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Cisco Drives Into NaaS
Market
March 30, 2021
 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 our strategic
partner Cisco is diving deeper into the as-a-service era, helping us
in our transformation to deliver IT as a service to our customers.”—
Jeffrey den Oudsten, CTO Office Solutions Director, Conscia
"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.” — Vinu Thomas, Chief Technology Officer, Presidio |
