Cisco held its annual Cisco LIVE event this week, and the company made several announcements of new product releases, touching on everything from networking, security and collaboration to help IT professionals guide their organizations into new ways of working.
Chief among the announcements were the company’s improvements to its networking and security offerings, including new cloud management capabilities that provide a unified experience across the company’s Meraki, Catalyst and Nexus portfolios.
According to Cisco, Cloud Management for Cisco Catalyst allows customers to monitor select Catalyst switches and manage new Catalyst Wireless devices through the Meraki dashboard, giving IT pros increased visibility and offering organizations more flexibility. This is designed to help IT simplify operations by combining cloud management and networking hardware.
The unified experience announced at Cisco Live also includes the Cisco Nexus Cloud, a new cloud-managed platform delivered as-a-service that helps simplify deployment, management and operation of cloud networking. Cisco says Nexus Cloud—available in the fall—is powered by Cisco Intersight for best-in-class switching and multicloud management, helping customers manage across public and private cloud and edge computing environments of any size or scale.
The new vision also includes a new Cisco ThousandEyes product, ThousandEyes WAN Insights, that the company says is designed to proactively forecast and optimize WAN Performance. Calling the offering the first step on delivering on its Predictive Networks vision, Cisco says the product proactive alerts IT teams to issues before they happen and impact user experience, offering policy recommendations and path optimization guidance.
The new products announced during Cisco Live come after the company during the RSA Conference announced a unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution, Cisco+ Secure Connect Now, an as-a-service, cloud-managed solution designed to simplify how organizations connect and protect their IT assets and users.
For cloud-native observability of modern applications built on complex, distributed architectures, Cisco announced the launch of AppDynamics Cloud to help IT remediate application performance issues with business context and insights-drive actions from across the entire IT stack.
Cisco says the solution accelerates detection and resolution of performance issues with intelligence operations and helps protect IT investments with data integrations with OpenTelemetry standards and technology partnerships with cloud solutions and providers.
Current AppDynamics customers can upgrade to AppDynamics Cloud and leverage their existing application performance monitoring agents, or feed both solutions concurrently, Cisco says.
When commercially available starting June 28, AppDynamics Cloud will support cloud-native managed Kubernetes environments on AWS, with future expansion to Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and other cloud providers.
Cisco also used its Cisco Live conference to highlight its recently released advancements to Webex Calling, as well as new hardware to support hybrid workers.
On the second day of Cisco Live, the company launched Panoptica and Calisti, the latest additions to Cisco’s suite of cloud-native, API-first solutions for faster application development cycles. Cisco says the cloud-native, API-first solutions provide businesses with modern application connectivity, security, and observability that is critical for digital experiences. Both Panoptica and Calisti are available for free.
Cisco also announced it has teamed up with musician Pharell Williams’ non-profit YELLOW to provide technology centered around connectivity, collaboration and security at Williams’ school, YELLOWHAB.
The Norfolk, Va.-based micro-school gives students an immersive learning experience based on skill, not age. The school will utilize Cisco technology, such as the WebEx Suite, Secure X, WiFi-6, Meraki, data centers and SNA Spaces. In turn, the technology will help build a networking foundation to provide an inclusive and hybrid learning environment.
In a Move to Mobile, Cisco is making it easier to transition from desktop to iPhone. You can now take your Webex meeting in your car with Apple CarPlay, in audio-mode only, of course. In August, Cisco will be extending the CarPlay integration to include listening to past Webex recordings.
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