500-451 information - Cisco Enterprise Networks Unified Access Exam (ENUAE) Updated: 2024

Cisco's Cius will be an enterprise game-changer because it consolidates all of a business user's most important unified communications (UC) tools, and offers them in a mobile device with built-in enterprise security. That's the key difference between the Cius and tablet market dynamos like Apple's iPad, Cisco said Wednesday: a truer enterprise-grade experience that also creates upset opportunities for Cisco solution providers focused on UC, video and virtualization.

That was the message from Cisco collaboration executives, who in a media event in New York and other locations Wednesday offered the most details yet on how Cisco will position Cius in the rapidly-crowding tablet arena.

"We believe we sunk a lot of technology into this device," said Tom Puorro, senior director, product management, collaboration solutions at Cisco. "We've designed the device to be very broad in its capabilities, and [not just designed] for a particular use case. [This is] a lot of power focused on the enterprise user."

The Cius' on-board security offerings include Cisco hardware-accelerated encryption, network security, certificate management, virtual private network, enterprise access, mobility security and policy management tools. It's the only tablet out there with built-in enterprise security, according to Puorro, and IT managers can tailor policy controls to the needs of their Cius fleets.

"They can make it very loose, or very firm," Puorro said.

Cius, which Cisco introduced a year ago to the day at Cisco Live 2010, weighs 1.5 pounds, includes a front-mounted 720p HD camera, a 7-inch VGA touch-target display, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and other features. It runs an Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz processor, with 32 GB of flash memory.

It's supported by Cisco's UC Manager and natively supports Cisco TelePresence, Cisco's Jabber instant messaging client, Cisco's WebEx communications software, and Cisco Quad, the vendor's social networking-flavored collaboration platform. It also supports virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), using Citrix, VMware and Wyse platforms and devices, per a previous Cisco announcement. Cius outguns even business-focused tablets like Research In Motion's PlayBook, Cisco executives said, because Cius extends the reach of Cisco's total UC offering all the way to the mobile edge.

Earlier Wednesday, Cisco debuted AppHQ, an application development platform for Cius users that in theory will allow companies better control over what business applications their Cius tablet users have access to.

Cius users can access Google's Android Marketplace as they would using any Android device. But Cisco AppHQ gives businesses the ability to both highlight and limit what applications they want their employees to use. AppHQ further has a "store within a store" function: a Cisco-hosted, private app storefront that business users can customize with their own logos, and through which they can offer specific applications to their employees based on company policy. Those controls are useful, for example, when IT managers want to direct users to applications that are pre-validated to work interoperably with Cisco platforms, and have the necessary security built in to work on their enterprise networks.

"I buy what I want for bulk licenses, and put them there for my users to consume," Purro explained. "This is not a Draconian consumer store."

The applications included in AppHQ are chosen by Cisco, which on Wednesday also said it would be expanding its Cius app development program with an announcement at the upcoming Cisco Live conference in Las Vegas, July 11-14.

Next: More Details On Cisco Cius Pricing, Availability

Cisco hasn't confirmed the exact list price for Cius, but on Wednesday reconfirmed an estimated street price below $750 for the Wi-Fi only version of the tablet. Volume discount programs will bring the price per unit below $700 -- likely about $650, Puorro said. Cius is scheduled for global availability on July 31, and 4G versions will be available through Verizon and AT&T this fall.

Basic AppHQ access is included with all Cius units. Customers that want to use the "store within a store" function will pay an additional fee, which hasn't yet been confirmed by Cisco, according to Puorro.

All of the Cius' core functions, including VDI, can be accessed without the Cius' docking unit, which is sold separately for what Cisco executives told CRN will be about $400. The docking unit adds a handset, speakerphone and USB and Bluetooth connectivity for keyboards, mice and other peripherals. According to Cisco, more accessories -- including Cius cases -- will be available later this year.

Cisco put Cius in field tests with hundreds of users around the world as part of a beta program over the past six months, according to Puorro. Wednesday's event included positive feedback from several Cisco Cius customers, including Verizon, the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Palomar Pomerado Health, that deployed between a dozen and two dozen Ciuses in their employee bases.

