Our Software-Centric Strategy for Helping Customers Achieve Business Outcomes

2015 was a big year for Cisco as we made tremendous progress on our journey to provide a simpler and richer customer experience across all of our offerings. As Chuck said on our recent earnings call, “Our portfolio is more strategic than ever to companies and countries that are digitizing everything.” Customers worldwide rely on Cisco as a strategic provider of IT services and solutions across their business, but they’re also looking for us to go beyond delivering technology, to helping them with their digital transformation as they seek to achieve specific business outcomes.

With the introduction a year ago of Cisco ONE Software, we dramatically changed the way we deliver innovation across our infrastructure offerings making it easier for customers to procure, deploy and manage their data center, networks and critical applications. We built Cisco ONE Software on our four key principles: Customer Experience First; Everything Cloud Ready; Simple and Open; and Consumption Flexibility.

Cisco ONE Software offers customers the choice to buy and consume software in a way that meets their budget and investment strategy while providing simplified solutions to their most relevant, frequently-used scenarios. With Cisco ONE Software, we’re sharply focused on outcomes, like rolling out Intelligent WAN, Connected Mobile Experience, and Hybrid Private Cloud. And with Cisco ONE Softwarewe are delivering cloud and subscription based offerings, starting with Enterprise Cloud Suite. (For more, check out Cisco ONE Software – One year old! )

We’re looking at many opportunities to move point products and components into easier-to-consume and manage customer models. Last December, Cisco completely changed the game in collaboration with the announcement of a major evolution in Cisco Spark, with a brand-new offer to deliver the universal forms of collaboration— messaging, meeting, and calling — in a simple consumption model, all native and from the cloud. With Cisco Spark we’ve made it easier to get phones and other devices connected to these services—all with a rich customer-experience making collaboration simple and easy anywhere, anytime and on any device. Spark is modeled on a very intuitive and simple good, better and best user-subscription model. Spark, like Cisco ONE Software, brings simplicity, value and innovation in one consistent model across the data center and network.

Now, with the recent launch of Digital Network Architecture (DNA), we’re bringing rich capabilities like virtualization, automation, analytics, and cloud, through the Cisco ONE Software framework, which gives our customers a simpler, more valuable way to take advantage of these technologies in an integrated approach. DNA helps enterprises operate at digital speed, and supports the business outcomes customers are after – accelerated innovation, reduced costs, simplicity, and lower risk. DNA is key to getting the network ready as companies go digital, and Cisco ONE Software provides the investment protection that allows customers to begin their network transformation journey today and add new innovations through software updates.

Throughout 2016, you’ll see us continue to refine our software-led model, putting the customer at the center of the experience, with a focus on flexibility in how they consume and manage software. With this model, customers can rely on Cisco to help them transform their businesses, while ensuring they get easy access to continuing innovation.

Watch us further solidify our position as the only vendor that can provide end-to-end solutions to help customers digitize their businesses.

Thank you,
John