Service Opportunities for Midsize/Small Service Providers Are Key to Competitive Differentiation

Competitive intensity across the service provider landscape has increased significantly over the past few years. While most pronounced in the large tier 1 service provider segment, the level of competition has recently picked up in the midsize and small communication service provider market. The competitive landscape now includes a broader set of providers such as the following:

◉ Cable providers broadening their portfolio of services beyond traditional video services and expanding into new areas like wireless

◉ Gaming companies offering their content as a service in conjunction with cloud and/or connectivity providers

◉ Electrical cooperatives emerging as the latest new entrants to the communications market as they look to diversify their business and bring broadband access solutions to rural areas

◉ Cloud providers playing an increasing role in hosting small-medium business workloads

To maintain competitiveness, midsize/small service providers must innovate at the service level and focus on key customer segments where they can provide differentiated value. This innovation will include improving the service enablement process to drive efficiencies and accelerating the time to market for new service offerings.

Improving the Service Enablement Process

Most midsize/small service providers interviewed as part of IDC’s SP Digital Readiness Survey are primarily focused on expanding their existing set of services to new customers and broadening their partner channel; these providers see such initiatives as key to expanding their customer base. However, over time, these providers will increasingly look to develop compelling new service offerings to customers. In fact, nearly 40% of midsize/small service providers indicated that the rollout of new services is an essential component of their growth strategy. These providers are either evaluating, planning, or executing a strategy to deliver new services to an expanding base of customers (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 – Midsize/Small Service Provider Growth Strategy

Question – What role does growing your business through adding new services, entering new markets, or targeting new types of customers play in your business strategy?

n = 201

Source: IDC’s SP Digital Readiness Survey, 2021

As midsize/small service providers look to offer new services to market, they are equally focused on making improvements to service enablement and provisioning by targeting process efficiencies and expanding their service portfolio to drive profitable growth. As part of this effort, midsize/small service providers are in the process of upgrading their internal systems with a focus on operational functions critical to stimulate new sales such as:

◉ Billing (monetization)

◉ Customer order management

◉ Pricing models

◉ Partner enablement

IDC believes that data accuracy, the appropriate pricing models, the incorporation of analytics at every step of the service creation process, and work with critical partners (app developers, compute/storage providers, and channel partners) are all essential steps in supporting the efforts of midsize/small service providers to offer new compelling services to their customer base.

New Service Priorities

On the service portfolio side, there are a collection of offerings that midsize/small service providers will emphasize to satisfy customer demand for secure and reliable connectivity solutions. In the enterprise segment, private cellular services, cloud-based network services and managed services will be key areas of focus for midsize/small service providers.

According to IDC’s SP Digital Readiness Survey, midsize/small service providers indicated that private cellular services, network as a service, and managed services were their top three service priorities (see Figure 2).

Figure 2 – Priorities for Expanding Existing Service Portfolio

Question – Which of the following services represent priorities to expand your services portfolio? (Select all that apply.)

n = 147 customer-facing and internal services respondents

Source: IDC’s SP Digital Readiness Survey, 2021

Private Cellular Services. 48% of midsize/small service providers cited private cellular as their top service priority; they should also look to add incremental value on top of their connectivity solutions by partnering with ISVs and bundling industry-specific solutions that address requirements of companies in specific industry segments. IDC believes there is a broad partner ecosystem developing to service the needs of midsize and small enterprises, comprised of communication service providers, managed service providers, ISVs, VARs, and cloud providers.

Network as a Service. – While network as a service (NaaS) is still in its infancy, enterprises see value in the ability to quickly procure, deploy, manage, and retire networking assets. NaaS will enable customers to select the hardware and services to transform their network, which allows for faster access to new technologies with less risk to existing operations, improved management, faster refresh cycles, and the ability to scale with a few clicks.

Managed Services. Given the avalanche of new technologies that enterprises are evaluating, the complexity associated with implementing and operating these solutions will drive demand for managed services. This will particularly be the case in the midsize and small enterprise market segment and remote branch offices of larger enterprises where there is a lack of in-house technical expertise. IDC believes that these companies will prefer to transfer the cost of network ownership to experienced third parties with scale.

