Cisco Unveils Predictive Services Powered by AI

Cisco announced a new portfolio of services designed to put IT departments back in the driver’s seat. Powered by AI, Cisco’s suite of predictive services anticipates IT failures, mitigates risk, reduces maintenance costs, and assists organizations in attaining the necessary skills to transform their businesses. Delivering both advanced predictive and preemptive capabilities, Cisco’s new Business Critical Services and High-value Services offerings will enable organizations to invest more of their IT budgets on technology innovation amid a growing technical skills gap that poses an imminent threat to business continuity and growth.

“Today’s world is moving faster than ever, and to be successful, businesses must have the right blend of IT talent and services,” said Chuck Robbins, chief executive officer, Cisco.“By leveraging AI and machine learning to address critical IT issues, Cisco’s new services offerings will truly help our customers free up time to focus on the growing IT talent gap, and remain competitive into the future.”

More than ever, organizations look to heads of IT to create new revenue streams for their businesses. Yet the shortage of digital skills and the technical skills gap are putting organizations at peril of losing their competitiveness. Cisco’s new suite of predictive services are differentiated by the unique expertise, intelligence and automation that help minimize the impact of the skills gap and free technical staff to focus on accelerating innovation.

Today Cisco is launching two new additions to the services portfolio: Business Critical Services and High-value Services. These two new services offer the power and intelligence of AI and machine learning to optimize IT talent, knowledge and skills and allow organizations to solve their problems first and ultimately get closer to their end user/customer.

Cisco Business Critical Services:

Technology environments are increasingly more complex and dynamic and organizations seek to aggressively address these challenges. Cisco is introducing a new portfolio of subscription services, Business Critical Services that goes beyond basic optimization to deliver more capabilities including analytics, automation, compliance and security by Cisco Advanced Services’ technology experts to enable secure, efficient, and agile technology environment. Business Critical Services will help minimize human error and help extract the most value from products and solutions while creating a secure IT environment. These next-generation optimization services enable organizations to:

• Reduce complexity and cost through automation, orchestration, and technical expertise.
• Accelerate business agility and transformation through advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities to deliver critical insights that prioritize infrastructure and application recommendations.
• Reduce risk with automated compliance and remediation services, coupled with a robust security portfolio including incident response for threat protection.

These new Business Critical Services seek to help reduce downtime by 74 percent, resolve issues 41 percent faster and reduce operational costs by 21 percent according to IDC’s Business Value Study 2017.

Cisco Services:

To help organizations better utilize advanced software, solutions, and the network, Cisco is delivering next-generation Technical Services, called high-value services. This portfolio builds on our industry leading product support services with offerings that use analytics, onboarding, expertise, and scale to deliver more proactive and prescriptive services, enabling our customers to realize higher value, faster, from their IT investments.

• Software Support: provides support for Cisco software. New high-value services features includes: Multi-level service options enhanced and premium, in addition to basic level (reactive) support.
• Solution Support: provides centralized support for Cisco hardware, software and third-party partner solutions from first call to resolution. Solution Support is the default service offering for Cat 9K/DNA enhancing the customer experience.
• Network Support: Technical Services (TS) Advantage provides network-level support.

According to IDC's 2017 Global Digital Transformational (DX) Leader Survey, a lack of digital skills in the organization was cited as the single largest challenge to successfully implement digital transformation. Correspondingly, companies seeking to implement digital transformation are creatively looking to other sources of talent to enable their digital strategies.  IDC forecasts $6.3T in direct digital transformation investments over the period 2017-2020. $2.6T of this investment is being budgeted and spent exclusively on third party services firms with expertise in digital transformation.

Chris Barnard of IDC says: “The landscape is evolving too fast for some businesses to keep up with digital transformation, as a result they rely on their larger vendor partners with the skills, expertise and capabilities to help address these talent gaps. By leveraging IT vendors with strong knowledge and a breadth and depth in IT skill sets, organizations are able to get up to speed, adjust to changing market conditions and ultimately focus on innovation.”

According to Cisco’s recent Services landscape report, the top benefits enterprise organizations are looking to achieve from IT services include filling key talent or skills gaps, gaining access to unique expertise or capabilities and refocus internal staff on other priorities. Additionally, the strategic challenges where IT services are most important in helping to address include allowing IT to focus on strategic priorities rather than keeping systems running and increasing the speed at which they implement new technology to support business priorities.

As the company’s second largest business, Cisco Services delivers the experience, talent and skills where the customer needs it. Cisco Services augments a team and provides the innovation, expertise, flexibility, learnings and dedication to service quality to help customers accelerate business growth while minimizing risk. The offerings span every stage of IT lifecycle – from advisory to optimization to training and technical services and across every major IT architecture.

Channel partners: Partners are vital to the Cisco Services business. Whether a Cisco partner has an existing Services practice or looking to build one, Cisco is enhancing its services portfolio to support its partners to deliver end-to-end customer solutions. With Business Critical and High-value Services, partners can unlock services opportunities that will deepen their relationships and attract new customers.