Purro admitted the Cius unit, physically, is a bit bulkier than an iPad but was necessary because Cisco wanted to include a replaceable battery for the tablet, and also drive high quality audio with fatter speakers.

Overall, insisted Puorro, if business users are going to adopt tablets in greater numbers, they'll ultimately seek an enterprise-centric experience, not a consumer-focused device brought into enterprise.

"People are trying to use consumer-grade products in the enterprise, and a lot of that ends up as base functionality: e-mail, accessing the Web and watching movies," Puorro said. "[You] want more out of the device. This is a consolidation of many devices."

Cisco worked closely with Google during the development phase, Puorro said. Current Ciuses run the Froyo, or version 2.2, release of Android. Cisco will be skipping version 3.0, also known as Honeycomb, and the next major update for Cius' Android OS will come when Google releases Ice Cream Sandwich, which reportedly will be a melding of Google's Honeycomb-focused tablet software and its Gingerbread, or version 2.3, smartphone software into one platform.

Next: Cius' Appeal For Cisco VARs Cius became available for Cisco Master and Advanced Unified Communications partners in late March. Cius is particularly appealing for Cisco solution providers because it cuts across all of Cisco's major business architectures, allows partners to pinpoint network upgrade opportunities to run data, voice and video more effectively for customers. AppHQ can leverage partner skills for app development, particularly when vertical-specific applications are involved, according to Cisco.

"The hope is to have apps living there that leverage Cius integration with U.C.," said Richard McLeod, senior director, collaboration sales for Cisco's Worldwide Partner Organization. "You've taken those apps you're comfortable with, and they're tightly integrated with your business process. [That's] where the real power of a Cisco VAR steps in."

Steven Reese, director of solutions marketing for Nexus Information Systems, a Plymouth, Minn.-based solution provider and top Cisco VAR, said there's a shift going on in which customers are moving from "best of need" networks to upgraded network architectures that can seamlessly support voice, video and data and the myriad mobile devices that use those applications on the go. Cius, with its many functions, fits neatly in that shift, he said.

Features like the AppHQ platform add to a VAR's ability to customize the mobile experience for business users, Reese said, because the VAR can sell the infrastructure and the device, add professional and managed services behind those elements, and provide a tailored app deployment experience that leverages secure, pre-validated apps and creates opportunity for custom development.

"Now that I can create my own enterprise app store, I can say this application is already integrated with our back office processes, your unified communications are going to be there, and it's tested and proven and built into that application," Reese said. "That's a repeatable sales process."

Reese said Nexus is pushing Cius toward its health care, state and local government, K-12 and education customers. There's been a lot of positive feedback based on Cius use cases, Reese said, and Nexus is also focused on app development for the tablet with third party developer partners.

Cisco solution providers can't yet brand the AppHQ for their own use -- that is, private-label the AppHQ platform as their own, branded app store -- but McLeod said Cisco is discussing that as a possibility for partners.

Cius adoption is also happening within Cisco. Internally, about 1,500 Cisco employees have personal Cius units so far, according to Cisco executives.

Earning specialized certifications is a surefire way to advance your career in the IT field, regardless of industry or current career level. The right certification validates your skills and knowledge, which makes you more desirable to future employers who want to attract and retain the best employees. Below, we’ll explore the top IT certifications and share how to examine your goals to choose the right path forward. 

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• The milestone coincides with the launch of Cisco’s annual Purpose Report, providing updates on its ESG and social impact progress through fiscal year 2023.
• Delivering impact locally, Cisco’s Country Digital Acceleration program is running in collaboration with the UAE’s Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications Office.
• Through Cisco Networking Academy, more than 105,000 learners in the UAE have gained IT skills to transform their careers.

DUBAI, UAE — One year ahead of schedule, Cisco has surpassed its goal to make a real, tangible difference in the lives of one billion people, leveraging a powerful combination of technology and people, backed by its purpose to power an inclusive future for all.

To achieve its goal of positively impacting one billion people by 2025, Cisco invested in nonprofits through its Social Impact grants and Networking Academy to help them develop and scale technology-based solutions for the critical challenges facing communities around the world. Cisco also worked with local and national governments, including the UAE, to empower communities with IT skills, helping develop the workforce of the future and fostering digital inclusion – all measured by a rigorous tracking methodology.

