Network security is the foundation of a customer’s security posture. Having a firewall that can adapt to your customers’ changing needs is essential to protecting their network. Cisco, a leader in networking and cybersecurity solutions, understands this need and has introduced a range of new security incentives and promotions to maximize your profitability when selling Cisco Firewalls. The new programs are designed to be simple for you to leverage as you help businesses of all sizes secure their data and IT infrastructure effectively.

Be sure to check out this video on the new incentives.

Now, let’s dive into our latest offerings.

Customer Assessment Incentive

• Cisco values informed decisions, and with the Customer Assessment incentive, we encourage you to register and conduct customer security assessments to identify potential vulnerabilities, compliance gaps, and understand the security posture of your customers’ network. Upon completion and submission of a deal registration, you will earn significant incentives!

Targeted Competitive Firewall Program

• To address the challenge of competitive firewall solutions in the market, Cisco has launched an aggressive discount to help you incentivize customers to consider switching from a competitor’s firewall. This program offers significant discounts to make the transition to Cisco’s firewall solutions both cost-effective and seamless. Explore the resources linked in the title to determine if your end customer is eligible for the promotion.

Security Suites: Residual Value Subscription Credits and Competitive Displacement Incentives

• Cisco recognizes that security extends beyond firewalls; it’s also about comprehensive user protection. The User Protection Security Suite now includes the ability to apply residual value subscription credits from qualifying Duo, Umbrella, and Secure Access subscriptions. You can also leverage upfront or amortized competitive displacement incentives to alleviate costs for your customers when migrating to Cisco User Protection. For more information, reference the new Cisco Security Suites Investment Protection Fact Sheet.

Security Concierge Deal Support

• Understanding that your time is valuable and with an eye to improving your deal velocity, Cisco has launched a Security Concierge Deal Support service to provide personalized assistance throughout the quoting and purchasing process. This new support team triages security deal registrations where partners have indicated a need for help in getting to the right Cisco resources. Ultimately, this ensures that partners have access to Cisco experts will accelerate registered security deals for partners by finding the resources to win. You can easily request support by using the QR code found on the program’s dedicated webpage.

Firewall Software Upgrade Offer – coming soon

• Using a “pay as you upgrade” approach, Cisco will now pay partners for upgrading their customers’ existing firewalls from 6.x through 7.1 to 7.2.5 or higher. This new program, where partners can claim as they go, unlocks new critical features to enhance the security of your customers’ networks. Stay tuned for a dedicated webpage where you’ll find resources and additional information for how to leverage this new offer!

In his latest blog, Brian Feeney, Vice President of Global Security Partner Sales, highlights how Cisco’s new Security incentives and promotions demonstrate our commitment to improving your Cisco experience and empower you to maximize your profitability and enhance your customers’ cybersecurity posture. Whether you’re looking to upgrade your existing infrastructure, switch from a competitor’s product, or ramp up a security suite, Cisco has tailored options to suit your needs. To take advantage of these opportunities, check out our dedicated Security Promotion, Bundles, and Offers hub on SalesConnect, just for partners.

Remember, the cybersecurity landscape is constantly shifting, and encouraging your customers to have up-to-date security products in place is crucial. With Cisco’s innovative solutions and incentives, you can ensure the network remains secure against the threats of today and tomorrow.

Mark your calendars for a Partner Interactive Webinar (PIW) where we’ll review all the new promotions in detail leaving you with a strong understanding about how these programs benefit your organization.

AMER: June 11, 2024, at 1:00pm EST | Watch the recording!

EMEA: July 11, 2024, at 3:00pm CET | Register today!

APJ: June 27, 2024, at 11:30am SGT | Register today!

Gartner’s Market Guide for Network Automation Platforms highlights that more than 65% of enterprise networking activities are performed manually, and only a small but growing percentage of large enterprises automate more than half of their network activities. Delivering superior digital experiences for an enterprise involves powering multiple, disparate networking domains and/or deploying multiple solutions within a single domain. This results in multiple challenges for network operators, including:

• Cross-domain and cross-product integration result in “swivel chair” effect—context-switching between multiple management consoles and dashboards—and require expertise of individual products and services to drive the required configuration.
• Existing community automation tools require scripting skills, as well as additional investment, to enable collaboration and governance, and support production-grade automation against different products and services in an enterprise setting.

