Cisco Systems Inc. said today it’s taking another shot at helping customers connect their multicloud environments to their on-premises data centers.

The company announced at its virtual Partner Summit a range of new software services aimed at connecting customers’ distributed applications, automate the infrastructure environments they run on, deliver better insights and generally enable more consistent business operations.

Cisco said multicloud capabilities are becoming vitally important for enterprises as they move to the cloud in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, placing more and more pressure on their information technology teams. The problem is that cloud adoption creates more complex and distributed application architectures with less visibility, so it takes much more effort to maintain them and design new features for their apps.

“Cisco is trying to help IT be faster using unified tools,” said Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of marketing for Enterprise, Data Center and Cloud Networking, IoT and Developer Platform at Cisco. “This is a journey for Cisco. We’re not done yet.”

Cisco’s latest tools for multicloud include the new Intersight Kubernetes Service, which will become available before the end of the year and help infrastructure teams to better automate application lifecycle management across any environment. Key to this new service is the Intersight Workload Optimizer, which helps to simplify application resource management.

It enables real-time, full stack visibility so customers can balance application performance with costs. In addition, Intersight integrates with Cisco’s AppDynamics tools for network and application monitoring to improve visibility and help teams stay on top of any possible problems with their apps.

Also new is the Cisco Nexus Dashboard, a “single insights and automation platform” that helps companies manage multicloud data center networks. It provides a single interface from which users can manage their application lifecycles from set-up to maintenance and optimization, Cisco said. Meanwhile, the new Cisco Identity Services Engine helps by simplifying secure network access so as to extend zero trust security frameworks to any cloud or device, including “internet of things” sensors, Cisco said.

Both of those services will be made available before the end of the year, Cisco said.

“Cisco’s new solutions are part of an overall effort to transform how customers connect people, secure their organization, and automate their processes,” said analyst Will Townsend, Networking Practice head at Moor Insights & Strategy. “It is designed to bring together platforms and portfolios to help customers respond and adapt to business disruptions, accelerate cloud adoption and transform IT operating models.”

To that end, Cisco said it’s adding making new capabilities available for the AppDynamics platform too. These are generally available from today, and include a new Full Stack Observability platform that helps to increase visibility into applications running on any platform, including public or private clouds.

There’s also a new Cloud Data Collector that helps to automate data collection and correlate cloud services with application code, user experiences and business impact, to give customers more insights into the business performance of their applications. And on the consumption side, there’s a new Cloud Native Visualization tool that helps to reduce the complexity of monitoring cloud-native applications through easy-to-understand visual representations.

Finally, AppDynamics is getting a new Intelligent Application Resourcing and Cost Optimization tool companies can use to proactively optimize infrastructure resources to control their costs better.

Analyst Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research told SiliconANGLE that most businesses today have already adopted a hybrid cloud or multicloud business model. He said what Cisco is trying to do is use its network capabilities to help those customers accelerate their journey to whatever cloud model they’ve chosen.

“The combination of Cisco’s management tools and infrastructure provides better visibility, security and resiliency of cloud connectivity, helping IT departments, which are currently overwhelmed with complexity, keep up in this constantly changing ‘new normal,’” Kerravala said. “It’s a strong set of announcements, but it’s important that Cisco continue to drive integration across its multiple management tools.”

Photo: Cisco