When we first announced our Cisco and Google Cloud partnership back in 2017, our companies were focused on improving our customers’ journey to hybrid cloud. Each time that I talk with our teams about our ongoing joint innovation, I get more excited and here’s why. This work of integrating our complementary portfolios is driven by our shared vision of helping customers gain the most value from operating in the cloud.
“We’ve partnered with Cisco to integrate the best of what we both do to deliver solutions that solve our customers’ problems as they leverage the enormous power of operating in the cloud. Quite frankly, this is what our customers expect of us. By combining the best of what each market-leading company does, together the solutions are highly differentiated, bringing tremendous value to our mutual customers.”
—Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate Vice President, Global Ecosystem at Google Cloud
This isn’t just marketing talk. Cisco and Google Cloud continue to expand our joint innovation as we highlighted at this year’s Google Cloud Next ’20 digital event series.
Here’s a quick recap of how we’re working together to improve our customers’ cloud journeys.
AI-enabled contact centers
One of the areas I am personally excited about is the work being done around Contact Center and AI/ML. As we have adjusted to a new way of working, the role of contact centers has become even more critical to businesses, governments, and individuals. According to IDC, more than 70 percent of buyers point to customer experience as the most important consideration in their purchasing decisions. Poor customer experience leads to lost customers.
To address this challenge, Cisco has seamlessly integrated its contact center solutions with Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI, making it easy to deploy AI-driven virtual assistants quickly. This solution helps direct inbound contacts to the most appropriate and efficient form of interaction. It also provides faster service and manages customer support around the clock with simple, conversational self-service options via chat or voice. As a result, customer satisfaction increases, agent efficiency skyrockets, and organizations save money providing service to their clients.
Delivering the best multicloud application experiences
Our customers’ journey to cloud increasingly relies on supporting a hybrid IT environment. They want to make the transition but recognize that they need a managed, secure approach to develop and deploy applications anywhere, optimizing their existing on-premises investments, as well as harnessing the innovation from multiple public clouds.
To further enable our customers in their multicloud journeys, last year we announced our expansion of our collaboration with Google Cloud to build an architecture for Anthos (see Figure 1). This past May, we announced a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) that further integrates Google Cloud’s Anthos with Cisco HyperFlex and AppDynamics for advanced data and storage functionality and end-to-end visibility and monitoring for containerized applications.
We have also been consistently evolving our security offerings—such as Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud supporting Google Cloud VPC Flow Logs and Packet Mirroring and Cisco CloudLock supporting G Suite—to natively support Google Cloud and Google offerings.
We’ve also made available the Cisco Cloud Services Router 1000v in the Google Cloud marketplace, enabling customers to seamlessly extend their on-premises network to Google Cloud.
Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud
We have announced the integration of our market-leading Cisco SD-WAN with Google Cloud, bringing to market the industry’s first application-centric multicloud fabric. With this tighter integration between Cisco and Google Cloud, the Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud offers an end-to-end network that adapts to customers’ application needs more securely. We can’t wait for this integration to deliver even more efficiency to our customers’ hybrid cloud environment.
Want to Learn More?
For more specific information on the partnership, visit:
As you can see, there is an incredible amount of innovation happening between Cisco and Google Cloud to help our mutual customers better operate in the cloud.
Innovation is the cornerstone of our global partnering strategy, and it is exemplified by Cisco and Google’s cloud partnership.
Thanks for reading,
Nick
Exactly why I’m shifting my way of thinking in the future. Cloud is the new wave.