As a result, users experience steep learning curves, lengthy implementation times, and ultimately suboptimal and under-maintained automation adoption across their global infrastructure.

To address this complexity, we announced Cisco Workflows, a new set of capabilities at the heart of Cisco Networking Cloud, earlier this month in June at Cisco Live US 2024. Delivered as a cloud-hosted service, organizations can use Workflows to define, automate, and orchestrate configuration tasks within and across their domains—branches and sites, campuses, data centers, clouds—with just a few clicks using a low- to no-code environment. Cisco Workflows helps users focus on accelerating business value, increase infrastructure usage and efficiencies, and reduce costs and time lost to manual errors.

Workflows offers out-of-the-box automation across multiple products and domains, following design guidelines and best practices recommended in Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs). A powerful set of low- to no-code customization options (e.g., drag-and-drop API tasks, data transformation) enable users to easily modify and extend the automations for their specific use case. Workflows automates both cloud-hosted service APIs and on-premises network controller API endpoints. A secure cloud connectivity service hosted on-premises enables the connectivity from Workflows to the on-premises endpoints. Users get real-time updates to track workflows execution progress, pause execution to accept inputs from other users within the organization, and review audit logs of previous automation runs. Workflows will be accessible from within Cisco Networking Cloud’s Cross Platform Navigator, via single sign-on (SSO), and through embedded links in various Cisco controllers.

Today, Cisco Workflows includes the following Cisco controller adapters to run automation—Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Catalyst Center, Identity Services Engine (ISE), Catalyst SD-WAN, Meraki, and many more. The automation hub provides two ready-to-go sample validated automations using these adapters:

1. Campus to data center establishes a networking fabric, with macro- and microsegmentation, securely connecting users in campus (Catalyst Center and Identity Service Engine) to workloads and applications running in a data center (Application Centric Infrastructure).
2. Automated hybrid branch site deployment for branches that include a mix of Meraki (Wi-Fi and LAN) and Catalyst infrastructure (SD-WAN for routing). The automation performs inventory pre-checks, onboards devices within the Meraki and Catalyst SD-WAN, and establishes connectivity between them.

Workflows, as a low-code procedural automation capability, provides the fine-grained control and insights into execution flow required for the flexible implementation, debugging, and troubleshooting of cross-domain automation. Workflows resides on a platform that holds multiple certifications including ISO 27001, ISO 27017, SOC 2 Type 2, SOC 3, CSA, and STAR 1, underscoring our unwavering commitment to data security and compliance. The service is designed to effortlessly scale automation across millions of endpoints worldwide while ensuring unmatched security and seamless integration with hybrid cloud environments.

With this advancement, we continue to simplify the experience for our customers, empowering organizations to thrive in today’s dynamic digital landscape with confidence and ease. Customers and partners are already going through beta trials with Cisco Workflows.

“As beta testers, we are beginning to explore the new cross-domain automation functionality within Cisco Workflows. We are starting to migrate some of our existing automation scripts to the Workflows system and are excited to see how these capabilities will be able to simplify tasks for our customers in the future.”
—Stefan Ronge, NTS (a managed service provider in Europe)

“We have been exploring the beta capabilities provided within Cisco Workflows and see a real potential to help automate key parts of the networking infrastructure. Our evaluation has been running on complex multi-domain infrastructures including Catalyst Center SDA and ACI.”
—Ingmar Schön, EnvOcean Network Systems (a network consulting firm in Europe).

It was almost fifteen years ago that ThousandEyes co-founders Mohit Lad and Ricardo Oliveira recognized the Internet-sized blind spot in network visibility preventing companies from delivering flawless user experiences. Fast-forward to today’s hyper-distributed world and our dependency on external environments has increased exponentially.

The Internet has become the delivery mechanism for mission-critical customer and employee applications, services, and websites. ThousandEyes pioneered end-to-end visibility across Internet, cloud, and SaaS environments, becoming a critical solution for IT and Operations teams that rely on networks and services that they don’t own or directly control.

Over the last few years, users have become more distributed and more dependent on digital services. Workers connect from home, cafes, airplanes, and more. Nearly every organization is dependent on digital connectivity, whether for marketing, productivity, patient outcomes, manufacturing efficiencies, financial and supply chain management, or other critical functions.

