The goal of any technology or engineering team is to build products that make life easier for their end-users. That’s especially true in the world of IT. Against the backdrop of rising cloud costs, performance demands, and new security and sovereignty requirements, hybrid cloud offers more options – and more complexity – than ever. Whether it’s a “build your own” approach or full-scale managed services, organizations want the ability to choose the path that will create the simplest, best experience for their employees and customers, and the most value for their business.
With that in mind, it is no surprise that Cisco’s converged infrastructure solutions offered through our world-class ecosystem partners are popular with customers. Simply put, converged infrastructure exists to simplify and accelerate application delivery. These solutions are designed, validated, and optimized for a wide variety of application workloads and use cases so that IT teams can reduce their complexity and risk.
The converged infrastructure offering from Cisco and Hitachi Adaptive Solutions is built on decades of industry expertise and technology innovation together. And now, Cisco is thrilled to support Hitachi Vantara’s announcement of the next and logical evolution of this solution: A new suite of managed as-a-service offerings with a flexible consumption option for hybrid cloud use cases. This is also an important deliverable from the strategic partnership agreement that the two companies signed June 2023, specifically to help customers simplify their hybrid cloud management.
This new offering, Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud embodies the benefits of both simplicity and choice. It means that Hitachi Vantara, with solutions powered by compute, networking, and software from Cisco and storage technologies from Hitachi, assumes the responsibility for maintaining a range of IT infrastructure functions, backed by contractually agreed-to service levels, metrics, and consumption-based pricing.
Why managed services for hybrid cloud?
Organizations are finding that consumption-based IT infrastructure delivered as-a-Service (aaS) can help overcome challenges often present in hybrid cloud deployments, such as operational complexity, rising costs, increasing security risk, and demands for faster time to value.
According to the Cisco Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report, hundreds of IT organizations globally cited three top concerns:
- 37% said security concerns are a significant challenge to deploying to multiple clouds.
- 35% reported operational complexity as a key challenge when using multiple clouds.
- 33% said the cost containment was an issue, especially as companies adopted more public cloud resources.
Together, Hitachi and Cisco address these challenges by accelerating the transition to hybrid cloud and providing organizations with the flexibility to meet their specific business requirements.
Hitachi Vantara Hybrid Cloud Managed Services offers a variety of capabilities including:
- Monitoring and alerting, capacity management, provisioning, and IT change management.
- Continuous improvements and innovation by applying automation, AI/ML technologies, and leveraging leading practices.
- Use of predictive analytics of operational data to drive innovation and streamline delivery.
The goal is for Hitachi Vantara to empower a cloud-like experience for IT organizations on-premises and in the cloud. Customers benefit from improved data availability, hybrid cloud observability, better operational and infrastructure efficiency, including the enablement of hybrid cloud automation.
And because we know that one-size-fits-all is rarely the best option, customers have flexibility to choose from more self-service offerings all the way to fully managed service, pay-as-you-go options all backed by professional services, support, and training.
Managed services also help our channel partners diversify and differentiate their businesses, within key areas of demand including hybrid cloud. With this managed service offering, Cisco and Hitachi channel partners can access proven, reliable solutions powered by two trusted brands that meet dynamic business requirements through consumption-based, cloud-like experience services.
“Our joint efforts with Hitachi Vantara around hybrid cloud managed services support a holistic approach to achieving customers’ business outcomes,” said Alexandra Zagury, vice president of partner managed and as-as-service sales, Cisco. “Our combined portfolio, including Hitachi Infrastructure Orchestration as-a-Service (HIOaaS), deliver the reliability, flexibility and insights that allow the customer to be more agile in today’s dynamic business environment. And the Partner-to-Partner model taps into one of the biggest growth drivers in the industry right now by providing customers with more choice and partners with the opportunity to build offers around their competencies.”
Future ready with Cisco and Hitachi Vantara
Being ready and adaptive to whatever the future brings is a powerful tool. This is at the heart of what makes Cisco UCS X-Series powered by Cisco Intersight, an award-winning solution and our most popular computing system. Future readiness means that the technology investments that our customers make today will help them better meet the evolving demands of tomorrow—driven by AI and the increasing importance of data.
One way for customers to ensure future readiness is to work with partners that can be there for them every step of the way. That’s at the essence of the new hybrid cloud managed service offering from Hitachi Vantara – it’s choice and simplicity delivered as a service customized for the specific needs of our customers.
Learn more about this joint effort with Hitachi
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Excellent news and partnership, #GoManaged!
Great read, great partnership #GoManaged