Source: cisco.com

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Simplify Network Security with Cisco Secure Firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) on AWS

Introduction

With traditional firewalls, network security teams are charged with the heavy lifting of deploying new solutions. They are responsible for a variety of costs, including licensing, appliance, related infrastructure updates, and ongoing maintenance. From a time-value perspective, inserting firewalls also creates additional complexity for NetOps and SecOps teams, delaying time to deployment in production environments due to design and testing required to integrate the new firewall into the network.

To become more agile, organizations are increasingly moving towards deploying SaaS-based security offerings hosted directly by vendors. According to Gartner, by 2025, 30% of new deployments of distributed branch-office firewalls will switch to firewall-as-a-service, up from less than 10% in 2021.

Reduce management and deployment complexity

Cisco has collaborated with AWS to simplify the way organizations secure their public cloud infrastructure using Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) where Cisco Secure Firewall is integrated with the AWS Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB). AWS Gateway Load Balancer enables elastic scaling, improves availability, and simplifies insertion and management of the Cisco Secure Firewall. Starting with version 7.1 of Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense, we support integration with AWS Gateway Load Balancer.

What does this mean for Cisco Secure Firewall customers?

Simply put, experience your firewall working for you, not the other way around. Cisco Secure Firewall-as-a-service on AWS enables you to simply consume our virtual firewall in AWS, without rearchitecting, deploying, or managing new infrastructure. Now, you can simplify security at its core by leaving the heavy lifting to us. Other benefits include:

◉ Simplified security architecture – Provisioning of firewalls and control plane infrastructure are managed by Cisco, saving time and accelerating value.

◉ Flexible and scalable security – Elastic firewall infrastructure meets demand by scaling as throughput requirements change.

◉ Security that works with you – Simplified firewall insertion delivers the security you need, without having to rearchitect your network. Additionally, traffic routing configurations and firewall monitoring are performed by Cisco.

◉ Stay agile – Say goodbye to the traditional refresh cycle and stay instantly up to date with the latest firewall software versions and IPS signatures. No hardware required.

◉ Achieve better ROI, fast – Our OPEX-based model will demonstrate to your CFO that you’re both a technology and business partner. And you’ll reduce upfront costs, paying for only what you need.

Customers also benefit from support for dynamic policies for AWS tags, plus improved threat detection, simplified customization, and enhanced performance of our latest, industry-leading open-source IPS, Snort3.

Architecture and use cases for Secure Firewall-as-a-service on AWS

Cisco Secure Firewall-as-a-service on AWS consists of:

A.) Managed Gateway Load Balancer endpoints (MGE) – MGEs reside in the customer’s VPC/account and are responsible for routing the traffic from the customer’s VPC to the Cisco-managed security VPC, where it will be inspected.

B.) Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) – GWLB resides on the Cisco managed VPC/account, this is responsible for hosting the Secure Firewall appliance fleet.

Together, these components bring best-in-class managed security infrastructure for customers using AWS.

With Cisco Secure Firewall-as-a-service on AWS, we intend to support:

◉ Inspection for ingress (inbound) and egress (outbound) traffic from and to the internet

◉ East-West (E/W) traffic between subnets (resources) within a VPC (Intra-VPC) and between VPCs (Inter-VPC)

◉ Traffic between the on-premises network and customer VPC’s, when passed over a Transit Gateway using VPN.

East-West traffic

East-west traffic flow for firewall-as-a-service

Ingress and egress traffic

Ingress and egress traffic flow for firewall-as-a-service

 

Choose between fully managed and partially managed Firewall-as-a-service

We recognize some customers want a fully managed service while others wish to configure their own policy. To satisfy both, Cisco is offering a partially managed Firewall-as-a-service option as well. This option provides the customer with most of the benefits of the fully managed service above, but with a partially managed environment where Cisco continues to manage the infrastructure, but lets the customer retain policy management responsibilities.

And if customers wish to manage and deploy their own

Looking to manage and deploy your own Cisco firewalls on AWS? The release of Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense 7.1 introduces GENEVE support, integrating Cisco Secure Firewall with AWS Gateway Load Balancer, giving customers full control of their infrastructure while simplifying deployment, management, and scaling of firewalls. This integration ensures traffic to and from AWS VMs are inspected by Secure Firewall without requiring any routing changes. This enables rapidly scalable, highly available security with simplified insertion, removing the need to rearchitect your network.

