David Ward, Cisco Systems’s Service Provider Chief Architect and CTO, presented at Deutsche Bank’s conference earlier today. Cisco Systems has unveiled a variety of new products; including a new cloud firewall.
Deutsche Bank has a report on some of the latest developments. They note that leveraging SDN solutions for telco services monetization and agility A key insight from the Cisco Systems’ presentation was leveraging Software Defined Networking capabilities (e.g. programmable interfaces in Cisco Systems’s routers, switches, etc) to enable incumbent service providers to rapidly provision new services (e.g. hosted business VoIP, Ethernet and MPLS VPNs, datacenter to datacenter connectivity, etc) and hence compete effectively versus the Over the Top providers.
The analysts note that deploying new services using SDN based approaches could reduce new service introduction times from “months” to “weeks” or even “days” (from a network operations point of view).
A related insight was to utilize interfaces in Cisco Systems’s Layer 2/7 platforms to mine analytics on network behavior, services performance, etc. The network analytics could be monetized by the service provider and also be a basis for competitive advantage versus service offerings from peers.
The many flavors of Cisco Systems’s SDN strategy
Deutche Bank further notes that Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO)’s SDN strategy is likely to have multiple facets to it– reflecting the company’s diverse customer base and end markets. For example, Cisco is likely to partner with VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW) in network virtualization use cases in enterprise datacenters (leveraging Cisco Systems, Inc (NASDAQ:CSCO)’s networking capabilities in VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW)’s Cloud management stacks).
The telco SDN strategy is likely to be focused around services creation agility and monetization. The Cloud Provider SDN strategy is likely to be a combination of enterprise and service provider SDN solutions.
Deutsche Bank maintains otheir positive outlook and their Buy rating of $22 a share. Shares of Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) are currently trading at $19.18, up 0.74% on the news.
(Full Disclosure: The author of this article has a long position in Cisco Systems)
