A cloud journey without a cloud ready network is much like trying to drive a race car on a dirt road, –it just won’t go fast.  For this reason, Cisco is committed to delivering natively integrated solutions to cloud providers.  Cisco’s partnership with Microsoft is over a decade old, delivering natively integrated solutions that accelerate business outcomes for our joint enterprise customers. Through our vast partner ecosystem and marketplace, we deliver these solutions to our customers around the world.

Joint Channel Development with X-Architecture GTM

Cisco is committed to being the bridge between our customers’ current situations—and where they want to go. Cisco’s partners are the trusted advisors who make that a reality.

That’s why we’ve developed x-architectures and Cisco Validated Designs for Microsoft Azure, so that our shared channel partners can accelerate our joint customer’s digital transformations. In fact, we’re seeing these channel partners close 4x more business vs. our individual account teams selling together, which has led to several partners seeing a 300%+ increase in opportunities month-over-month, along with shortened sales cycles.

Customers are thrilled about the end-to-end solution architectures because it reduces complexity, de-risks decision making, and accelerate and improves deployment and business outcomes.

Unlocking Business Outcomes

Our customers are facing unprecedented pressure to deliver consistent, top-notch business outcomes. That’s why so many enterprises are migrating their business-critical applications and workloads to hybrid cloud architectures—to get out of data centers and innovate faster while focusing on core business competencies.

However, before customers begin their journey to the cloud, it is imperative that they have a secure, cloud-ready network that can meet the demands of modern business, including the following:

• Improved application performance
• Security and compliance
• Automation
• Reduced total cost of ownership

Cisco’s industry leading SD-WAN solutions are tightly integrated offerings for customer applications, including O365 and Azure Cloud deployments. This ensures that enterprises are able to meet core requirements around security, high performance, low-latency, and cost-optimized connectivity. Once the customer has a secure, cloud-ready network, they can begin their application and workload migrations. Cisco’s SD-WAN deployment options for Microsoft customers are also available through Equinix colocations.

Today, customers recognize that the application is their business. Applications are how customers interact, see the brand, and pay for products. These stats really tell the story:

• 53% of users abandon an application that takes longer than 3 seconds to load
• 86% of users delete applications that perform poorly
• 66% of consumers claim they would avoid trying a brand known for delivering poor digital experiences

Enter Application Performance Monitoring (APM), a business-critical need.

With AppDynamics, an Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for eight years running, customers accelerate cloud migration and achieve successful business outcomes faster in the cloud.

A recent example of this success is joint AppDynamics and Azure customer Alaska Airlines. With its shift to cloud-first as part of their digital transformation strategy, Alaska Airlines was faced with having to build cloud-native applications, re-architect others, and manage different workloads across their hybrid Azure environment.

Alaska Airlines turned to AppDynamics for APM, infrastructure monitoring and visibility, and end-user monitoring. This gave them tools for live monitoring of applications across the entire infrastructure and technology stack, including guest-service applications such as travel searches, ticket purchasing, and boarding passes, plus applications leveraged by pilots and flight attendants for flight mapping, safety, and customer service. All these functions now depend on AppDynamics to ensure the business runs smoothly and the airline continues to deliver exceptional user experiences.

In the first year after deploying AppDynamics, Alaska Airlines reduced the number of Level 1 and 2 outages significantly, and when they did happen, resolution times plummeted. They also achieved the following:

• 60% reduction in outages and other issues
• Reduction of mean-time-to-detection (MTTR) from hours to minutes
• Self-service access to see how everything impacts the big picture across the entire landscape

Cisco’s commitment is to be the bridge for our customers. Our partnership with Microsoft, along with our joint channel partners as trusted advisors, enables customers to achieve their business outcomes faster and with more confidence.

 

To learn more about Cisco solutions built for Microsoft, check out these additional resource links:

Learn more about SD-WAN and get a demo

Learn more about AppDynamics and get a demo

Learn about Cisco Secure Cloud Architecture for Azure

Download the Cisco Cloud ACI on Microsoft Azure White Paper