As enterprises begin to realize that software applications are the future of business, there’s been a pivot toward becoming app-centric. This, however, is placing enormous strain on information-technology networks by exposing silos between teams and technologies, a dangerous opportunity for bad actors and a tangled mess for compliance purposes. This makes visibility within the complex network of multicloud, edge computing, and on-prem increasingly important.

“The world around both sides of the networking has become highly hyper-connected and highly dynamic,” said Prashanth Shenoy (pictured), vice president of marketing, enterprise networks, IoT, and developer platform at Cisco Systems Inc. “How do you manage this dynamic environment? How do you set the policy? How do you guarantee an application experience? So this has been a very challenging environment.”

To navigate this extremely complex world, automation must be key, according to Shenoy. For every dollar that Cisco’s customers spend on building a network, they spend $3 managing and monitoring the network. And more IT staff just isn’t going to cut it.

“We live in a world where repetitive tasks should be done by machines and not human beings, ” Shenoy stated. “It’s happened in the rest of [our] lives, and networks operations is just one part of that. So the concept of controller-led architectures … is now being applied to this world of intent-based networking. But we also get the data to provide you insights on how things are behaving and how to take actions before it happens.”

Shenoy spoke with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona. In separate interviews, Todd Brannon, senior director of data center marketing at Cisco, spoke with Vellante and Miniman, and Fabio Gori, senior director of cloud solution marketing at Cisco, and Eugene Kim, global product marketing manager of data center computing and storage solutions at Cisco, spoke with Miniman and co-host John Furrier. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the complete video interview below with Prashanth Shenoy below:

Cisco’s solution in Intersight Workload Optimizer

To help businesses address the increasing demand for flawless digital experiences within a complex world of applications and multicloud environments, Cisco recently announced a multi-domain approach that connects application and infrastructure teams with full-stack visibility and operational insight in a Kubernetes-based application platform that makes it easier for both DevOps and IT to embrace a multicloud world. A big part of this approach is Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, which uses historical and real-time knowledge to proactively flag potential issues, as well as list opportunities to lower costs.

Intersight can find the root cause for application degradation no matter where it’s coming from. While Intersight has been around for three years, it’s now shifting from a Cisco focus to a more heterogeneous data-center environment.

“That Workload Optimizer software has always been inherently a heterogeneous approach,” Brannon described. “So databases, cloud management platforms, all the hypervisors, operating system, storage partnerships — we’ve been able to do telemetry and interdependency mapping with that in a heterogeneous way for some time.”

Intersight is now getting data integration with AppDynamics, an all-in-one monitoring solution for application performance.

“Now we correlate those and you get a top to bottom view,” Brannon said. “They kind of get you to where you can see what’s an application, how’s it performing from a business context with AppD, but being able to connect it all the way down into your cloud and on-prem infrastructure — make that correlation and ensure that your infrastructure is doing the right things for the app.”

Watch the complete video interview below with Todd Brannon below:

Intersight, AppDynamics, HyperFlex integration for full stack management

With the integration of AppDynamics and Intersight, the visibility an enterprise can have over its network is even better because of the data exchange between the two, according to Gori.

“Now you are in a position to immediately understand whether you have an application problem or you have a workload problem or an infrastructure problem — which is ultimately what you really need to do as quickly as you can,” Gori said.

Cisco also introduced Cisco HyperFlex Application Platform, an integrated container-as-a-service platform that simplifies provisioning and ongoing operations for Kubernetes across cloud, data center, and edge. This hyperconverged platform is a fully containerized version that can be managed from Intersight as well.

“It provides a full stack, fully supported element platform for our customers,” Kim explained. “It’s all managed from Intersight from the physical infrastructure, to the hyperconverged layer, all the way to the container management — so it’s very exciting to have that full stack management in Intersight as well.”

Watch the complete video interview below with Fabio Gori and Eugene Kim below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event. (* Disclosure: Cisco DevNet sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE