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Optimizing customer experience via a superior application and service delivery is critical for achieving better business and mission outcomes. That’s precisely why delivering enhanced customer experience is a top priority for organization and agency leaders across the globe.

Customer Experience is Paramount

Eighty-nine percent of surveyed CIO and IT leaders worldwide identified consistent application performance across both application and infrastructure as key to driving a great user experience.  In the U.S., under the previous administration, Improving Customer Experience was one of 14 Cross-Agency Priority goals to drive President’s Management Agenda (PMA) outcomes. Under the Biden Administration, Delivering Excellent, Equitable, and Secure Federal Services and Customer Experience is one of only three PMA priorities that have been released. It was followed by a December Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery. Given this emphasis, it’s likely that we’ll see a customer experience metric for the first time in the forthcoming 14.0 or 15.0 Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) Scorecard. Further, studies show using a cross-domain architectural approach to optimizing customer experience also contributes to higher employee retention (especially in a hybrid work environment), decreasing hybrid cloud costs, and enhancing enterprise Zero Trust security across your organization.

Full Stack Optimization is a Key Customer Experience Enabler

It started with Full-Stack Observability (FSO).  FSO is a construct focused on understanding the behavior of all the technology components that support an application and a user’s experience. FSO encompasses the data, application code, microservices, containers, databases, compute, storage, networking, and security. In other words, anything in the technology stack that impacts customer experience.

Virtually everyone agrees that you can’t fix what you can’t see. As a result, enterprises need full-stack observability and intelligence to provide comprehensive visibility, turning data into insights and translating those insights into actions. FSO solutions centralize and correlate application performance analytics across enterprise networks, data centers, the internet, and clouds.

Full-Stack Optimization is “Next-Gen” FSO. Integrated, cross-domain customer experience-focused capabilities provide the means to manage and optimize activity across the DevOps/ApplicationOps, InfrastructureOps, NetworkOps, and SecurityOps functional process pillars. Unfortunately, these pillars are frequently operated as independent silos that don’t provide a unified perspective. What that translates to is an inability to optimize cross-domain user experience. Cisco takes the concept of FSO to the next level by enabling unified performance optimization across the entire application, infrastructure, network, and security stacks, thus delivering Full Stack Optimization.

Key Optimization Components

Cisco’s solutions are designed to work together to deliver optimized customer experience, specifically:

  • AppDynamics for correlating user experience with business and mission context and real-time insights into application performance and management
  • ThousandEyes for delivering insights into network and application performance across your enterprise and the internet
  • Intersight for optimizing application infrastructure dynamically across hybrid cloud and data center environments to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Optimization Outcomes

This integrated approach improves customer experience and delivers enhanced:

  • Performance: application performance is improved, metrics are correlated with business outcomes to provide a flawless application, and user experience across hybrid and cloud-native applications improves
  • Optimization: infrastructure is dynamically matched to application needs and business demands. This optimization also minimizes costs through more efficient use of infrastructure resources.
  • Security: vulnerabilities can be identified and blocked during production runtime and application development processes, creating shared context between application and security teams

Cisco stands ready to show you how we can help deliver better customer experience to enhance your organization’s business and mission outcomes. See Cisco’s Application Infrastructure Modernization Portfolio Explorer for additional information.



Authors

Steve Vetter

Senior Strategic Solution Executive and Federal Strategist

U.S. Public Sector