September 19, 2014 2 Comments
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Data Center

Leading the SDN transition with ACI – One Customer At a Time

The last several months have been a roll with several customers, channel partner and technology partner engagements. With the ACI starter kits and lab bundles shipping, customers can bring this solution into their labs and subsequently into their production Pods with the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and the Nexus switching platforms. We see a healthy interest in these kits with customers as they explore its SDN capabilities. Several ecosystem partners like F5 and Citrix have started to ship device packages. We just came off a company wide sales conference at Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago that was hugely energizing. Policy as a means to drive automation, security and scale is now the major focus area for SDN as outlined originally by Cisco as more industry vendors now endorse the vision as evidenced by initiatives like OpenStack Congress. Investment protection continues to be a major Overall the new fiscal year promises to be an exciting one.

https://youtu.be/nGmM2vzF0oA

ACI. SDN central interview with Soni Jiandani and Shashi Krian
Soni Jiandani on  SDN Central – Click for Q&A

Following up on the Unleashing IT magazine (ACI special edition) released last month, I wanted to share the momentum we’re experiencing with customers and partners as the acceleration continues. As John Chambers had outlined during the last earnings call, the adoption rate has been off to a tremendous start with some of the customers and partners featured in the video above.

We also continue to take the opportunity to answer questions as the vision around ACI continues to crystallize and rapidly evolves from concept to hard reality. This week we took the opportunity to have a Q&A session with SDN central. Soni Jiandani, SVP of Insieme Networks Business Unit at Cisco led the conversation. The featured interview can be accessed here. Soni crisply articulates the ACI value proposition while addressing some of the top of mind questions that come from the media.

Over the next few months, you should see more announcements come in on the innovations front across the entire portfolio, even as new acquisitions bring more value to the integrated offering.  If you’re a Cisco customer or a channel partner, global roadshows are kicking off to bring the conversation to your city and to your doorstep. In the coming months, I hope to share how customers are continuing to adopt the ACI, the Nexus switching portfolio and other elements of the DC infrastructure stack to address  different data center and cloud use-cases across segments as we lead one of the most exciting transitions in the IT Industry today.