October 25, 2019 2 Comments
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Cisco Enterprise Agreement: Benefits and Exclusive Offers

The first blog in this series highlighted the benefits of Cisco DNA software subscriptions, and marrying your hardware network to software consumption models. For this second post in the series, we’ll concentrate on one of those consumption models: Cisco’s Enterprise Agreement (EA), and introduce some very attractive offers available for new Cisco DNA enrollments in an EA.

What is the Cisco Enterprise Agreement?

The Cisco Enterprise Agreement is a centralized, enterprise-wide software buying program. Simplifying the Cisco Software experience, an EA establishes a framework across several different Cisco architectures using unified terms and conditions and makes the licensing of Cisco software easy and seamless for your business.

Figure 1. Cisco Enterprise Agreement Framework

As seen in Figure 1, currently there are four enrollments eligible for inclusion in an EA. Cisco is also expanding the number of available enrollments to better serve businesses by piloting additional architectures under the EA umbrella.

What’s In It For Me?

Change is never easy, and frankly, oftentimes not all that welcome. For businesses to make the leap from the status quo to something new and unfamiliar, the benefit has to outweigh the uncertainty. The breadth of customer benefits received by entering into an Enterprise Agreement with Cisco are summed up in Figure 2:

Figure 2. Cisco EA Cross-Portfolio Buying Platform

Cisco EAs were designed to simplify technology purchases by making Cisco software:

Easy to Buy: The heavy lifting is behind you: a cross-portfolio purchase agreement is in place granting you simplified access to Cisco’s software catalogs.

Easy to Consume: True Forward: no punitive retroactive billing. NTE Pricing: bought products’ pricing is locked for the duration of the EA. Try & Buy: you have access to new software and on-demand deployment.

Easy to Manage: Get simplified EA management, enterprise-wide visibility, and automatic license fulfillment. Licenses are managed from within the EA Workspace portal on Cisco Software Central (CSC). All software subscription expiration dates are aligned via the EA.

But don’t just take our word for it! The Enterprise Strategy Group recently published an analysis of the Economic Benefits of the Cisco Enterprise Agreement. Interviews with current EA customers unanimously showed a profound reduction in the complexity surrounding the procurement and management of software licenses, as shown in Figure 3, below.

Analyst Study: EA Reduces Customer Licensing Complexity
Figure 3. Analyst Study: EA Reduces Customer Licensing Complexity. Source: Cisco.com

 

“Procuring and managing traditional licenses is a complex activity that invites mistakes, which can be costly and make budgeting a pure guessing game…. Cisco has created a transformative Enterprise Agreement (EA) that simplifies tracking of licenses for compliance…. All customers interviewed expressed a high level of satisfaction with Cisco EAs, specifically noting the shift of resources to more strategic activities when moving from an à la carte licensing consumption model to a Cisco EA.”

 

Exclusive Cisco DNA EA Enrollment Offers

As businesses digitize more and more of their operations to deliver business outcomes, they are looking for purchasing solutions that have the ability to rejuvenate their IT environments. A Cisco DNA enrollment can help to remake IT departments into a

  • Purchase when needed,
  • Deploy when, where, and how needed,
  • Automated software updating,
  • Policy enforcement and monitoring across all domains,
  • End-to-end regulation compliance

kind of department.

To further pique your interest, there are currently some very attractive offers available both to new Cisco DNA EA enrollments, and also to new suite additions within an existing Cisco DNA EA enrollment. The offers include:

  • Free Cisco DNA Center appliance in Switching and Wireless enrollments
  • Free ISR 1100-4G/6G devices in SD-WAN and Routing enrollments
  • $7500 in Partner implementation services benefits

See all of Cisco’s exclusive offers and promotions for a Cisco DNA EA Enrollment.

Get in touch with your Cisco Account Manager to explore how a Cisco EA can revolutionize your technology spend.

Watch the new Cisco DNA subscriptions introductory video:

 

 

Check out all our blogs in the Cisco DNA software series: