Conversations from Cisco Live To Observability and Beyond!

Three years, six days, and fourteen hours. That’s how long it has been since we were last able to experience an in-person Cisco Live in EMEA. For those of you concerned if we’d still remember how to “conference,” if we’d still have the buzz and excitement – you needn’t have worried. Cisco Live EMEA 2023 was the most productive and highest energy event that I’ve attended for a long time – bringing together 14,000 of our partners and customers in a way that only Cisco can.

I got the opportunity to talk to many of our partners, and I asked them two things:

1. What are the big trends you’re seeing and building your business around?
2. What are you most excited about as it relates to AppDynamics and the Cisco Full-Stack Observability (FSO) journey?

Big Trends in IT and Digital Transformation

1. Business experience is a boardroom KPI and requires a cross-company approach

Our partners see that the most successful transformations happen when they can help their customers move fast without internal barriers. This means creating a common language that brings together business and IT teams across the organisation— enabling quicker, more impactful change. The challenge is that most tools operate in silos—either specifically for technology teams or business leaders, but rarely both.

2. There’s so much data, and it’s hard to make sense of it all

Customers already have a lot of tools—that was the overwhelming feedback from our partners. Despite this, application problems persist, and their impact on the business and consumers is increasing. Organisations are looking to bring together intelligence and insight across their business in a way that helps them make decisions faster and supports new modes of going to market.

3. The pace of change and innovation is faster than ever

Our partners shared stories of how, as consumers, the expectations for flawless and engaging digital experiences are higher than ever. This is no longer just the case across web stores and banks—it’s every industry. We spent time with a tyre manufacturer who told us that whilst things like the manufacturing process and end product are critical, if their app didn’t work flawlessly every day, their affiliated garages and distribution network would use a competitor.

It gets even more complicated. Consumer expectations have risen far faster than our ability to keep up with technology and processes—meaning we have a wealth of tools and systems that are now struggling to keep up with new demand, making it increasingly challenging to deliver a world-class digital experience.

The message from partners was clear: applications are no longer just a window into the business—they ARE the business—and consumer expectations show no signs of slowing down despite the dramatic rise in complexity associated with managing these applications. Ultimately, our partners are looking for a way to manage the noise while providing world-class application experiences and business outcomes for their customers.

Enhancing Full-Stack Observability

Enter AppDynamics and FSO. We discussed many of the latest innovations and our platform vision over the week, and there were three areas that were of particular interest to our partners:

1. Business Risk Observability

Comprehensive security offerings, such as Business Risk Observability, allow partners to address new buyers and solve bigger problems for their customers.

On Monday, Liz Centoni (EVP, Chief Strategy Officer, and General Manager, Applications) announced the general availability Business Risk Observability, now live in our SaaS platform.

This solution brings together insight not just from AppDynamics, but also Kenna (for risk probability), Talos (for threat intelligence), and Panoptica (for API security)—all in the context of business transactions.

With Business Risk Observability, organisations can prioritise security responses based on impact on the business and users in ways unseen in the industry until now.

With this new capability, we’re creating a common language (the business transaction) to bring together business and IT teams across the organisation, thereby enabling large-scale transformation for our partners and their customers.

2. The Full-Stack Observability Platform

The FSO platform offers new routes for market growth for partners by leveraging observability in bigger ways than ever to support complex business change and transformation.

Liz also announced that the Cisco FSO platform would be generally available in June. Many of our partners conveyed extreme anticipation upon seeing the live FSO platform demos at Cisco Live.

The FSO platform is built open; it’s API driven, anchored in OpenTelemetry™, and fully extensible. It has flexible data ingestion from multiple IT domains through MELT data (Metrics, Events, Logs and Traces) and via data streams from Cloud native apps and 3rd parties.

With Full-Stack Observability our partners can create new solutions, applications, and experiences for customers leveraging the underlying data collection and correlation capabilities—all tied together with business context. This means our partners can solve bigger problems for their customers and lead cross-company change projects with even more impact.

3. Partner focus

In September 2021, we committed to be 100% partner focused. Our business is driven by and with partners; everything we do is centered on how we can help our partner community to go-to-market in bigger and better ways than ever before, like the latest updates to AppDynamics Cloud.

Pricing and scoping are more accessible than ever, thanks to the new bundles on Cisco’s price list. We’re seeing more partners build managed services using AppDynamics and FSO at the core to deliver improved user experiences and Application-based SLAs to their customers, mitigating risk and reducing cost. We’re unlocking more partner service opportunities, enabling partners to own the entire go-to-market motion across sales, deployment, integration, adoption, and renewal.

And this is just the beginning.

We’re at such a fantastic point; we have a market where technology is transforming every industry, where that transformation is happening faster than ever, and it’s centred on a set of challenges that we’re uniquely positioned to address together.

This environment creates unprecedented opportunities for our partners by enabling them to address new customers and new industries and solve greater problems for their customers than ever before. The opportunity is there for us to go after together in a way I don’t think we’ve seen before—and I’m excited to be on the journey with you.

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