When it comes to leadership in the SDN marketplace, clearly there is one winner. And that is, Cisco ACI. The proof is in customer momentum numbers. In the recently concluded quarter, Cisco ACI announced 8600 plus ACI ready customers and a rapidly growing ecosystem of 50 plus technology partners.

In fact, the growing ecosystem of partners is a direct testimony to the openness of the ACI platform. I like specifics. In recent blogs, I presented the customer success featuring ACI with F5 and ACI with Citrix, and it was clear how customers are benefiting from these solutions. In this blog, I want to highlight recent North-bound technology partner solution integrations with ACI, the use-cases they address and the key benefits to customers.

In this blog, I will focus on Splunk, Zenoss, AlgoSec, Tufin, Sciencelogic and One Convergence. What is unique about these partners? Well, they all use the Cisco ACI's REST API to integrate with Cisco ACI and are also referred to as North-bound partners.

Splunk Enterprise (Analytics) -Cisco ACI for Splunk Enterprise offers a flexible approach to monitoring Cisco ACI and all other elements of customer's technology stack. ACI and Splunk together reduce customer costa and accelerate MTTR, meet SLAs and improve the efficiency through realtime and historical insights into ACI health, user and fabric analytics and single console visibility across physical and virtual infrastructure. For details read solutions brief and visit splunkbase.

Zenoss Service Dynamics 5 (System Management) -Zenoss, a systems management software company, focuses on the challenges of helping ensure the delivery and operation of large-scale IT services. Zenoss Service Dynamics 5 replaces a patchwork of traditional management frameworks and custom-built solutions, bringing highly scalable, unified monitoring and operations management to Cisco ACI. This powerful combination is well suited to a new class of IT demands, including IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS), automated operations, and hybrid cloud infrastructure. For more information, click here

Tufin orchestration Suite (Security and Application connectivity) -The integration of Tufin Orchestration Suite with Cisco ACI provides visibility, compliance, and automated provisioning of security policies across ACI fabric, firewalls and cloud platforms. Tufin manages all security policy changes using an auditable, documented change process with inherent security and compliance checks. With a comprehensive audit trail for all changes, Tufin helps ensure compliance with internal and regulatory standards. Customers can configure alerts and reports to instantly identify and remediate violations, reducing the time and effort needed to achieve audit readiness. For details read solutions brief

AlgoSec (Security and Visibility) -AlgoSec complements Cisco ACI by extending and enhancing its policy-based automation to all security devices across the enterprise network. Through AlgoSec's visibility and unified security policy management, customers can now process and apply security policy changes quickly, assess and reduce risk, ensure compliance and maintain a strong security posture across their entire environment -thereby rapidly realizing the full potential of their Cisco ACI deployment. Click here to read Press Release.

ScienceLogic (Monitoring) -Cisco ACI is great for reducing the amount of heavy lifting network engineers have to do to get a network up and running. Gone are the days of manually establishing Access Control Lists (ACLs) - all of those activities are automatically handled by ACI behind the scenes. ScienceLogic's hybrid IT monitoring platform automatically discovers all of the elements making up your Cisco ACI system. It maps your ACI components onto visual topology views, applies best practice monitoring templates, and populates a number of out-of-the-box dashboards.

Why should customers care for this? Well, for starters, the joint solution ensures network performance, by spotting bottlenecks before end-users notice them. It also helps reduce downtime -If an application is performing poorly or has spotty availability, IT personnel can quickly diagnose whether the issue is with the application, virtual machine, hypervisor, or ACI network element - using intuitive, graphical maps. By now, I am sure your interest has peaked -read more

One Convergence (Network Service delivery) -One Convergence -Cisco ACI solution provides high level of automation of all layers of the networking stack and enables enterprises and service providers to roll out rich set of network services at scale in OpenStack cloud deployments. The solution addresses the scale and efficiency required by large Data Centers. ACI/APIC in combination with NSD provides the scale and assurance required by enterprises for all layers of networking. While ACI/APIC hardware fabric provides scale and assurance for L2 networking, the distributed routing and NAT capabilities along with distributed OPFLEX control plane of the software scales L3 networking. NSD further provides the scale and assurance for network services with per tenant network service model, elastic scalability and high availability. Need Additional information, click here

The momentum is going strong with ACI ecosystem, and several new technology partners are in the process of coming on board. I will highlight these new partners and their differentiated solutions via a new blog in near future. We have lots of exciting ACI ecosystem sessions at Microsoft Ignite during sept 26-30, Atlanta. If you happen to attend, please come by the Cisco mini theater to find details. I can go on and on, but I will then exceed the limits of a blog. I want to recommend a few useful links for you to check out.

New ACI-Splunk release:

APP:   https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/1896/#/overview

Add-on:   https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/1897/#/overview

ACI-Tufin Integration demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASTvOBv_b8A

New Zenoss release for ACI:

http://blog.zenoss.com/2015/01/new-cisco-apic-zenpack-the-day-2-plan-you-need-for-cisco-application-centric-infrastructures/

ACI resources

www.cisco.com/go/aci

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/data-center-virtualization/unified-fabric/aci_ecosystem.html

Cisco ACI App Center

http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/introducing-the-cisco-aci-app-center