Cisco brings in transformative technologies for hyper-connected enterprise

Cisco has come up with some transformative technologies which will help businesses push boundaries by “reimagining” applications. The products were launched at Cisco Live in Barcelona.  

David Goeckeler, EVP and General Manager, Networking and Security Business, said that the last decade ended with a rise of application and the application economy, with every business a software business and mobile ecosystem, and data science coming to the fore in the journey to business digitisation.  

The application was king said Goeckeler, noting that towards the end of the last decade, the infrastructure industry had started to keep up, and this decade would be about how these two worlds came together in a multi-domain architecture.

The new offerings of Cisco includes technology to deliver visibility within the application, network and datacentre, both on-premise and in the cloud; an integrated container-as-a-service platform designed to simplify provisioning and ongoing operations for Kubernetes across cloud, datacentres and the edge; a security architecture for the industrial internet of things (IoT); developments in collaboration tools to transform the customer experience with contact centres; and better and more engaged meetings through innovations in artificial intelligence (AI).

The company’s new app dynamics technology is designed specifically to examine business transactions. It monitors key performance indicators (KPIs) for the technical performance of apps and correlates those to business performance metrics. It acts like the lens of a business transaction, providing a pathway to deliver outcome to users, said Cisco.

The new technology will give a clear picture of the front-end process relating to an app and showing how the app is working, which will complement the existing dynamics technology of the company. It uses AI to map the journey a customer would take when making a transaction, with the ability to gain granular insight into discrete processes, such as billing and discounts. This can potentially show where business is lost from where a customer ends a transaction and where and how any customer experiences issues are arising.

Cisco has also launched a workload optimiser that uses machine learning to pull in masses of data and streamlines it, so that information is computed right at the edge.

The functionality is also designed to make sure operational silos are removed and that app-building teams and IT departments work on the same page. Cisco said its HyperFlex application platform delivers an integrated container-as-a-service platform that simplifies provisioning and ongoing operations for Kubernetes across cloud, datacentre and the edge.

With its new tools, Cisco claims to be offering new means of communication in an information continuum across meeting types, enabling people to communicate with whatever tools they choose in what is described as an inclusive team space.

Specifically, the company has added new AI-powered voice intelligence capabilities to Webex Meetings with the option for global teams to choose whether their Webex Teams’ data will be stored in Europe or the US. It also announced the new Cisco Webex Room USB, an entry-level video device offering collaboration for smaller organisations.

Sri Srinavsan, SVP and general manager of Cisco Collaboration, said voice is the next frontier and, to that end, the new collaboration services have both transcription and translation capability. The new product also boasts a Spanish translation.

Srinavsan stressed that what is being offered are “enterprise-class” assistant capabilities based on work automation, and that it is “not Alexa”.