Source: cisco.com

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Cisco CCNP Data Center 300-630 DCACIA: Exam Tips and Benefits

CCNP Data Center certifications is a professional level certification (Data Center) offered by Cisco. This certification is suitable for those aspirants who want to work in data Center Administration. The CCNP Data Center Certification programs establish a foundation for installing, handling, configuring, and managing a Data Center Infrastructure. It also proves your skills as well as your ability to manage data center solutions. By earning this Cisco certification, you will be qualified for a promising IT career in Data Center Technologies. This post will focus on the CCNP Data Center concentration exam, 300-630 DCACIA: Implementing Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure – Advanced.

Cisco 300-630 DCACIA Exam Details

Cisco 300-630 DCACIA, Implementing Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure - Advanced is a 90-minute exam associated with the Cisco Certified Specialist – ACI Advanced Implementation certification. This exam measures an applicant's high-level knowledge and skills of Cisco switching in ACI mode, including configuration, implementation, management, and troubleshooting. The course, Implementing Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure – Advanced (DCACIA), helps applicants prepare for this exam.

Cisco 300-630 Exam Topics

• ACI Packet Forwarding
• Advanced ACI Policies and Integrations
• Multipod
• Multisite
• Traditional network with ACI

Simple Tips for Cisco 300-630 DCACIA Exam Preparation

Many websites claim to be specialists in the Cisco exams and certifications and manage to fill the Internet with information on how to pass the 300-630 DCACIA exam successfully. But most of them advise you of irrational actions or don't advise important anything at all. Though some information can help you get through your exam, you should never misuse your time on any platform that you don't know without checking its trustworthiness.

Here are simple but proven tips that can help you prepare for the Cisco CCNP Data Center 300-630 DCACIA exam with amazing colors:

• Have a reasonable study plan with adequate study targets.
• Organize your revision and design it to help you obtain your preparation goals. Have a proper schedule to spread out all the exam topics you need to complete within a specified time frame.
• Read the exam concepts carefully before starting Cisco 300-630 DCACIA exam preparation. Make sure you avoid cramming. You need to understand the exam concepts.
• Be sure to take advantage of reliable study resources. Otherwise, all other tips described here will not help you pass the 300-630 DCACIA exam.
• Take Cisco 300-630 DCACIA practice test. This is an excellent way to gauge your preparation level. Make them one of your main prep materials.
• Refresh your memory when you are done with your preparation by going through everything you have studied.

Also Read: How Practice Test Will Help You Pass Cisco 300-630 DCACIA Exam Fluently?

• Eat healthy food, stay hydrated, take small breaks in between, and have a good night's sleep to improve your concentration and enhance your overall thinking capacity. Trying to study when you are tired, sleepy, or hungry will not fetch any positive outcome.
• Read each question to understand what it means before giving an answer to it during the actual exam.
• Manage your time correctly and be sure not to spend more than enough time on one question.

Core Benefits of Cisco 300-630 DCACIA Exam for Your Professional Career

The first and most important benefit of passing 300-630 DCACIA is that you will receive the certification from Cisco, which is a leading vendor in networking. Taking this exam successfully paves the way towards CCNP Data Center certification, which the top organizations in the IT field acknowledge. Having such a certification confirms shows recognition to the entire industry and significantly promotes you. Another advantage of adding Cisco DCACIA to your resume is that it unlocks a door to excellent job opportunities in more reputable and more prominent organizations. This certification exam also helps you to go and work overseas as it is accepted worldwide. CCNP Data Center is a very popular certification in the IT market today. It will qualify you for several prestigious positions.

Popular Job Roles in Data Center domain:

• System administrator
• Network administrator
• Systems engineer
• Network engineer

Passing the 300-630 DCACIA exam gives a boost to your professional career by offering advanced potential. CCNP CCNP Data Center is a professional-level certification, and getting it shows that you have gained updated and advanced skills. The employers will be ready to offer you a higher salary because they know that your skill set can lead their organizations to new heights. You should understand that promotion is a crucial affair in your career. Favorably, by taking this Cisco exam, you will have more significant opportunities of being promoted to a more renowned position because you hold advanced skills and expertise for a higher job position.

