Disruptive technologies have become more frequent than ever before, making business agility and the ability to adapt key competitive differentiators.  Every day I speak with IT executives who are asking how Cisco can help them respond to new requirements across their physical, virtual, and cloud-based environments.  They feel compelled to accelerate the delivery of applications, better align IT with business activity, and reduce time to revenue.   They want to know if their initiatives will have the impact and outcomes they require.  Can they capture the full value of their technology investments?   How can they up their game when it comes to delivering IT services that their businesses need to succeed?

Today Cisco introduced itsApplication Centric Infrastructure(ACI) offerings to manage the health and performance of the applications that you rely upon to run your business.  A simplified, flexible, and agile framework, ACI aligns the needs of the entire application lifecycle, overcoming functional silos, and bringing together your infrastructure, security, application, and cloud teams through a holistic architecture and policy-driven framework.

Cisco has enhanced its services portfolio to help you take the right steps with ACI to achieve your business and technical objectives, reduce risk, and realize the true value of your network.  With ourCisco Services for Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure,we analyze all operational aspects of your data center networks and prepare detailed migration plans for a smooth and successful transformation to ACI.   Also, our team of services professionals can help you reduce vulnerabilities and build security into your data center architecture with our newCisco Services to Secure Cisco Data Center Infrastructure.

As an IT executive, you might be concerned about potential risks that come with new technology.  Delivered by Cisco and Cisco Certified Partners, Cisco Services shares with you the ownership and management of risks when using ACI to streamline your IT operations .   Our migration strategy and design service includes technical expertise, best practices, and specialized tools for helping you adopt ACI to take advantage of the features that will grow your business.  Our approach is anchored by our comprehensive Cisco Domain Ten^SMframework for simplifying data center transformations.  We have employed Domain Ten over the past ten years when helping customers with their transformation initiatives including cloud, virtual desktop, application migration, data center consolidation, and now Application Centric Infrastructure.

Your IT team can become more responsive to changing business needs by rethinking how you provision the data network, thus enabling rapid and consistent deployment of applications while increasing network predictability.  Many of you are asking the right questions.  I invite you to contact us to explore what Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure and Cisco Services can do for you and your business.

 Additional resources

John Chambers Blog "Transforming IT for the Application Economy"
Shashi Kiran's blog "Redefining the Power of It with Application Centric Infrastructure "
Chris Young's  Blog on ACI Security
ACI Partner Ecosystem