“Through collaboration with national leadership, industry and nonprofit partners, as well as the dedication of our people, we are proud to celebrate impacting more than one billion lives globally. We will continue to leverage the power of technology and partnerships in the UAE and across countries around the world deliver a secure, connected and inclusive future for all,” said Reem Asaad, Vice President, Cisco Middle East and Africa.

Cisco’s Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) program is a long-term partnership with national leadership, industry and academia to stimulate innovation, grow GDP and expand job creation. In the UAE, the CDA program was launched in 2018 and has since recorded over 20 completed digitization projects across industries such as healthcare, tourism, transportation, education, retail and more.

Cisco renewed its commitment in 2022 – signing a collaboration framework with the UAE’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications Office – expanding their collective impact. The current initiative focuses on areas including sustainability, cybersecurity, talent development, SME empowerment and digital infrastructure.

In the same year, Cisco collaborated with the UAE Coders HQ to establish the ‘Sibaq Lahja’ program – aiming to equip young coders and software engineers with the skills required to develop and deploy AI solutions in the realm of Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP).

In 2023, Cisco has also collaborated with the UAE’s Ministry of Economy on a digitization initiative that provides entrepreneurs with access to innovation labs, technical expertise, and business development opportunities. This initiative seeks to help boost the growth of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the country.

In light of ongoing advancements with generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI), and evolving cybersecurity threat that comes with the technology, the World Economic Forum (WEF) estimates that half the global labor force may need reskilling over the next two years, and 1.1 billion jobs will be transformed by technology in the coming decade.

In addition, there is the assessment that three million cybersecurity experts are needed to support the current global economy, signifying the imminent importance for initiatives like the Cisco Networking Academy – one of the longest standing IT-skills-to-jobs programs in the world.

Since the inception of Cisco Networking Academy in the UAE (in 1999), more than 105,000 learners have received IT skills training in-country, with a strong 45% female participation rate. This includes over 12,000 learners in Cisco’s 2023 fiscal year alone, participating via 38 academies across the Emirates. 

95% of students surveyed globally* cite the Academy’s impact in helping them attain a job or further education opportunities. This year, Cisco announced its goal to train 10 million people in digital and cybersecurity skills, over the next 10 years, across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA).

Annual Purpose Report Released

This announcement accompanies the release of Cisco’s annual Purpose Report, which details its latest impact, goals, and progress on ESG topics, including environmental sustainability, social impact, digital access, philanthropy, supply chain, security and privacy, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

Learn more: cisco.com/go/esg-hub   

*Based on student outcome surveys of students participating in Cisco certification courses between fiscal 2005 (when exit surveys began) and fiscal 2023

About Cisco 

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that securely connects everything to make anything possible. Our purpose is to power an inclusive future for all by helping our customers reimagine their applications, power hybrid work, secure their enterprise, transform their infrastructure, and meet their sustainability goals. Discover more on The Newsroom and follow us on X at @Cisco.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.

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The rapid awareness and adoption of artificial intelligence has increased concerns around security, governance, compliance and business risk.

The digital business imperative to improve customer experience combined with a vastly more complex technology environment, comprising multiple clouds, the internet of things, containers, app integration and the popularity of open source, are driving need for better observability across technology stacks. But fragmented information technology environments, lack of talent and a spate of existing installed monitoring tools are preventing organizations from achieving their full-stack observability aspirations.

In this Breaking Analysis, we dig deeper into the trends in observability based on a recent custom study from our partners at Enterprise Technology Research. As always, we’ll provide our perspective on the market and players with a view toward trends to watch in 2024.

What is full-stack observability & O11Y?

Full-stack observability is the capability to discover the real-time status of each technology stack component in a distributed IT environment. It involves holistically viewing cloud-hosted applications, services, infrastructure, on-premises IT, K8s (there’s your O11Y hint) infrastructure and more. O11Y uses telemetry data such as metrics, logs, traces and other information from the entire IT environment to provide complete end-to-end visibility to understand the connection and dependencies among IT components.

