Barcelona, Spain, Cisco Live – January 28, 2020 – Businesses are realizing that applications are the business and the gateway to their customers. 78 percent of customers say their expectations of digital experiences are growing*.  As companies pivot towards becoming app-centric businesses, it places enormous strain on enterprise IT, exposing dangerous silos between teams and technologies.

To help businesses address the increasing demand for flawless digital experiences, Cisco today unveiled a multi-domain approach that bridges application and infrastructure teams with full-stack visibility and operational insight, allowing both real-time and automated troubleshooting to ensure optimal application performance. A new Kubernetes-based application platform makes it easier for both DevOps and IT to embrace a multicloud world.
New innovations from Cisco:

• Cisco’s AppDynamics, the #1 application performance monitoring solution, introduces the AppDynamics Experience Journey Map which automatically displays the most important user experience journeys within mission critical apps.  These journeys focus on both business metrics and application experience to give business and app teams a single correlated view across business performance, user experience, and application performance.
• AppDynamics and Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer now exchange and correlate data to give application and infrastructure teams a shared view of infrastructure dependencies that effect application performance, user experience, and business impact. Using common vocabulary, common tooling and sharing datasets between application and infrastructure health, Cisco enables IT teams to more easily cooperate and focus on what matters most: the business and customers. This industry-first, direct coupling of application insight to infrastructure automation empowers infrastructure teams to keep up with the demands of application-centric businesses in real time, while managing costs and complexity.
• Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer introduces powerful workload and cost optimization capabilities across hybrid application architectures. Intersight Workload Optimizer takes into consideration performance, cost and compliance constraints. It uses historical and real-time knowledge to proactively flag potential issues as well as list opportunities to lower costs driven by over provisioning. Unlike approaches that start and end with virtualized infrastructure, this solution can pin-point the root cause for application degradation whether it be at the application level, at the VM/container layer or deep within the storage, compute or network hardware.
• Cisco HyperFlex Application Platform delivers an integrated container-as-a-service platform that simplifies provisioning and ongoing operations for Kubernetes across cloud, data center, and edge.  This new platform curates open-source tooling, automates routine tasks, and makes it easier for IT and DevOps teams to use Kubernetes in a way that accelerates application innovation across multi-cloud environments.  It also supports real-time monitoring and optimization of the complete application to infrastructure stack using AppDynamics and Intersight.

“Applications are now at the heart of every business but managing the IT infrastructure to ensure a positive user experience has never been more complex,” said Liz Centoni, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud, Compute and IoT at Cisco. “These new technologies provide full visibility and deep insights into all aspects of infrastructure through the lens of application, simplifying real-time correction and automated predictability to identify and fix issues before they even happen. While some vendors provide visibility into apps or an individual tier of physical or virtual infrastructure, Cisco is the first to bridge all three with insight and proactive optimization up and down the stack. And with the HyperFlex Application Platform we are making Kubernetes, the new defacto standard for app developers, much easier to deploy and manage for both app and infrastructure teams.”

“Applications are changing the patient experience, offering new opportunities but also new challenges for our IT teams,” said John Gaede, Director of Information Systems, Sky Lakes Medical Center. “This new operating model from Cisco will arm my IT team with new insight and self-optimization, freeing us from day-to-day manual intervention, and allowing IT and DevOps to work together to increase innovation and deliver better outcomes for our patients.”

“As organizations continue to rapidly adopt modern application architectures, IT teams are challenged by the increased complexity, scale and velocity of these environments,” stated Bob Laliberte, Sr Analyst, ESG. “This will drive organizations to embrace technology that connects application performance to infrastructure automation, increasing IT productivity, simplifying day two operations for Kubernetes and helping make IT more relevant and critical for DevOps teams and for the lines of businesses.”

Availability:

• AppDynamics Customer Journey Map will be available in 2QCY20
• Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer will be available in 2QCY20
• HyperFlex Application Platform for Kubernetes will be available for early access in 2QCY20

Additional Resources:

• Executive Blog: Read more about this announcement in Liz Centoni’s blog here.
• App Attention Index 2019
• For more information about Cisco data center click here.