Last but not least, passing the Cisco 300-630 exam makes you eligible to go for more advanced Cisco certificates that can greatly help in advancing your knowledge and skills in the future. It is acknowledged that the networking industry is loaded with many opportunities, which become simpler to explore as you upgrade your networking expertise. Moreover, there are always many possibilities for growth.

Conclusion

Get started today and take the Cisco 300-630 exam to ace your career because it provides advanced knowledge that is significant for IT professionals. Always remember that the skills learned are applicable for passing the Cisco DCACIA exam and for solving real-world problems. Be CCNP Data Center certified and enjoy the benefits that life brings you. For that, concentrate on your exam preparation.

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Accelerating Analytics Workloads with Cloudera, NVIDIA, and Cisco

As today’s leading companies utilize artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to discover insights hidden in massive amounts of data, many are realizing the benefits of deploying in a hybrid or private cloud environment, rather than a public cloud. This is especially true for use cases with data sets larger than 2 TB or with specific compliance requirements.

In response, Cisco, Cloudera, and NVIDIA have partnered to deliver an on-premises big data solution that integrates Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) with NVIDIA GPUs running on the Cisco Data Intelligence Platform (CDIP).

Cisco Data Intelligence Platform: a journey to hybrid cloud

The CDIP is a thoughtfully designed private cloud that supports data lake requirements. CDIP as a private cloud is based on the new Cisco UCS M6 family of servers that support NVIDIA GPUs and third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable family processors with PCIe fourth-generation capabilities.

CDIP supports data-intensive workloads on the CDP Private Cloud Base. The CDP Private Cloud Base provides storage and supports traditional data lake environments, including Apache Ozone (a next-generation file system for data lake).

◉ CDIP built with the Cisco UCS C240 M6 Server for storage (Apache Ozone and HDFS), which supports CDP Private Cloud Base, extends the capabilities of the Cisco UCS rack server portfolio with third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors. It supports more than 43 percent more cores per socket and 33 percent more memory than the previous generation.

CDIP also supports compute-rich (AI/ML) and compute-intensive workloads with CDP Private Cloud Experiences—all while providing storage consolidation with Apache Ozone on the Cisco UCS infrastructure. The CDP Private Cloud Experiences provide different experience- or persona-based processing of workloads—data analyst, data scientist, and data engineer, for example—for data stored in the CDP Private Cloud Base.

◉ CDIP built with the Cisco UCS X-Series for CDP Private Cloud Experiences is a modular system that is adaptable and future-ready, meeting the needs of modern applications. The solution improves operational efficiency and agility at scale.

This CDIP solution is fully managed through Cisco Intersight. Cisco Intersight simplifies hybrid cloud management, and, among other things, moves server management from the network into the cloud.

Cisco also provides multiple Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs), which are available to assist in deploying this private cloud big data solution.

Integrating a big data solution to tackle AI/ML workloads

Increasingly, market-leading companies are recognizing the true transformational potential of AI/ML trained by their data. Data scientists are utilizing data sets on a magnitude and scale never seen before, implementing use cases such as transforming supply chain models, responding to increased levels of fraud, predicting customer churn, and developing new product lines. To be successful, data scientists need the tools and underlying processing power to train, evaluate, iterate, and retrain their models to obtain highly accurate results.

On the software side of such a solution, many data scientists and engineers rely on the CDP to create and manage secure data lakes and provide the machine learning-derived services needed to tackle the most common and important analytics workloads.

But to deploy the solution built with the CDP, IT also needs to decide where the underlying processing power and storage should reside. If processing power is too slow, the utility of the insights derived can diminish greatly. On the other hand, if costs are too high, the work is at risk of being cost-prohibitive and not funded at the outset.

Data set size a major consideration for big data AI/ML deployments

The sheer size of the data to be processed and analyzed has a direct impact on the cost and speed at which companies can train and operate their AI/ML models. Data set size can also heavily influence where to deploy infrastructure—whether in a public, private, or hybrid cloud.

