This year at Cisco Live! in Milan, Cisco made some interesting announcements regarding their new commercial architecture. Their hope is to move their customers towards a closer, more beneficial engagement, and with this initiative have presented their clients with a new, flexible approach to licence purchasing and software deployment.
Purchasing software solutions can present unnecessary hassles and complexity, as customers have a myriad of options to try choose from, budgets to try factor in when making their choices, and the face a licence repurchasing when they update their hardware, all of which makes for a mountain of complexity. With Cisco One, clients are presented with a software offering that simplifies processes and reduces costs, through offering integrated solutions for purchase.
This new approach is achieved by reducing a multi-product software offering to a three by three model of solutions, with three suites across the three disciplines of data center, wide area, and local access. How this works in practice will emerge and evolve in the coming months. However, on the surface we can see three distinct advantages to this new model.
Three of Cisco ONE's Key Benefits
1. Financial Predictability
Cisco ONE gives customers the option to move closer to a subscription or annuity model. For many customers, an annual number to put against infrastructure trumps a capital spend model. This is especially true of users of complex enterprise networks. And while this currently is targeted at software, some clear hints were given that this might apply to hardware as well as in the future.
2. Faster and Easier Access to New Technology
Customers adopting Cisco ONE via a subscription model will get automatic access to new and improved features in the product as they emerge, as part of the programme. All software upgrades are included in the architecture, which means no more waiting until the next hardware upgrade to get the next feature set.
3. Licence Portability and Simplification
Cisco ONE allows customers to port licences from hardware device to hardware device. So, if you are replacing an old switch with a new switch, Cisco ONE will recognise that the old switch has been taken out of the network and will port the licencing to the new switch, simplifying licence management significantly.
Cisco is clearly keen to engage on a more in-depth level with its customers, and wherever possible, it wants to do this via annuity based or subscription commercial models. Cisco ONE represents a further step towards this strategy. However, unlike with some of the other major players, there’s loads of benefit for the customer in this model as well, with less complexity to deal with, and potential savings of up to 30%.
And in the spirit of Guy Kawasaki, there’s a fourth bonus feature to this model – if you don’t like it, don’t do it! Cisco will continue to take all of its current commercial models to market, allowing its customers to continue on as they have been with regards to preferences such as buying products and paying for them at the point of purchase.
However, keep an eye on Cisco ONE. My belief is that this is the start of a process that will make the engagement model that Cisco ONE represents more attractive than ever, especially for those heavily invested in highly functional Cisco networks. Watch this space.
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