Cisco Unveils Digital Network Architecture to Accelerate Customer Digital Transformation

Digitization is transforming businesses in every industry, opening up a $2.1 trillion global market opportunity by 2019, according to IDC*.  The path to digitization requires a digital network that evolves beyond just connectivity. This new network will enable business innovation, generate insights and create customer experiences. It will reduce cost and complexity with new orchestration and automation capabilities, while protecting the business with an architecture designed for security. 

Cisco recently unveiled its Digital Network Architecture (DNA), an open, extensible and software driven architecture for digital business. Cisco® DNA complements Cisco’s market leading, data center based Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technology by extending the policy driven approach and software strategy throughout the entire network: from campus to branch, wired to wireless, core to edge.  Cisco DNA is delivered within the Cisco ONE™ Software family, enabling simplified software-based licensing, investment protection and flexibility.

“In the IoT era, enterprises are addressing how to move to digitization with tremendous innovation in networking, including software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), open API’s, cloud management, analytics and more. Though these innovations offer great promise to improve operational efficiency and enable digital applications, adoption has been slow due to the difficulty in consuming these many new technologies. The market needs a solution that integrates the critical innovations in networking software into an architecture that can achieve these promises in an integrated and easy to consume manner. Cisco DNA does just that,” said Mike Weston, Vice President, Cisco Middle East.

Cisco DNA is built on five guiding principles:   

1. Virtualize everything to give organizations freedom of choice to run any service anywhere, independent of the underlying platform – physical or virtual, on premise or in the cloud. 
2. Designed for automation to make networks and services on those networks easy to deploy, manage and maintain – fundamentally changing the approach to network management. 
3. Pervasive analytics to provide insights on the operation of the network, IT infrastructure and the business – information that only the network can provide.
4. Service management delivered from the cloud to unify policy and orchestration across the network - enabling the agility of cloud with the security and control of on premises solutions.
5. Open, extensible and programmable at every layer – Integrating Cisco and 3rd party technology, open API’s and a developer platform, to support a rich ecosystem of network-enabled applications.

“The digital network is the platform for digital business,” said Rob Soderbery, SVP for Enterprise Products and Solutions, Cisco.  “Cisco DNA brings together virtualization, automation, analytics, cloud and programmability to build that platform.  The acronym for the Digital Networking Architecture – DNA – isn’t an accident. We’re fundamentally changing the DNA of networking technology.” 

Cisco recently announced automation, virtualization and cloud management capabilities in support of the DNA architecture, including APIC-Enterprise Module (APIC EM) Platform and Automation Services, Evolved IOS-XE and Enterprise NFV and CMX Cloud.

To support Cisco customers and partners on this network transformation journey, the Learning at Cisco and Cisco DevNet developer programs are committed to educating and enabling networking professionals transitioning to a software-driven networking model. Network Programmability Specialist Certification is available built on top of Industry award winning CCIE and CCNP programs. As developers and engineers build on DNA, Cisco is making available training, hands on exercises and certifications to enable the workforce of the future. 

Cisco Capital Easy Pay is a new global offer is specifically created for DNA. It allows a three-year fair market value 0% lease for all products as part of Cisco DNA. Customers pay 90% of the cost, over the three-year term, providing predictable monthly payments and cash flow management. At the end of the three-year term the customer has three options: keep, return and refresh or purchase the assets for 10% of the original purchase price