Consider an autonomous driving use case for example. Working with a major automobile manufacturer, the Cisco Data Intelligence Platform ran a proof of concept (POC) that collects data from approximately 150 cars. Each car generates about 2 TB of data per hour, which collectively adds up to some 2 PB of data ingested every day and stored in the company’s data lake. The cost to move this data into a public cloud would be staggering, and, therefore, an on-premises, private cloud option makes more financial sense.

Furthermore, this data lake contains about 50 PB of hot data that is stored for a month and hundreds of petabytes of cold data that must also be stored.

Considering infrastructure performance

In addition, the performance of the underlying infrastructure in many AI/ML deployments matters. In our autonomous driving use case example, the POC requirement is to run more than a million and a half simulations each day. To provide enough compute performance to meet this requirement takes a combination of general-purpose CPU and GPU acceleration.

To meet this requirement, CDIP begins with top-of-the-line performance, as illustrated through TPC-xHS benchmarks. In addition, CDIP is available with integrated NVIDIA GPUs, delivering a GPU-accelerated data center to power the most demanding CDP workloads. To meet the performance requirements of this POC, 50,000 cores and accelerated compute nodes were utilized, provided by the CDIP solution deploying Cisco UCS rack servers.

Source: cisco.com

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Improving Application Experience with Deep Network Visibility

In the not-too-distant past, everything in the application and networking stack was under IT’s control. Workloads lived securely in the on-premises data center—people sat in their campus offices connected to the secure wireless network, and an MPLS service with an SLA connected branch offices to the data center and each other.

Today, workforce productivity depends on cloud and SaaS applications that often rely on the public cloud infrastructure, which in turn depends on the internet as part or all the WAN connectivity. The internet paths depend on a multitude of ISPs, CDNs and advanced network services. Hybrid and native clouds applications are mostly containerized, so performance can be affected by the communication paths among the microservices, both in the data center and cloud. The total application experience as perceived by the workforce is dependent on the performance of all the components of applications and network connections acting in concert. If one element falters, the whole experience can be impacted.

NetOps and DevOps need to understand the interdependencies among the component applications and tune the enterprise network and internet paths accordingly. A unifying view can only be provided by the network fabric that monitors and analyzes the full stack of interlacing components: from the foundational network data layer to the software-defined WAN to application containers in the cloud. With the workforce accessing applications from literally everywhere, all the time, IT requires pervasive, real-time monitoring of network, internet, and application performance with auto-healing capabilities. This is Deep Network Visibility, driven by software-defined controllers and network analytics that enable ​action, policy, and automation.

Visibility Begins with a Comprehensive Historical View

To improve application experience, IT needs tools to record, analyze, and report on network and application activity at a massive scale to build a deep historical data set against which to apply AI and Machine Reasoning tools. Hybrid and cloud applications consist of multiple micro-components connected by east-west traffic in the data center or cloud service. Continuous monitoring and analysis are needed to optimize application experience because many inter-application communication issues are transitory and difficult to replicate. Application performance needs to be recorded for machine analysis to determine recurring issues and root causes. Deep Network Visibility from the perspective of the application requires:

◉ Application experience as measured by ThousandEyes, NetFlow, and AppDynamics.

◉ Dependency graph to the underlying composite application services and infrastructures.

◉ Comprehensive availability and performance data on each of the supporting components such as composite application services, public cloud services, ISPs, networking devices, compute and storage infrastructure.

The irony of having mountains of telemetry and activity logs awaiting analysis by overworked IT teams is that there is too much noise in too much data for humans to deal with in a timely manner. When the volume of data is beyond human scale and below human sensitivity, machine reasoning (MR) can automate the analysis of trillions of bytes of switch and router telemetry, wireless radio fingerprints, and network access point interferences to uncover patterns in the chaos, and turn the findings into actionable insights and automated mitigation actions.

Automated Visibility with AI Network Analytics

To make full use of the deep historical and real-time data, IT can take advantage of an analytics software stack that can:

◉ Use purpose-built applications to augment human engineers in NetSecOps with Insights into network performance and security vulnerabilities.

◉ Leverage machine-speed analytics and knowledge-base Machine Reasoning Engine (MRE) to unburden NetSecOps from mundane monitoring tasks to focus on proactive digital transformation projects with DevOps.