ThousandEyes has been there every step of the way, helping our customers successfully embrace an increasingly global workforce, modernize their digital infrastructure, and unlock new business opportunities through improved digital experience outcomes. Throughout this journey, our data has continued to increase, and with it, the insights gleaned across our entire dataset. Our vantage points have grown by the millions, our measurements by the billions. We’ve unlocked visibility into new domains whether on premises or deep in the cloud. As part of Cisco, we have unparalleled access to network telemetry and management controllers across every network domain.

We’re now at a point where the sheer volume and scope of data, combined with our AI-native platform purpose-built to scale for the next phase of our evolution, allow us to do so much more.

Today we are ushering in the new era of Digital Experience Assurance (DXA) for Cisco Networking Cloud and beyond—an expansion of our product strategy and capabilities, powering a radical shift in IT operations from monitoring to automated action. Imagine correlating, analyzing, diagnosing, predicting, optimizing, and remediating with little or no manual intervention—all seamlessly connected to a vast IT ecosystem that powers today’s businesses. This is the opportunity at hand. We’ve already delivered solutions that prove we’re uniquely able to seize this opportunity, and we intend to continue doing so to its fullest potential.

A step-change in IT management

We’re radically evolving how our customers assure digital experiences by doubling down on our core values and expanding investments and innovations in three essential areas.

Shattering silos and extending our visibility to everywhere our customers need it.

Today, our platform is powered by over 650 billion daily measurements collected from around the globe. We are a leading authority on Internet, cloud, and SaaS performance. This visibility has been critical to our customers as they transition and adapt to an increasingly cloud-first world. But our customers tell us that they still need visibility into their internal environments, and they want to be able to leverage the power of ThousandEyes’ end-to-end insight across their on-premises networks, cloud environments, and beyond. With Cisco, we’re going to continue to expand visibility to wherever our customers need it.

Leveraging AI to surface the insights that truly matter to our customers.

IT teams are inundated with alerts and noisy data, making it nearly impossible to determine what might be a red herring, how to prioritize, and where to apply resources. AI-driven intelligence can correlate patterns and unique combinations to triangulate the source of a problem instantly and surface which incidents require attention, and which do not. ThousandEyes Event Detection is already providing this critical capability reducing to mere minutes what could ordinarily take hours and multiple engineers to achieve. We’re going to invest and innovate more in this arena.

Enabling closed-loop workflows that automate and accelerate critical actions for our customers.

Acting quickly across a vast array of IT dependencies requires seamless interoperability with disparate datasets and management systems. ThousandEyes is committed to supporting and fostering open standards through OpenTelemetry (OTel), a robust API, and native integrations with IT services management tools (ITSM), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), observability, and other critical systems. By integrating ecosystems and leveraging interoperability, we can now translate AI-driven recommendations into configuration commands that drive action across both customer owned and unowned domains. We do this today with our predictive analytics solution WAN Insights—combining ThousandEyes’ AI-native intelligence with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN to provide forecasting, recommendations, and implementation of optimal policy configurations. We’re going to expand and extend these capabilities to other Cisco Networking Cloud platforms, and beyond.

Driving Digital Experience Assurance across Cisco Networking Cloud and beyond

As part of Cisco, we’re accelerating seamless integrations that unlock out-of-the-box capabilities for Cisco Networking, Security, Collaboration, and Observability customers. ThousandEyes also remains dedicated to meeting our customers where they are and supporting every environment and vendor of choice. Our commitment extends to fostering integrations across diverse IT systems and networking infrastructure vendors, ensuring comprehensive support for all our customers.

Today’s ThousandEyes innovation announcements demonstrate this commitment—extending our visibility and support for public cloud environments and expanding our reach into on-premises networks through the collection of flow and device data from both Cisco and non-Cisco network equipment.

We understand that in today’s digital landscape, our customers’ business outcomes depend on consistently delivering exceptional digital experiences to every user, everywhere, every time. Which is why we’re not just taking a step but making a leap in our commitment to deliver the next era of Digital Experience Assurance. This leap will transform how our customers manage their IT operations and formulate their digital strategy, leveraging AI-native capabilities to perform smarter, faster, and with greater ability to capitalize on the digital opportunities ahead. Stay tuned for more exciting developments, because we’re just getting started.