There is no escaping digital transformation. Companies who choose ignore this will go obsolete. Dave West, Vice President, Enterprise Networking Sales; Chief Technology Officer, Asia Pacific and Japan – Cisco Systems elucidates on Cisco’s journey to ease and enable digital transformation in organization. By Jasmine Desai.
How is networking industry responding to digital transformation?
West: Digital business transformation is placing unprecedented new demands on service provider networks, causing them to seek an alternate approach to their architectures that gives them more agility. According to Cisco Global Cloud Index, total global data centre traffic will come from the cloud by 2019. The proliferation of more business devices and M2M connections as well as more scalable services and applications with additional storage needs will create new network and compute requirements, specifically a convergence of the data centre and WAN. Most data which will be generated will be closer to the customer and will have interesting implication on data centres and what they will look like.
We are preparing our partners for massive digital disruption. Presently, companies are under tremendous pressure to digitise. We look at it in two spectrums. Most companies today are doing digital, but they are not being digital i.e. they are not improvising their back-end processes and systems to be able to service customers more efficiently and to transform how they do business.
Cisco analysed 12 major industries in Asia, and according to them 4 out of 10 companies from all those industries would longer be in business in 4-5 years, as they cannot improvise and keep pace with the digital disruption. Many organisations believe that disruption will not happen due to start-ups, but it will happen within. For example, through acquisition or change in their digital processes.
We are working with our partners to be able to deliver services end-to-end. We can deliver capabilities from cloud and data centre, all the way to the workplace. Our work in Openstack in NFV, ACI and SDN, will transform the way our partners deliver service to our customers.
Can you elucidate on Cisco’s recent acquisitions?
West: For us, networking is not a commodity. In world old digitisation network is at the heart of everything. We recently made Lancop acquisition. The technology in Lancop senses anomalies in the network. Security is crucial in the world of digital. There will be 35 billion more devices in the network in the next five years. In cyber-world that is 35 billion more attack vectors to attack from. It is imperative to make the network much more security aware, to make every port, every access point an early warning sensor to threat. The technology embedded in our NetFlow switches can track the flow and anamolies in the network from baseline and visualize the network flow. We can automate services to shut down the port and to orchestrate and deliver capabilities much more readily. Keeping with times, all of our devices now are embedded with anti-malware protection.
Another of our most interesting and important acquisition has been Meraki for cloud network. It is a cloud networking service. Through Meraki networking, routing, wireless infrastructure, enterprise mobility can all be managed on a cloud dashboard. Location and analytics can also be done through it. It will be a game changer for networking over-all. It also supports enterprise mobility management. It can drive the policies all the way to the work-space and manage all of the devices. It allows organisations to be really robust but simple.
What is the most recent discussions at Cisco around?
West: Presently, we have been having tremendous amount of discussion on fast IT, which is about how to deliver services with greater agility. To facilitate this, we launched our Application Infrastructure Controller, which is the policy controller for our enterprise network. It is a key component of our SDN strategy. Through this we are able to automate and orchestrate services more readily across the network.
We recently launched Cisco Mobility Express. Mobility is the new access, wireless is the new access. This has 11ac Wave 2 access point, which is a very important transition in wireless. It delivers 2.5 to 5 Gigabyte over wireless. Given the spectrum limitations in India, this will be very relevant for Digital India. A branch can set-up a network of wireless services in matter of minutes. We have integrated our controller which controls all access points into the infrastructure. Users who do not have 3g or 4g can now use this to use VoIP infrastructure. We also released MGig which hallows to run 2.5 and 5 gig over CAT 5E cable. Through this they do not have to rip and replace.
How is analytics unfolding in the networking space?
West: Around analytics, it is hard for customers to realize the value that broadband services are providing. For enhanced customer experience through analytics we have a solution Connected Mobile Experience. If there are 100 or any number of people routed around a network we can track that. It allows to track the device and gives access to the broadband. Most users connect through their social media account. Retailers, hospitality, education find this extremely relevant. For example, Louis Vuitton had given its sales associates iPad to get in touch with the database. However, in few months everyone stopped using it because their database was in the cloud and the network was not fast enough to give them the access. Eventually, realising the problem they began to do branch transformation. They began to move content closer to each and every store. Every store now has Louis Vuitton content cache locally. They had pervasive wireless across their stores.
We have started to converge rich services on the router. We are able to run compute platform directly embedded on router. It really becomes a branch application. With our relationship with Akamai we are able to cache the content locally. So every store has a compute platform embedded in a router. So now when a customer walks in, they know the preferences, what did they buy last etc. Business do not transform with data centre or processes. It is with all of it. It is about delivering the right experience from the data centre all the way to the workplace. We also released Hyper Location module, which can track an individual down one meter. The new world is digital and it is going to be fun.