◉ Achieve massive collection, storage, and analysis of diverse data lakes—collections of anonymized network and application telemetry based on volume, velocity, and variety of data to compare performance and security metrics.

For several decades, Cisco has been building a data lake of worldwide, anonymized customer telemetry in parallel with a knowledge-base of expert troubleshooting experience, both of which are available to machine reasoning algorithms under the command and control of Cisco DNA Center. With Cisco AI Network Analytics, NetOps can, for example, be forewarned of increases in Wi-Fi interference, network bottlenecks, uneven device onboarding times, and office traffic loads in the more traditional data center and campus network environments.

Better Outcomes with Data and Automation

Visibility for cloud-based applications, however, needs a different approach as much of the application infrastructure is not under direct control of IT. Direct internet connections to clouds can be unreliable—especially for latency-sensitive applications—unless they are monitored and automatically tuned using cloud onramps.

Gaining deep visibility with Cisco Cloud OnRamps for each of the major cloud services—Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud, as well as colocation, and SaaS platforms—provides the ability to monitor and set performance parameters that are automatically applied to maintain the proper quality of service based on the type of application and cloud provider. Paths are calculated by tracking characteristics including packet loss, latency, and jitter in the data plane tunnels among cloud workloads and edge devices. Cisco AppDynamics and ThousandEyes provide application layer visibility for inter-cloud and intra-cloud dynamics that enables NetOps and DevOps to monitor and identify factors affecting application experience.

Network Analytics + Software-Driven Controllers = Deep Network Visibility

Cisco AI Network Analytics working in conjunction with Software-Driven Controllers also enables Deep Network Visibility. Operational intents and security policies defined in software-driven controllers are compared with telemetry and operational anomalies detected by an MRE to automatically adjust operations or isolate rogue devices. Always-on AI Analytics watch over the distributed workforce and workloads at machine-speed, making automatic adjustments or sending alerts with suggested remediations to appropriate levels of IT personnel or to ITSM applications to log and kickoff trouble tickets. Over time, NetOps and DevOps can fine-tune application performance using a consistent flow of insights from analytics to adapt to changes in workloads, workforce, and workplace.

AI and MRE also provide customized recommendations on updates and patches for controllers. Upgrading controllers carries a certain risk given the complexity and many differences among existing network configurations. Knowing in advance what affect an update can have—and even if it applies to the existing configuration—can bring peace of mind to the process. Does a specific configuration warrant a patch if that issue is not relevant? If not, then there is no reason to force an update that is not required. Are controllers running an OS version with active PSIRT vulnerabilities? NetOps is alerted to put a higher priority on upgrading those specific controllers. Automation and visibility go hand in hand to make operation teams more efficient so they can spend time on more valuable tasks.

Deep Visibility Provides Operational Simplicity and Serviceability

Deep Network Visibility is the foundation of a network and security operating model that ensures application experience and trust. The ultimate outcome of attaining Deep Network Visibility is to make all the operations teams—NetOps, SecOps, DevOps and CloudOps—able to work together to raise the levels of serviceability across the application infrastructure. Automations that support Deep Network Visibility simplify operations by eliminating many of the time-consuming and tedious tasks of network monitoring and troubleshooting. I will address how Cisco DNA Center delivers specific capabilities for the four network personas in a future blog post.

At Cisco, we believe: “The more you can see, the more you can solve. The more you can solve, the more you can automate. And the more you can automate, the more resilient and agile your entire business becomes.” Automation with Deep Network Visibility is key to ensuring that application experience delivered to the workforce and customers meets or exceeds expectations.

Source: cisco.com

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Driving down IT OPEX with a Webex bot

Every IT organization strives for excellence by continuously driving down their operating expenses (OPEX) while providing the best-in-class experience to their user base. Several factors affect OPEX, such as increasing IT cases that require more resources to address recurring requests. Having a focused approach to reduce cases can significantly optimize on cost and improve the efficiency of IT Operations teams. One way that Cisco IT is driving down OPEX is by harnessing the power of automation.

By the end of September 2020, the number of service request cases to Management & Finance IT’s (M&F IT) Order Management (OM) Automation team in Cisco had been cut by half and operational costs reduced by one-third. The solution:  a self-help Webex bot called ‘OM-BOT’ that the OM Automation team created to assist with service request cases.

