Cisco Adds New Software to Support Closed-Loop Operating Model, Accelerate Hybrid Applications

Cisco is fortifying its commitment to what it calls a “closed loop operating model” with the introduction of new products — AppDynamics and Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, Cisco AppDynamics Experience Journey Map, and HyperFlex Application Platform. The vendor made the announcement at Cisco Live 2020 Barcelona.

In this new operating model, the goal is to eliminate the silos between teams and technologies, such as application and infrastructure, and provide visibility and operational insight in real-time using automated troubleshooting. The outcome is optimized application performance and the user digital experience.

Cisco’s Liz Centoni

“Applications are now at the heart of every business, but managing the IT infrastructure to ensure a positive user experience has never been more complex,” said Liz Centoni, senior vice president and general manager, cloud, compute and IoT at Cisco. “These new technologies provide full visibility and deep insights into all aspects of infrastructure through the lens of application, simplifying real-time correction and automated predictability to identify and fix issues before they even happen. While some vendors provide visibility into apps or an individual tier of physical or virtual infrastructure, Cisco is the first to bridge all three with insight and proactive optimization up and down the stack. And with the HyperFlex Application Platform, we are making Kubernetes, the new de facto standard for app developers, much easier to deploy and manage for both app and infrastructure teams.”

Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer is application-aware automation for on-premises and public cloud infrastructure. It offers workload and cost optimization capabilities across hybrid application architecture, taking into consideration performance, cost and compliance constraints. The software uses historical and real-time knowledge to proactively flag potential issues as well as list opportunities to lower costs driven by over provisioning.

AppDynamics and Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer can now exchange and correlate data between the applications and infrastructure, using common vocabulary, common tooling and sharing data sets. The goal is to help IT teams more easily cooperate and focus on the business and customers.

Cisco AppDynamics Experience Journey Map automatically displays the most important user experience journeys within mission-critical apps, helping businesses tp discover critical moments in the customer experience to maximize ROI. These journeys focus on both business metrics and application experience to give business and app teams a single correlated view across business performance, user experience and application performance.

HyperFlex Application Platform delivers an integrated container-as-a-service platform designed to simplify provisioning and ongoing operations for Kubernetes across cloud, data center and edge. The platform curates open-source tooling, automates routine tasks and makes it easier for IT and DevOps teams to use Kubernetes to accelerate application innovation across multicloud environments. It also supports real-time monitoring and optimization of the complete application to infrastructure stack using capabilities from both AppDynamics and Intersight, a SaaS infrastructure management platform.

Cisco acquired AppDynamics in 2017 for $3.7 billion, to help deliver visibility across the network, data center, security and applications.

In a blog, Centoni addresses how businesses suffer when silos between application and IT teams exist

“On one hand, the complex, distributed nature of modern applications from the edge to the cloud (and everything in the middle) makes it difficult to root-cause the source of a poorly performing application. While on the other hand, blatant overprovisioning of infrastructure capacity (whether its on-prem or cloud) for “peak scale” leads to gross underutilization … because for 364 days in the year, you’re NOT running at peak. Add data gravity limitations, containers, a myriad of opensource components and the idiosyncrasies of every cloud in the sky — you’re looking at 25 hours a day, just to keep the lights on.”