Great Wins for Cisco in CRN's Tech Innovator Awards 2023

We all feel the customer demands fueling a high pace of change in innovation. Cisco and our partners are delivering to these needs, to meet these shifts driving a new market scape. Technology migration is happening in networking hardware, data storage systems, and sustainability around power management systems. This results in innovative products areas such as automation, edge computing, IoT, hybrid work, and cloud. The CRN Tech Innovation Awards honor products that offer ingenuity and technological differentiation that are of value to global partners and customers.

CRN has kept a pulse on these changes with the annual Tech Innovation awards, and Cisco is well-represented with next-generation solution leadership. While you can see the in-depth reviews online, I wanted to review Cisco’s winning innovations.

Collaboration

I had a chance to reach out to my colleague Kristyn Hogan, VP of Collaboration Partner Sales. Here’s her perspective on the two winning collaboration products.

UC & Collaboration Hardware – Cisco Collaboration Devices for Microsoft Teams Rooms

Interoperability has always been at the forefront of our hybrid work strategy, understanding that our partners and their customers want collaboration to happen on their terms – regardless of device or meeting platform. Our partnership with Microsoft brings together two collaboration leaders to completely reimagine the hybrid work experience while unlocking the opportunity for our partners to sell the world’s best video devices into a broader customer base.

UC & Collaboration Software – Webex Connect

We live in a multi-channel, digital world. When our partners sell Webex Connect, they are able to deliver seamless, always-on, and connected customer experiences, enabling enterprises to engage with their customers on their terms across any communications channel. Webex Connect reinforces our position as one of the leading enterprise CPaaS solutions in the market and unlocks an entirely new opportunity for our partners to accelerate their value while driving customer transformation.

Compute

Industry Standard Servers Cisco UCS X-Fabric with PCIe node for GPU workloads

Cisco UCS X-Fabric Technology allows customers to standardize on a single system supporting a more comprehensive range of workloads—including those typically supported on rack servers—with the benefits of shared power, cooling, networking, and Cisco Intersight management.

With Cisco, partners can offer customers’ the flexibility of assigning GPUs as needed to server nodes to meet the evolving needs of workloads. This gives partners independent management for the different lifecycles of CPU and GPU components, driving more value for their customers to deliver additional AI/ML, VDI, and visualization applications.

Observability

IT Infrastructure Monitoring and Management ThousandEyes WAN Insights

The internet is your new enterprise network and with ThousandEyes you can deliver better digital experiences with unrivaled visibility into the internet, cloud, and networks that your business relies on for predictable, stable performance.

Specifically, Cisco ThousandEyes Internet and Cloud Intelligence, combined with Cisco SD-WAN, delivers optimal digital experiences with end-to-end visibility from the WAN edge to every user of any application, over any network.

Cisco also received finalist recognition for innovation in the following areas

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure – Bright ZR+
- Coherent Optics increase fiber transmission capacity by 80X as compared to conventional on-off keying (OOK) methods, keeping pace with 400G and 800G Ethernet commonly used for cloud and hyperscale data center interconnects.
- More commonly known as Bright ZR+ or BRZR+ (the actual product name is 400G Bright QDDZR+) is the latest addition to the Coherent Optics 400G product family. BRZR+ main use case are Transport Centric Networks requiring +120Km High Power Connectivity, ideally suited to support a Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure interconnecting on-prem and cloud-based data centers. We have a new 400G QDD Bright ZR+ 15x promo, orderable now on CCW with 34% list price bundle savings!
Email Security – Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
- This innovation provides expansive email security protection for your employees and organization while empowering your security response. Threats can come from numerous sources: phishing, business email compromise, malware, and ransomware. Defend against all of them with industry-leading threat intelligence that empowers you to act quickly.
Cloud Tools / Management – Cisco Secure Equipment Access (SEA) Plus
- Use Secure Equipment Access Plus (SEA Plus) in a variety of use cases from manufacturing to connected roadways, to remotely configure and maintain connected equipment through a secure channel from your workstation. SEA software is built into Cisco industrial switches and routers, and deployed using Cisco IoT Operations Dashboard, leveraging the scale and simplicity of the cloud.

Congratulations to our Cisco winners and finalists for continuing to lead the industry with innovation that delivers productivity and advances the value of technology for our global partners and customers!