Cisco Systems Inc. today introduced a new platform that will enable customers to manage its networking products through a common interface.

The platform introduced by Chief Executive Chuck Robbins (pictured) at the annual Cisco Live 2023 conference taking place this week in Las Vegas, is called the Cisco Networking Cloud. It’s rolling out alongside enhancements to several of the company’s existing offerings, including its ThousandEyes infrastructure monitoring service and Catalyst product portfolio.

Simplified network operations

The newly announced Cisco Networking Cloud will enable administrators to manage on- and off-premises network infrastructure in one place. According to the company, the platform will make it easier to troubleshoot technical issues. It also includes automation capabilities for streaming common administrative tasks.

The drive for simplicity echoes what customers have been asking for, given Cisco’s voracious appetite for acquisitions, which has created some siloes in its product offerings. “The company’s mandate is to integrate the piece parts of its intricate offerings to create more facile and seamless experiences for customers,” Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante wrote in a recent Breaking Analysis on Cisco.

“The Cisco Networking Cloud converges and connects fragmented platforms that exchange data through automation,” detailed Jonathan Davidson, the executive vice president and general manager of Cisco’s networking business. “It replaces isolated pockets of data with telemetry, assurance, and proactive analytics across the network.”

As part of its feature set, the Cisco Networking Cloud will provide a single sign-on feature for several of the company’s networking products. Single sign-on is a technology that allows users to log into multiple systems at once using one set of login credentials. Thanks to the capability, administrators won’t have to separately log into different Cisco products, which should streamline the user experience.

The Cisco Networking Cloud also includes an API key exchange that can be used with the new sign sign-on feature. It’s designed to ease the process of moving data between the company’s products. 

Data center systems often require the ability to exchange information with one another. A switch, for example, may send error logs to a monitoring tool for analysis. Systems send data to one another via application programming interfaces.

Before a system can transmit information to the API of another device or application, it has to provide an API key. That’s a kind of code used to verify that cybersecurity requirements are met. The new API key repository included in Cisco Networking Cloud makes it easier to manage such codes, which will simplify the task of moving data between the company’s products.

“Only Cisco has the portfolio, experience, and partner ecosystem to bring together campus and branch, data center, compute, IoT and SD-WAN to optimize outcomes using one networking management platform to deliver unified experiences,” Davidson said.

Simplified consumption models

Besides day-to-day network management, Cisco is also simplifying how customers purchase its products. The company today detailed a new pricing model that will enable enterprises to buy hardware and software support in a single subscription. The pricing, which will initially become available for Cisco’s Catalyst line of switches, promises to ease procurement for enterprises.

In conjunction, the company is rolling out a new way of purchasing its Catalyst SD-WAN platform. The platform is used by organizations to establish network connections between disparate locations such as offices and data centers. It was known before today as Cisco SD-WAN.

According to the company, companies can now buy the newly renamed Catalyst SD-WAN platform under a subscription model. Cisco says that the platform takes a few minutes to deploy after a subscription is purchased. Moreover, the company will help customers manage their Catalyst SD-WAN to ease their day-to-day technology operations.

Enhanced network monitoring 

At Cisco Live 2023 today, the company also debuted a new version of its ThousandEyes network monitoring platform. ThousandEyes became part of Cisco through a 2020 acquisition reportedly valued at $1 billion. The platform enables companies to detect and troubleshoot technical issues in their networks, as well as monitor the carrier infrastructure through which their application traffic travels.

ThousandEyes is receiving a tool called Event Detection as part of today’s update. According to Cisco, the tool can automatically spot technical issues as well as identify which system they affect. ThousandEyes can spot issues in network devices, servers and other components of a company’s infrastructure.

Event Detection is rolling out alongside a second new feature called AWS Path Enrichment. It will provide administrators with additional data on network connections in Amazon Web Services environments. The feature can identify the AWS service involved in processing application traffic, as well as other details such as the cloud data center through which the traffic traveled.

The enhancements to ThousandEyes’ analytics capabilities are joined by new product integrations. Thanks to those integrations, the platform can now more easily monitor Cisco’s RoomOS videoconferencing devices and Meraki MX network appliances. Furthermore, ThousandEyes is receiving an integration with company’s Secure Client application, which workers to securely log into business applications.

Photo: Dave Vellante/SiliconANGLE