-generation data center innovation to its customers, aligning with its overall transition to providing more software-centric solutions, and allowing Cisco to continue to grow its computing business, enabling more customers to realize the benefits of simple and economic software-defined infrastructure, the expected benefits to Cisco and its customers from completing the acquisition, and plans regarding Springpath personnel. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results due a variety of factors, including, among other things, the potential impact on the business of Springpath due to the uncertainty about the acquisition, the retention of employees of Springpath and the ability of Cisco to successfully integrate Springpath and to achieve expected benefits, business and economic conditions and growth trends in the networking industry, customer markets and various geographic regions, global economic conditions and uncertainties in the geopolitical environment and other risk factors set forth in Cisco's most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. Any forward-looking statements in this release are based on limited information currently available to Cisco, which is subject to change, and Cisco will not necessarily update the information.