Cisco Intersight – Analysts and Partners Respond

Cisco Intersight is a transformative cloud-based management platform. It delivers new levels of simplicity and actionable intelligence to achieve significant customer benefits. Industry analysts and partners affirm Cisco’s strategy.

Embracing the Transformation

In a previous blog I explained how Cisco Intersight is a transformative evolution in infrastructure management. Existing systems management tools are deployed on premise as separate tools and appliances. Cisco is moving the management of servers, hyperconverged infrastructure, and the associated fabric and storage to the cloud. By moving management to the cloud, we can apply analytics and machine learning to deliver new insights and deliver a more proactive approach to systems management. This is a bold move that is being implemented in an evolutionary manner to minimize the hassles for our existing and future customers.

Industry analysts responded to the Intersight announcement and commented on the potential benefits of Cisco Intersight for customers of all sizes.

“…many users that rely on the basic functionality of UCS Manager could benefit from the intuitive functions of Intersight”, said Chris Gardner, senior analyst at Forrester Research. (“Cisco Intersight rolls up data center management software”, TechTarget, Sep-22-17)

IDC analyst Ashish Nadkarni points to this cloud sourcing as “the big picture promise” of Intersight. “What you get in this kind of model is a secure way of learning from each other,” he said, explaining that a company with a 1,000-server data center is only going to have insight over those 1,000 servers. “But if I make that 100,000 servers, because now everybody’s infrastructure is pooled in terms of the learning, my chances of troubleshooting or finding out things before they happen goes up.” (“Cisco Starship Pushes Data Center Management to the Cloud”, SDXCentral, Sep-21)

Ashish elaborated on the benefits of cloud-based operations analytics in an interview with Todd Brannon, the director of UCS marketing. The interview was recorded at Cisco Live in June.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-YDpu1Iw7s

“Cisco’s grand plan is to provide context data to every IT group — network, storage, server and virtualization”, said Torsten Volk, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. (“Cisco Intersight to take data center networking to the cloud”, TechTarget, Sep-22-17)

Torsten provided further analysis of Intersight and industry trends in a report he recently published, “EMA Quick Take: Cisco Launches AI-Enabled, Cloud-Managed Infrastructure.”

You can download the report.

Partners Endorse the Advantages of Intersight

Our technology partners are also committed to working with Cisco to deliver improved benefits and differentiated solutions to our customers and channel partners. Eric Herzog, the VP of Product Marketing and Management with IBM Storage Systems and Software Defined Infrastructure, stated in a recent blog post,

The new Cisco Intersight cloud-based infrastructure management platform is an excellent step forward in the infrastructure managed marketplace. We are pleased to see the launch of this new technology and look forward to expanding the VersaStack market with Cisco.

In a blog entitled “Next Gen Infrastructure Management with Cisco Intersight”, Matt Burr, the VP Platforms at Pure Storage said,

Pure Storage looks forward to creating enhanced customer and partner value with Cisco through the Intersight management and analytics platform. With the development of new connectors, integrations and insights gained from machine learning that enable faster, proactive operations, we look forward to continued collaborations with Cisco to deliver the best-in-class data platform for the cloud era.

Providing customers with a revolutionary new way to manage their IT infrastructure while keeping it simple will be a journey. The experts agree that Cisco is heading in the right direction with this new management platform. Our partners are supporting the vision to empower users to “Be anywhere, act everywhere” using Cisco Intersight.

Learn more:

Read the independent analyst report

Go to www.cisco.com/go/intersight