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Over the last decade, there is proliferation of insights and automation capabilities within the Cisco CX (Customer Experience) organization. These capabilities are slowly making its way to the partners door to unleash its benefits. Cisco partners who embed insights and automation capabilities within their service delivery processes are certain to reap higher operating margins due to lower cost, reduced human errors and improved efficiency. Implementation, support, optimization and change management services being key revenue streams has solid potential to be embedded with these emerging insight and automation capabilities across multiple Cisco technology domains (campus network, data center, sd-wan, etc.,).

These cutting-edge capabilities have been made possible due to API centric approach that Cisco has taken over the years while building the products across different domains. API is the new interface with its predecessors being CLI and GUI. Because these products are API centric, it allows standard methods to access product telemetry data on performance, health, software and security and apply AI/ML techniques to derive rich insights from the data. API centric approach also allows to automate products updates around configuration (policy, firewall rule changes, etc.,), software, security patches, etc.,

In this article, I will highlight few Insight and automation capabilities for Cisco partners, some of them already available and some in pilot.

Automated Insights for Optimize Processes

Cisco PX (Partner Experience) Cloud offers automated insights on network health and performance, software and security areas. Processes that used to take manual labor hours to arrive at insights and develop customer recommendation is now available at fingertips through PX Cloud dashboard or accessible via APIs. Some of the automated processes are software bug scrubs, golden image recommendation, field notices, security vulnerability analysis and compliance analysis. With these automated insights Cisco partners can focus more on the recommendation and customer relationships. Cisco partners who resell Success Tracks are entitled for these insights through customer consent.

Automation for Change Management Processes (Services-as-Code)

This is a new paradigm for network change management leveraging DevOps practices in the IT operations space specifically around provisioning, configuration, testing and deployment stages. Traditionally handled via CLI or GUIs, network change management is very hard, whether pushing configuration changes or software upgrades for 1000’s of routers or switches at once, many things can go wrong. 

With Services-as-Code, it allows network operators to ‘declare’ the expected target network state (eg., Add 2 new VRF, 5 VLANs and 2 bridge domains) to provision, configure, test and deploy services using ‘software code’ with tight version control. The net-dev-ops engineer dont need to write specific steps via scripts to execute this change. Unlike traditional automation that requires step-by-step instructions coded in the scripts, declarative automation abstracts away from this complexity making it easier to manage and maintain automation tasks over time 

Services-as-Code gives a powerful control point for IT teams especially with highly distributed networks. Most popular network updates like configuration changes (firewall rule change, network policy addition, etc.,) and software upgrades can be achieved through the DevOps automation pipeline that can save huge time and reduce manual errors. Cisco ACI and SDWAN are the first two solution domains that would be available for Cisco partners. Services-as-Code is available as add-on to Partner Advanced Support (PAS).

Automation for Support Processes (Partner Advanced Support)

Cisco TAC (Technical Assistance Center) has been in the forefront of leveraging automation capabilities to automate support workflows. These toolsets has mostly remained in-house but has started to slowly make inroads into partners business as well. Cisco RadKit is one of the first to get into partner hands and currently in pilot stage. Cisco RadKit a set of ready-to-use tools and Python modules for support engineers who can Interactively connect to remote terminals, WebUIs or desktops to collect data across a network. Cisco RadKit is currently under LA (Limited Availability) for Cisco partners. Other automation tools like Automated  RCA (Root Cause Analysis) and Automated RMA (Return Material Authorization) is currently in pilot stage with partners.

Automated Insights for Support Processes (Managed Insights)

Cisco CX has created a services analytics dashboard that sits on top of Cisco’s flagship products Thousand Eyes and App Dynamics. The analytics engine underneath the dashboard correlates humunguous amount of network events, combines and surfaces the most important ones to the network administrators. Root cause isolation, remediation and fault prediction are some of the key features from this service.

Partner growth, profitability and differentiation being key strategic goals for Cisco, the insights and automation capabilities that the partner builds align to all the 3 goals in one way or other.