Cisco Readies Usage-Based Network-as-a-Service Offering with Cisco Plus

Cisco will start offering its network, security and management solutions as a service with the debut of Cisco Plus. The new consumption-based solutions, announced at the Cisco Live virtual conference, will start rolling out this summer.

The move promises to initiate a major shift in the delivery of enterprise network infrastructure by the industry’s largest provider. Instead of providing its hardware and software for purchase, Cisco will offer what it calls its network-as-a-service (NaaS) model, with usage-based pricing. Cisco said it will provide unified subscriptions across compute, storage, network, security, cloud and application management architectures.

Todd Nightingale, general manager of Cisco’s enterprise networking and cloud business, introduced Cisco Plus during the Cisco Live keynote session.

Cisco’s Todd Nightingale at Cisco Live!

“Cisco Plus delivers complete, flexible solutions as a service, Nightingale said. “Cisco Plus is not just hardware as a service or software as a service; [it] is focused on outcomes and experiences. It’s brought to you by Cisco and built from, and backed by the technology teams and the promise of Cisco.”

Cisco Plus is cloud-native and is designed to provide agile service delivery.

“And it comes with a new observability experience that can help our users understand what’s really happening in their infrastructure,” he said.

Initially, the company will offer Cisco Plus Hybrid Cloud. It consists of Cisco’s data center compute, networking and storage portfolio as a consumption-based service. Cisco will also include third-party storage, though it didn’t disclose any suppliers. Cisco will offer it through a self-service portal via its Cisco CX Cloud.

The next offering in the pipeline will be the new Cisco secure access service edge (SASE). Also launched Tuesday at Cisco Live, the expanded Cisco SASE is a cloud-native security solution. It provides a protection for endpoints, data loss prevention, cloud malware detection, an expanded SD-WAN solution with Viptela, observability based on its recent acquisition of ThousandEyes, and password-less authentication.

Potential for Disruption

It remains to be seen whether the economics and flexibility of Cisco Plus are comparable with other cloud and SaaS models. But company officials emphasized that with the increase in remote and hybrid work environments, expanded implementations of IoT solutions are accelerating demand.

Cisco Plus is poised to upend how users buy the company’s solutions, and how partners sell them. The particulars of how Cisco Plus will impact how partners get compensated remain to be seen. Asked about that during an analyst and press briefing, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said he has navigated major shifts before.

“Having been deeply involved in the partner programs over the years, it’s a constant change that we have to deliver,” Robbins said. “The short answer is, we’ll continue to evolve our programs to make sure that our partners are included and part of our value chain. We think that it’s super important to us going forward. Does that mean 100% of everything? No, but we’ll continue to make sure that’s the case. We have partners that will be ahead of us, we have partners that will go with us and we will have partners that will lag; they tend to move at different paces.”

Industry analyst Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research, who posed the question to Robbins, said the introduction of Cisco Plus was …