Cisco and Microsoft: Partnering to Help Customers Accelerate Digital Transformation

In my last blog, I unveiled how Cisco is engaging our Strategic Partners to help create competitive advantages for our joint customers. I made some pretty bold statements, like this one…

“I truly believe that our team maximizes the value that Cisco and our Strategic Partners bring to customers, and that we manage strategic partnering better than anyone else in the industry. Period.”

And I’m doubling down on that claim. Cisco continuously drives the objective of delivering innovative solutions and business outcomes that empower our customers as well as partners, to help them differentiate and grow their businesses.

Enterprise customers are modernizing their legacy infrastructure, implementing cloud strategies, and making decisions to improve application and workload performance.  There is a tremendous amount of technology innovation and new services available on Azure, making it difficult for customers to navigate their options. That’s why many of Cisco’s solutions are natively and seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Azure to help customers de-risk their decision-making.

Together, this partnership gives channel partners the ability to provide customers with end-to-end solutions along with differentiated services to help customers successfully deploy workloads and applications to Azure. Here are a few examples of how channel partners and their customers benefit from the Cisco-Microsoft partnership:

Application Performance Monitoring

Cisco AppDynamics

We are in the digital era of the application and customers need to reduce risk and accelerate application modernization.  It can be challenging to diagnose root causes and mediate issues because the problem can exist in any number of layers in the stack such as in the application, database, third party calls to microservices, compute and storage – running both on-premise or in Microsoft Azure. AppDynamics makes it possible to measure performance deltas when migrating workloads to both Azure and hybrid environments.

The tool maps out all the layers an application touches throughout the environment – including infrastructure and network. Now through a native integration with Azure, AppDynamics can monitor SQL statements and Azure Functions versions v1 and v2, while also supporting popular languages such as .NET, Java and Node.js.

Infrastructure Monitoring

Cisco Workload Optimization Manager (CWOM)

Customers need to continually optimize infrastructure usage to deploy and keep their applications and workloads happy. Over provisioning infrastructure can lead to overspending. Under provisioning can lead to poor user experiences. This is especially challenging in this cloud era as administrators have multiple things to manage. This is where automation needs to take place.

Network Connectivity and Management

Cisco SD-WAN integrated

Cisco and Microsoft have also partnered to improve network connectivity to cloud-based applications by natively extending Cisco SD-WAN to Microsoft Azure vWAN. This integration enables customers to seamlessly extend their WANs to Microsoft Azure Cloud. It enables enterprises to improve network connectivity for their Azure-based workloads, while also leveraging Azure Virtual WAN to route and secure network traffic

Cisco ACI Cloud APIC

ACI is Cisco’s Software Defined Networking solution that has been natively integrated with Azure where it is known as Cisco ACI Cloud APIC . It is a comprehensive solution providing simplified operations, automated network connectivity and consistent policy management. ACI provides end-to-end automation, segmentation, enforcement and visibility for applications and workloads that span from on-premise to cloud, cloud to cloud, or cloud to on-premise.

Cisco’s partnership with Microsoft is dedicated to innovating together with the goal of helping partners and customers succeed in their digital transformation and cloud journey. Cisco is there, wherever the customer wants to be – in the data center, at the edge, or in the cloud.  Cisco is the bridge.

Want to know more about our partnership with Microsoft? Head over to the Cisco-Microsoft partnership page for more information.