Cisco ACI-Cherwell solution brings enhanced automation and visibility to IT Services

Today we are pleased to announce ACI-Cherwell joint solution to address growing customer needs in IT Service Management. Cisco ACI is industry’s market-leading SDN network technology and has fast established itself with a burgeoning ecosystem, and this success owes itself to the open API, flexibility, and choice provided by the platform. Cherwell is rapidly making strides as a leading ITSM vendor and has made it to the Gartner’s ITSM magic quadrant as a Challenger, for the second year in a row. There is plenty of excitement in Cisco ACI – Cherwell integrated solution and this blog sets out to bring the highlights in the ensuing sections.

Market ITSM Challenges and the Solution

Enterprises are increasingly challenged by the rapid increase in demand for IT services from both their employees and customers. Further, with hybrid nature of data centers with applications residing across both on-premise and clouds the task of providing quick and flexible business services becomes more challenging. Cisco ACI and Cherwell joint solution provides a fully-automated policy-based enterprise service management solution to address these challenges.

ACI and Cherwell joint customers have been telling us that the ITOM/ITSM layers have been trickling down to DC/Cloud infrastructure for quite some time. In fact, some of these customers have been using Cherwell to map business services to the network, and in some cases, they have been actually provisioning and managing the underlying infrastructure. Acting on customer’s feedback, we worked on ACI-Cherwell integration.

Major use cases covered as part of the ACI-Cherwell joint solution include CMDB enrichment, troubleshooting, service management, configuration management and UI Tools integration.

ACI – Cherwell Solution

Benefits of ACI-Cherwell Solution

With ACI-Cherwell solution, customers get unprecedented automation, visibility, and efficiency in their IT service management.

Automation: IT organizations can drastically reduce the time required to map new services and detect changes in existing ones. The solution not only enables fast and accurate service mapping process, but also enables you to reclaim or retire applications, servers, and storage and networking resources when they are no longer needed, resulting in operational agility and efficient use of resources.

Visibility: Cisco ACI enables Cherwell to provide real-time visibility across scale-out cloud, virtual, and physical infrastructure. When service and infrastructure changes occur, including actions related to change requests, infrastructure events, and service outages, IT teams can quickly identify the root cause and determine the best way to remediate the issue, leading to drastically reduced mean time to recovery (MTTR).

Operational efficiency: IT operations teams respond more quickly and become more proactive with Cisco ACI keeping an up-to-date view of service-aware infrastructure and informing Cherwell about the services that are available and the ways that they are connected.

Better SLA Management: Improved automation, visibility, and compliance, coupled with dynamic and accurate service mapping, enable IT organizations to create realistic SLAs that can be met and easily shared with stakeholders across the organization.

As customer adoption of ACI-Cherwell becomes widespread, we will continue to cover newer use-cases to address IT operational pain-points.

If you happen to be in Barcelona during Cisco Live (Jan 29-Feb 2), please visit us at the Datacenter world of solution demo pods to get a close view of how Cisco ACI works with our ecosystem partners and ITSM in particular. We have a great line up of technical experts at the show to describe Cisco ACI- Cherwell integrations and also hands-on demo session showcasing how these integrations work in real life use cases. So, do stop by the World of Solutions showcase.