FSO is more than just monitoring and reporting. It uses reasoning and often machine intelligence to draw conclusions about an environment to recommend change or even take action on behalf of humans.

New survey captures the customer mindset of FSO

FSO or O11Y has been a hot topic in the press and analyst community. That’s why we’re so excited to share the results of a recent study from ETR.

ETR has an amazing custom research capability that we’re privileged to share with you. This particular study was done in partnership with New Relic Inc., which we promise has zero influence on the commentary and conclusions of this Breaking Analysis or the ETR analysis.

This particular study had 1,700 respondents and, unlike most of the work we share, had a global respondent base, with U.S. customers only accounting for about a quarter of the survey. The companies spanned multiple industries, all organization sizes (80% more than 5,000 employees) and mostly technology practitioners.

Like security, observability is a crowded market

It has grown out of the world of application performance monitoring or APM, network monitoring, log analytics, AI operations or AIOps, database performance management, dashboarding, error tracking and literally dozens of legacy and fragmented market segments. There are literally dozens and dozens of vendors in this space.

Here’s a sample using network monitoring as the sector of choice. In this space “other” is the leading vendor, which underscores how crowded the market is. But the likes of Splunk, Grafana, Dynatrace, Elastic, AppDynamics, open-source tools such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus and the ELK stack, New Relic, Sumo Logic and more play in this specific market.

On the right-hand side of this chart you can see the sectors ETR tracked in this study – about 18, including distributed tracing, serverless monitoring, mobile monitoring, MLOps and so forth. Selecting each one in the pulldown will shuffle the deck of players.

Splunk leads in most, but as the leader everyone wants to attack it and get a piece of its market. It’s why Cisco Systems Inc. paid $28 billion for Splunk, because it has the largest footprint. But there are many others. For example, in application performance monitoring, Datadog, Dynatrace, AppD (also owned by Cisco) and New Relic join Splunk at the top of the list. In synthetic monitoring, Dynatrace and Datadog pop up as most popular along with Splunk. In distributed tracing, Grafana, Dynatrace, Prometheus and OpenTelemetry are cited more often than Splunk. And “other” is always prominent.

You get the point. FSO involves a lot of different capabilities and there are many vendors playing in the market. For example, here are some names in the other category you may or may not know: Lucidworks, Exabeam, Sentry, Moogsoft, Honeycomb, ChaosSearch, Graylog, ScienceLogic, Cribl, Monte Carlo, Observe, InfluxData and dozens more I could name. It’s crowded.

Consolidation continues to be a theme, but it’s not easy

The market is so fragmented and the budget pressures of 2022 and 2023 have caused a consolidation of tools.

This chart shows the number of observability tools installed in 2023 (top) as compared with 2022 (bottom). And you can see the reduction in the percentage of customers with five, six, seven and eight tools – highlighted in red. And the shift to one, two and three tools installed is shown by the red arrows.

But it’s clear that the movement in the past year is just scratching the surface as around 60% of customers cite that they have four or more tools. So more work must be done to accommodate greater consolidation. Having said that, around 30% of customers in the survey lean toward having multiple tools as a means of tapping best-of-breed capabilities.

Like in security, the quest for excellence often results in fragmentation.

Which vendors benefit most from consolidation?

When asked which vendor platforms customers prefer to consolidate on, about13% say they don’t want to consolidate. But Splunk, Dynatrace and Datadog are most commonly cited.

Once again, “other” is in the mix pretty prominently, with Elastic, AppD and New Relic also showing.

Now some interesting things change when you filter the data. For example, executive management prefers to consolidate on Dynatrace and surprisingly a somewhat higher percentage, 16%, say they don’t want to consolidate.

For what it’s worth, the small percentage of females in the survey want to consolidate on AppDynamics, a company Cisco acquired in 2017. Services and consultancies prefer to consolidate on Datadog.

So again this just underscores the complexity and varied preferences of the market.

Humans are still in the loop

Another notable finding in the survey is the degree to which manual labor is still a dominant force.

Despite the AI hype, fewer than 10% of customers say their incident detection and remediation workflows in the future will be mostly AI-led. But a huge percentage – around 75% as shown on this chart – expect to have some type of AI-led automation in their identification and remediation workflows.

