Cisco had recently announced its plans of extending Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) – its Software Defined Networking (SDN) solution, to the public cloud – Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google.
This will allow quick innovation and digital transformation as enterprises will get to access ACI anywhere along with the flexibility of running their applications across their private and chosen public cloud, while maintaining constant network policies along complete multi-cloud domain.
ACI helps in reducing data center complexities by providing hardware and software capabilities jointly via one environment. Approximately 4,000 customers of Cisco are currently using ACI platform.
In the wake of this development, Cisco made another announcement of commencing Early Field Trials (EFT) of its ACI Virtual Edge (AVE), Cisco’s next generation Application Virtual Switch (AVS) for the ACI environments. AVE is independent of hypervisor and offers seamless policy control across a number of hypervisors, with its basic version targeted for VMware ESXi.
Frank Palumbo, Senior Vice President, Global Data Center & Enterprise Networking Sales announced this development in his blog post. He said, “We are on schedule to ship by the end of this year.”
He added, “Cisco understands the burden of operational change. We have designed the ACI Virtual Edge for an easy transition with minimal operational disruption. Current customers can continue to use the AVS and move to the AVE at their convenience. We will continue support for the AVS to alleviate customer concern. With this solution, customers can maintain their existing policies and operational procedures.”
With traditional hardware based switches and routers quickly fading away, Cisco has been continuously trying to position itself as a software vendor. This year, the company experienced a dip in its switching revenue by approximately 9% YoY in fiscal 4Q17, that cover almost half of its revenue.
Cisco seems to be in the initial transition stages of moving to the software and subscription revenue business model and so this dip is expected when the companies switch business models. The recent announcements are the proof that the tech giant is focusing on innovation that can create long term business value.