OM-BOT helps users answer queries without requiring any IT teams’ intervention. Below are some benefits of implementing OM-BOT:

◉ Avoided 140 IT cases per month

◉ Improved Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR): cases get created in the correct queue, reducing the time it takes to resolve cases

◉ Improved case routing: OM-BOT links user to the correct team to solve their cases

◉ Enhanced user experience: we meet with users weekly to discuss feedback, most of it positive

From January 2020 to September 2020, we, the OM IT Support Team, were receiving an average of 285 cases per month (see Figure 1). However, in the last six months, we’ve seen an average of 145 cases per month — a reduction of about 48.5 percent, most of which can be attributed to the usage of OM-BOT.

Figure 1. The steady decline in service request cases under Order Management track in the last 2 years

Why did we build OM-BOT?

In early 2020, the OM Automation team realized that our incident case count per quarter was very high. When we investigated, we found that a lot of cases didn’t require IT fixes.  Users were seeking IT’s help to fetch data and information from the backend as it was not available in any of the tools or applications they used. We realized that we were spending a significant amount of time and resources in addressing non-technical related requests and we needed to get a little creative to solve this problem. We started exploring ideas on how to tackle it.

How did we build OM-BOT?

Around the same time, Cisco’s BotLite team were showcasing their new DIY No-code Low-code framework and toolkit with a rich GUI to create a bot with minimum technical expertise. BotLite leverages Cisco’s MindMeld and Webex and allows users to have human-like interaction with the bots they create through Natural Language Processing (NLP).

We saw this as a great opportunity to build our own bot to help answer user queries reported in service request cases. Our bot could easily connect to databases, pull the required information, and display it for the users in Webex. We formed a small, agile automation team of 3 members and identified the scenarios that caused the most confusion for users (See Figure 2). We set up a few sessions with the BotLite support team for their initial guidance on building a bot. It was pleasantly surprising to learn how simple and quick it was to create bot scenarios. After 4 sprint cycles, our first OM-Self Assist-BOT (now known as OM-BOT) was ready for our end users.

Figure 2. A few of the common scenarios configured in the BOT

 

Did we face any challenges?

Once our bot was ready, our major challenge was end user adoption. Initially, not many users were aware of the bot or how it could help them. We continued to see a spike in request case numbers, and we were still spending a lot of manual effort addressing these requests.

We set up a weekly connect call with the team that was raising about 90 percent of request cases. We started showcasing the bot to them, gave demos on how to interact with the bot, and shared the bot user manual. We discussed the 13 scenarios that we identified and how the bot could solve these scenarios.  The team realized the potential of OM-BOT and spread the word within their extended team. The bot was helping them to get the required details quickly and they did not have to spend time creating IT cases. It was a win-win for our teams! We started seeing results from October 2020 onward and service request cases declined.

Another challenge was more technical in nature. We had to connect to two databases (Oracle and MongoDB) to fetch the data, but the BotLite framework only allowed a connection to the Oracle database. Without data from both databases, the information we wanted to provide to users was incomplete.

To fetch the data from both databases, we leveraged the BotLite API feature. Our team built an API to connect to MongoDB. It’s able to fetch data, combine it with the result from the Oracle database, and then display the information in Webex in a human-readable format. If the requested data is large, we can provide the result in a downloadable spreadsheet.

 

What is the roadmap ahead for the bot?

We regularly collect and implement feedback from our end-users. We receive their enhancement requests, and they also notify us when they encounter issues with the bot.

Some bot usage metrics from 2021 include:

◉ Over 600 unique users from across the world interacted with OM-BOT

◉ More than 20,000 messages were sent

◉ OM-BOT is accurately answering users’ queries, with a 97 percent Hit Rate

In the future, we want to continue driving down opex by providing users with “self-healing” options. By this, we mean, if the bot identifies an issue, it can also guide the user on how to fix the issue with some simple clicks in Webex itself rather than creating IT cases. We want to give this option to users as it will help us in case avoidance and improve the time to resolve such issues for them — which is critical for teams when we are working during time-crunch situations, especially, during our Month-End and Quarter-End periods.