Automation is a two-edged sword. It’s one of those alluring concepts, but there’s real caution around trusting machines to judge what actions should and shouldn’t be taken and when. So given the sensitive nature of change management, we would expect this trend to continue to lean toward AI-led automation, but it will take some time before humans are mostly out of the loop. Moreover, while many vendors claim to have AI, there’s a wide spectrum of capabilities, and customers should be very cautious about vendor claims in this regard.

Now, not surprisingly, the regulated industries of financial services, healthcare and government see a much lower tendency to be mostly-AI led in this context over the next year (well under 5% say mostly AI-led in this chart), whereas industries such as energy and high tech are much more likely to adopt AI aggressively in this space.

Interestingly, the data show that senior managements are more likely to push for AI adoption whereas the practitioners, who literally have their jobs on the line – that is, machines replacing humans or getting fired for implementing rogue automation – are much less optimistic.

What does O11Y do for your business?

According to more than 1,500 practitioners in this survey, there are many benefits.

Better uptime, improved efficiency, more secure environment and a better customer experience help developers be more productive because they’re doing less troubleshooting and the like. And this ostensibly leads to greater business agility and more revenue. Only one-half of 1% cited no benefit. This is across all roles, all geographies and all industries, by the way.

But there are challenges to adopting FSO, including the siloed nature of data and IT, tools creep, lack of talent… but the No. 1 pressure is lack of budget – that is, it’s perceived as too expensive. So the industry has an opportunity to better sell the benefits.

Perhaps retiring goofy terms like O11Y would help!

FSO trends to watch

Security remains the No. 1 priority in the ETR survey data and that requires better visibility. So we don’t expect FSO to be a fad that fades in 2024. Just the opposite, actually. As digital businesses fight for customers and access to real time data becomes more critical, FSO will only grow in prominence in our opinion.

The latest ETR survey data on the spending macro is showing some positive momentum for 2024 – but really toward the second half. Amazon Web Services Inc. Chief Executive Adam Selipsky  said it best when he shared at the re:Invent in late November that we’ve seen better times, we’ve seen worse times, but we’ve never seen such uncertain times. True words of wisdom from the CEO of AWS.

Everyone is AI-crazed – including us – but your practitioners are cautious and probably skeptical that they have job security. So part of your challenge is to convince the doers that AI will bring new opportunities and relieve them of mundane and tedious tasks. And you’ll have to also put in processes to make sure that automation doesn’t create boo-boos because with the cloud and distributed computing, mistakes can travel fast.

The last point is that clearly the market generally and full-stack observability specifically are moving toward platforms. But the siloed nature of tech stacks, technical debt and sunk costs will mean a continued fragmented market. That said, those leaders with full-stack capabilities, cloud-native tooling and real AI will be in a good position to ride the consolidation wave in 2024 and beyond.

Keep in touch

Thanks to Alex Myerson and Ken Shifman on production, podcasts and media workflows for Breaking Analysis. Special thanks to Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, who help us keep our community informed and get the word out, and to Rob Hof, our EiC at SiliconANGLE.

Remember we publish each week on Wikibon and SiliconANGLE. These episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen.

Email david.vellante@siliconangle.com | DM @dvellante on Twitter | Comment on our LinkedIn posts.

Also, check out this ETR Tutorial we created, which explains the spending methodology in more detail. Note: ETR is a separate company from Wikibon and SiliconANGLE. If you would like to cite or republish any of the company’s data, or inquire about its services, please contact ETR at legal@etr.ai.

Here’s the full video analysis:

All statements made regarding companies or securities are strictly beliefs, points of view and opinions held by SiliconANGLE Media, Enterprise Technology Research, other guests on theCUBE and guest writers. Such statements are not recommendations by these individuals to buy, sell or hold any security. The content presented does not constitute investment advice and should not be used as the basis for any investment decision. You and only you are responsible for your investment decisions.

Disclosure: Many of the companies cited in Breaking Analysis are sponsors of theCUBE and/or clients of Wikibon. None of these firms or other companies have any editorial control over or advanced viewing of what’s published in Breaking Analysis.

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