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I still vividly remember, back in 2012 when I attended the data analytics conference in Santa Clara , California, few blocks away from Cisco office. Data analytics was beginning to take off on a large scale and the silicon valley was the hotbed of innovation. At least a 2000+ audience from data enthusiasts to experts attended the 3 day conference who were there to understand how the big-data industry was evolving, its use cases, applications, tools and opportunities.

What I also witnessed around the same time within Cisco services organisation that the grass roots innovation started to take shape. Easy access to analytical and automation tools, open-source libraries allowed Cisco engineers solve their customers problems with a greater speed and efficiency. They started build automation tools for every stage of customer technology lifecycle from implementation to support. The gamut of automation involved migration scripts, audits, assessments, complex log analysis, cross-domain workflow orchestration, automated change management, a humanoid support engineer, etc., Cisco corporate recognised this trend and started to formally support automation programs at a large scale.

Fast forward to 2023, today there are 1000+ service and support automation assets and award winning workflow orchestration tools across the customer lifecycle that has been catalogued and offered by the Cisco services organisation. Support automation tools and libraries are resolving customer problems with unprecedented speed, accuracy, and efficiency. Machine Learning models that has learnt from past technology failures have become robust in predicting failures or doing root cause analysis with greater accuracy.

As part of Partner strategy, Cisco decided to open up these innovations, assets, tools and libraries to its global ecosystem of CX (Customer Experience) specialised partners to drive the same kind of speed and efficiency in their service delivery motion.

Above, you will see different automation capabilities across support and Lifecycle Services. Few automation capabilities across the support services are already part of the partner program called Partner Lifecycle Services-Support. Cisco CX specialised partners can tap into these automation capabilities in the near future and begin augmenting their support services with cutting-edge automation.

A common automation framework is being developed for partners for lifecycle services automation. Once this is developed, partners can tap into the automation assets and capabilities and begin augmenting their lifecycle services with cutting-edge automation. Automation across implementation, migration, audits, compliance , change management, etc., are all part of the lifecycle services automation.

Automation in a general sense is a critical capability across any kind of digital business. Support and Lifecycle automation should become core capability for partners service delivery motion. It can drive upto 5x efficiency and speed of delivery and reduce the cost to a big extent.