Cisco's new predictive services portfolio taps AI to solve IT skills gap
Video: Cisco's new IoT operations platform to support connected device initiatives at scale
Cisco today announced a new portfolio of predictive services that aims to help customers spot and predict IT failures through the use of AI.
Featured
The lineup includes Business Critical Services, which uses analytics, automation, compliance, and security tools to prevent system failures. There's also a new High-value Services product group that provides software and network support to help with scale, onboarding, analytics, and efficiency.
Central to Cisco's pitch for the new services is that there's a growing digital skills gap in IT. Therefore, businesses need more AI-based tools to augment human ability in a way that fosters innovation while minimizing the impact of the skills gap.
"Today's world is moving faster than ever, and to be successful, businesses must have the right blend of IT talent and services," said Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins in a press release. "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."
More broadly, the new services portfolio suggests that Cisco is finally cashing in on its $3.7 billion acquisition of AppDynamics from earlier this year. AppDynamics, which had plans to become a public company before the acquisition, monitors application performance and business metrics.
At the time the deal was announced, Cisco said it planned to use AppDynamics to provide a suite of monitoring tools that can combine everything from network performance to application monitoring to the Internet of things, eventually becomming more of a business performance and analytics company.
PREVIOUS AND RELATED COVERAGE
AppDynamics launches Business iQ, aims to move into business analytics
The general idea is that Business iQ will take AppDynamics more into business analytics as it courts CIOs, line of business execs and developers.
Cisco places $3.7 billion bet on AppDynamics: What it means
Cisco is paying a hefty premium but will gain important new technology in return.
Cisco buys Springpath for $320 million
Springpath has been around since 2012 and the networking giant led its Series C funding round two years ago.