Key Takeaways

In the past, chatbots were a nice gimmick without any concrete benefit, but today they are an indispensable tool in the corporate world and really help drive down OPEX. Of course, developing and running a chatbot is a lot of work and requires a financial investment, but there are many good reasons to build and implement a bot. Our efforts in creating OM-BOT have not only achieved case and cost reductions, but has also ensured that as the OM IT Support Team, we are now able to provide a best-in-class experience to our users. The bot enables our IT support agents to focus more on addressing critical IT issues while the bot takes care of service requests. I think conversational AI is the way forward, now more than ever, for every IT organization.

Source: cisco.com

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What’s New in Cisco DNA Software: SD-WAN and Routing

Introduction

The enterprise networking business seems to always be in a state of flux. Entrants, features, solutions ebb and flow into and out of the market like tides at a beach in Florida. We know that you have come to trust Cisco as your enterprise networking partner and rely on us to ensure that the networking and security tools at your disposal are the sharpest and most fit for purpose in the market. In the spirit of continual improvement, and our goal of delighting our customers, we are happy to announce the following improvements to Cisco DNA Software for SD-WAN and Routing.

All good things come in three …

Cisco has made substantial changes to Cisco DNA Software for SD-WAN and Routing subscriptions all effective and implemented by the end of December 2021. The changes fall into three distinct areas: Cisco DNA for SD-WAN and Routing tier improvements, expanded bandwidth tiering, and right-pricing the Cisco DNA for SD-WAN and Routing Solution. We’ll discuss each of them in turn.

This section covers changes made to Cisco DNA Essentials for SD-WAN and Routing. Cisco is moving several features previously available in Cisco DNA Advantage down into Cisco DNA Essentials. Specifically, we have moved several Cloud Networking and Security features to Cisco DNA Essentials to enhance our SD-WAN and Routing entry-level offering for small and medium businesses, and to meet the needs of price-sensitive customers. Additionally, we have increased the VPN limitation in Cisco DNA Essentials to 4+1 (User/Management VPNs). The list and chart below speak to the feature additions in Cloud Networking and in Security to Cisco DNA Essentials for SD-WAN and Routing.

Cloud Networking functionality moving to Cisco DNA Essentials

◉ Essential Cloud OnRamp for IaaS, SaaS, and Colo

◉ Multicloud: GCP, AWS, Azure

Security functionality moving to Cisco DNA Essentials

◉ Cisco AMP with SSL proxy

◉ Basic URL filtering

As you can see, no changes were made to the feature functionality of, or license quantities included with, Cisco DNA Premier for SD-WAN and Routing.

Bandwidth Expansion

We have two changes in this section. First off, we have expanded Bandwidth Tier availability to all Cisco’s SD-WAN capable device families. Customers purchasing Cisco ISR and Cisco ASR devices now have the ability to select bandwidth tiers instead of individual bandwidth levels. Secondly, Cisco has increased the nominal and aggregate bandwidth capacities of Tier 0 and Tier 1 bandwidth purchases. Please consult the below chart detailing those changes.

We intend to slowly phase out the Discrete Bandwidth Level pricing construct in favor of the Tiered Bandwidth approach. You can assume that by the end of March, 2022, Tiered Bandwidth will be the only selection available.

Right-Pricing

Following the time-honored tradition of saving the best for last, pricing for Cisco DNA Essentials and Advantage for SD-WAN and Routing was given a once over and deemed lacking. Our analysis showed that price-sensitive customers were having difficulty aligning the cost of the subscription to the benefits of the subscription. The analysis also covered the competitive market and found there was room for improvement there as well. As a result, Cisco has revamped the subscription pricing for Cisco DNA software for SD-WAN and Routing, aligning the cost to the benefit and making Cisco much more competitive in the marketplace. The pricing adjustments will only be made to the Tiered Pricing option (Tiers 0/1/2/3), and not to the Discrete Bandwidth Level pricing. Pricing for Cisco DNA Premier for SD-WAN and Routing remains unchanged.

We won’t go into the grisly details here in this blog, but as a new subscriber, you will enjoy across the board list price reductions between 10% and 20% for Cisco DNA Essentials and Advantage subscriptions purchased in an Enterprise Agreement. If you’re looking at a la carte purchases, the list price reduction could be as high as 25%!

Source: cisco.com

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