6 New Cisco Cloud Services For Channel Partners To Sell

Cloud-Enabling Cisco Services

Cisco launched a slew of professional services Tuesday that partners can either resell, white label, co-deliver or co-develop alongside Cisco.

"Ultimately, we're giving you the secret sauce," said Fabio Gori, senior director and head of Cisco Cloud Marketing, in an interview with CRN. "These three different environments, which are your existing data center, cloud-native environment and private cloud, need to be wrapped around a very consistent analytics, security and orchestration layer – that's what we're executing upon. It's pulling together these three environments to give customers what they want, which is hybrid IT, and doing it together with our partners."

Here are six new cloud-enabling solutions that Cisco channel partners can take to market.

Cloud Acceleration Services

The new Cloud Acceleration service from Cisco accelerates the design and deployment of both traditional private clouds and cloud-native solutions such as OpenStack and Platform-as-a-Service, according to Paul Hamilton, director of Cisco Advanced Services.

"The services address the potential skills and process gaps within our customers and some of our partner community," said Hamilton in an interview with CRN. "Firstly, to help with simplified pre-validated solutions around Infrastructure-as-a-Service private cloud – both Cisco-managed through our MetaCloud offering but also partner-managed from our Quickstart Private Cloud environment and extending into cloud-native environments and services around OpenStack and PaaS."

Hamilton said OpenStack is important for cloud-native environments to allow IaaS to be integrated with a customer's deployment of OpenStack into their existing services.

D evOps Services

New IT transformation Cisco services for DevOps is focused on DevOps-related change management initiatives in order to help align business processes and capabilities to enable customers to optimize across traditional and DevOps environments and teams.

"[These services are] really considering the people, process and tools aspects of bringing together IT operations and applications development teams and the governance and management of those environments to manage the complexity of applications development in a new world," said Hamilton.

Muticloud Management Services

The new multicloud management and orchestration services for Cisco Cloud Center empowers customers to model, deploy and manage anywhere, said Hamilton.

"This is really aligned to develop the tools and solutions to better enable our customers and partners to operate multicloud, hybrid-IT environments," said Hamilton. "Our CliQr acquisition really helps customers profile their application environment, understand the application architecture, then to be able to deploy and manage those applications [regardless] of the cloud infrastructure they're deployed in. Our Cloud Center natively supports every private and public cloud that's in existence today."

Enhanced Migration Services

The networking giant unveiled enhanced application and cloud migration services to automate and de-risk the complexity involved in on-boarding and migrating applications and workloads to the cloud.

"These are automated mass-migration capabilities for cloud and application migration services to really enable customers to transition their application workloads faster, cheaper and at lower risk to whichever cloud platform they choose to evolve towards," said Hamilton.

Cisco Study And Business Cloud Advisor 2.0

The new Cisco professional service offerings were rolled out in conjunction with a Cisco-sponsored study with IDC based on research conducted with executives responsible for IT decisions in more than 6,100 organizations across 31 countries that are implementing private, public and hybrid clouds in their IT environments. According to the study, nearly 68 percent of organizations are using cloud to help drive business outcomes. However, nearly 70 percent of organizations do not have a mature cloud strategy, while only 3 percent have optimized cloud strategies generating superior business outcomes.

Cisco revealed an enhanced version of the company's popular Cisco Business Cloud Advisor (BCA) tool, which includes new data from this study. The BCA allows partners to assess a customer through a survey to determine an organization's cloud adoption level and associated business benefits in moving to the cloud relative to their industry peers by industry, company size and geography.

New Workshops For Partners

Cisco will offer an integrated strategy workshop combining the Cisco Domain Ten Framework with BCA. The workshop will help organizations identify cloud adoption gaps and benchmarks, continuously improve their multicloud environments and facilitate alignment between IT and line-of-business executives.

Hamilton said the workshop, becoming available sometime during the fourth quarter calendar year, will also help organizations better measure the potential impact of cloud adoption in their IT organizations across a broad range of key performance indicators.