Cisco has launched Business Critical Services and High-value Services — featuring AI and machine learning — as part of the company strategy to expand its services portfolio.
The intelligence of AI and machine learning will assist CIOs to optimize IT talent, knowledge and skills and allow organizations to solve their problems first and get closer to their end user customer.
Cisco said its new Business Critical Services and High-value Services will enable enterprise CIOs to invest more of their IT budgets on technology innovation amid a growing technical skills gap that poses an imminent threat to business continuity and growth.
Chuck Robbins, chief executive officer, Cisco, said: “By leveraging AI and machine learning to address critical IT issues, Cisco’s new services offerings will truly help our customers free up time to focus on the growing IT talent gap, and remain competitive into the future.”
Cisco’s new subscription services, Business Critical Services, deliver capabilities including analytics, automation, compliance and security by Cisco Advanced Services’ technology experts to enable secure, efficient, and agile technology environment.
Cisco said Business Critical Services will help minimize human error and help extract the most value from products and solutions while creating a highly secure IT environment. These next-generation optimization services enable organizations to: Reduce complexity and cost through automation, orchestration, and technical expertise.
Cisco said these new Business Critical Services seek to help reduce downtime by up to 74 percent, resolve issues up to 41 percent faster and reduce operational costs by up to 21 percent according to the Cisco Optimization Services Executive Summary.
Cisco’s high-value services come with analytics, onboarding, expertise, and scale to deliver proactive and prescriptive services, enabling customers to realize more value from their IT investments.
According to IDC’s 2017 Global Digital Transformational (DX) Leader Survey, a lack of digital skills in the organization was cited as the single largest challenge to successfully implement digital transformation. Correspondingly,
Companies seeking to implement digital transformation are looking to other sources of talent to enable their digital strategies.
IDC forecasts that $6.3 trillion will be invested in direct digital transformation over the period 2017-2020. $2.6 trillion of this investment is being budgeted and spent exclusively on third party services firms with expertise in digital transformation.
“The landscape is evolving too fast for some businesses to keep up with digital transformation, as a result they rely on their larger vendor partners with the skills, expertise and capabilities to help address these talent gaps,” Chris Barnard of IDC said.
According to Cisco’s recent Services landscape report, the top benefits enterprise organizations are looking to achieve from IT services include filling key talent or skills gaps, gaining access to unique expertise or capabilities and refocus internal staff on other priorities.
Cisco revenue declined 4 percent in Q2 2017, the company’s worst top-line growth performance since Q1 2014.
“Cisco is feeling the impact of macro trends, such as increased memory pricing and slight increases in pricing erosion. The company’s early traction with its platform transition efforts around the Catalyst 9000 switches along with continued strong performance related to the ACI portfolio leave Cisco well-positioned to recapture top-line growth by the tail end of its fiscal year 2018,” said Michael Soper, analyst at TBR.
