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There’s been a lot of talk about the new service offerings Cisco recently announced and Robb and I are here to help you separate the signal from the noise. Robb gets the high level overview with Bryan Palma, SVP of Advanced Services, as well as Joe Pinto, SVP of Technical Services. And I deep dive into some of the analytics, use cases, and other things we’re doing with the new services with Ulf Vinneras and Laura McCarty.

This is really a breakdown of the new offerings from both the Advanced Services team at Cisco and the Technical Services team. Both teams really try to help our customers fill in the gap, so to speak. So what’s the difference?

Advanced Services – Business Critical Services:

For one thing AS is all about advising customers. Helping customers figure out the right way to move forward with their networks, data centers, enterprises and campuses. The second big thing is actually helping customers provision the actual tech and products. IT folks are no longer only having to worry about the network switches and routers. There are IoT devices, Machine Learning and Analytics, Security, Wireless, etc. Business Critical Services allows customers to use AS across all these platforms, helping to reduce the silo problem and ultimately help everyone move up the maturity curve in the data center and/or enterprise/campus. There are four key areas Business Critical Services focuses on: Analytics, Automation, Compliance Remediation, and Security.

According to Brian Palma, “customers who use Business Critical Services have 21% less cost, 74% less downtime, and 42% quicker time to remediation.” Make sure to watch the episode to see Ulf’s deep dive on what Cisco can do with analytics to help our customers predict and remediate problems.

Technical Services – High Value Services

You may know Technical Services better as TAC which provides technical support globally to our customers for every technology offered by Cisco. So essentially we’ve always had Smart Net and Basic Software Support. With the newer High Value Services offering we’re building upon this foundation. For example, the Basic Software Support get you TAC support, kind of a reactionary support when things go wrong as well as software updates. But with High Value Servies, specifically Enhanced and Premium, our customers get things like case prioritization, Direct Access to Experts, and Workflow Integration.

Joe Pinto pointed out that customers using Technical Services have 43% faster resolution and 70% fewer outages. Good numbers all around!

Check out the end of the episode for some use cases in the lab around High Value Services.

As always thanks for watching!