Cisco Unveils New Low-Cost Consumption Models for Tetration

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Cisco Tuesday unveiled two new, subscription-based consumption models for its Tetration cloud workload protection offering.

Tetration SaaS is the cloud-based service for cloud-first and cloud-only organizations, and Tetration-V is a software-only version using a virtual appliance for smaller deployments. Both models deliver the same features and functionality as Tegration’s original on-premises form factors.

Cisco’s Scott Mohr

Scott Mohr, Cisco‘s director of data center/cloud and global partner organization, tells Channel Partners that Tetration brings a “whole new opportunity for our partners, especially in recurring and subscription revenue opportunities.”

“There [are] going to be no restrictions for our partners to sell this and it comes in multiple delivery options, both on premises and SaaS, and this leads to a tremendous opportunity to provide a low-cost, entry-level solution that you can land and ultimately expand the sale; maybe start with a single use case and then grow to other use cases,” he said.

Tetration automates application dependency mapping and white-list policy generation and enforcement, and gives insight into network performance, the company said. The Tetration APIs allow IT organizations to create custom applications with access to Tetration data sources, allowing the export and enforcement of policies generated by Tetration across SDN controllers and security devices.

With the new consumption models, organizations can adopt Tetration technology within hours with no initial investment and the flexibility to pay as they grow.

“We really think this solution brings a host of professional-services opportunities for our partners, both in workload protection and compliance assessment, as well as application dependency modeling and assessments, and then ultimately going beyond the box,” Mohr said. “Professional services also can lead our partners down a path for attached-to revenue, where they can attach to other security solutions or other devices in the network that provide value, and as a result, those solutions need additional integration work, additional professional-services work and optimization work that lead to extended revenue streams for our partners.”

In addition, installation revenue opportunities are “extremely strong,” and because it’s software only, partners can provide a partner-branded offering or a white-label solution, “which will then allow them to provide additional services … in installation, professional and resale subscription,” he said.

“They’ll be able to provide their own flexible licensing models and then at the same time they can have a low-cost, entry-level solution because we’re not relying on our partners to lay down a significant capex investment to get started,” Mohr said. “This takes us down a whole new path in being able to provide additional service opportunities for our partners, in managed, installation, professional, as well as resale subscription. So it kind of covers all four boxes that allows our partners to extend value beyond traditional installation and turn-on, and traditional service levels.”

Cisco Tetration SaaS is scheduled to be available next month, while Tetration-V is available now.

“Cisco Tetration helps Xentaurs manage successful cloud and data-center deployments for our clients by ensuring every single connection and flow to an application is visible,” said Anoj Willy, CEO of Xentaurs. “Without this critical information, app, cloud, and data-center migrations would be impossible to precisely guarantee nothing is missed and everything is as it is intended. Tetration goes further in establishing and enforcing a zero-trust environment that is the foundation for microsegmentation, down to containers and next-generation services development.”