SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cisco today introduced its new Cisco Crosswork Network Automation software portfolio to improve how global service providers run their large-scale networks. The solutions are designed to work together to offer greater network visibility at scale (mass awareness), data-driven insights (augmented intelligence) and outcome-based automation (proactive control). 

With 27 billion devices and connections¹ expected to be running on service provider networks by 2021, the pressure is on for industry adoption of complete lifecycle network automation and intent-based networking to help networks predict change and react in near real time.

Traditional operations staff will not be able to keep up with adding nearly 10 percent more devices every year without changing how they work. When Cisco automation is utilized, typical results include a 70 percent improvement in operational efficiency, 30 percent revenue uplift and a 40 percent improvement in customer satisfaction².

The new Cisco Crosswork Network Automation software portfolio helps innovative global service providers like Telstra and many others, automate their networks and explore how to effectively extract and manage huge amounts of data to help their networks react to common events and impending security threats.

This new portfolio offers service providers a single point of integration with zero-touch telemetry, machine learning intuition, open APIs and automated actions that offer a simpler experience.  It is backed by Cisco Services to assist customers with planning, customization and implementation.

New software technologies available today include:

• Cisco Crosswork Change Automation: Automated operations application that enables large-scale change and closed-loop control
• Cisco Crosswork Health Insights: Smart sensors, smart alerts and smart remediation to monitor and optimize networks
• Cisco Crosswork Data Platform: Featuring both an OpenSource and commercial-class data analytics platform
• Cisco Crosswork Network Insights: Cloud-based analytics solution for solving large-scale routing issues
• Cisco Crosswork Situation Manager: Machine learning-based event correlation featuring social tools such as chat functions to solve repair issues quickly.

The Cisco Crosswork Network Automation solution extends capabilities of the Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO), offering the industry's most comprehensive closed-loop multi-vendor, multi-domain automation solution, with service orchestration and automation applications that support third-party solutions with open APIs.

Solving Customer Challenges  
With this new portfolio, Cisco is uniquely offering its service provider customers easy onboarding into the network automation process. Key customer challenges the Cisco Crosswork Network Automation portfolio addresses include:

• Human driven network changes are error prone, time consuming, and lack comprehensive validation.
  • Cisco Network Services Orchestrator transforms network changes into intent-driven deployments with automatic validation
• Data silos make network data impossible to analyze and correlate.
  • Cisco Crosswork Data Platform creates a single point to seamlessly collect, analyze, and visualize network data across multiple services and domains
• Customer experience suffers when variations in network quality go unnoticed.
  • The Cisco Crosswork Data Platform, combined with Cisco Crosswork Health Insights, utilizes real-time visualization with analytics to provide unparalleled insight into network performance.
• The time needed to manually identify network problems results in significant business impacts when outages occur.
  • Cisco Crosswork Situation Manager uses artificial intelligence algorithms to automatically triangulate faults across multiple network domains, drastically reducing the time to isolate network outages, and provide root cause analysis to prevent future outages
• Remediating network problems is a slow and manual process.
  • Cisco Crosswork Change Automation uses analytics enhanced closed-loop automation to automatically remediate network issues as they happen
• Global Routing Scale errors can cause dramatic outages.
  • Cisco Crosswork Network Insights enables a cloud-first approach for resolving challenges in the rapidly changing global routing environment
• Networks are not continually optimized for business and service needs.
  • Cisco WAN Automation Engine (WAE) and XR Traffic Controller (XTC) use advanced telemetry and analytics to improve network performance in real time without human intervention

"As we remain focused on building Australia's leading network of the future, we are committed to delivering superior quality networked experiences to our customers," said David Robertson, Director, Network Transport & Routing Engineering, Telstra. "We are equally focused on anticipating the challenges and opportunities that affect our business goals. Our work with Cisco to reinvent our network operations through orchestration, automation and advanced data models offers us valuable insight for mass data collection, applying analytics and machine learning, and taking decisive action through automation."

"Only Cisco can offer this comprehensive and holistic automation approach to solve challenges of today's mass scale infrastructure," said Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider Networking, Cisco. "Our primary goal for network automation is to help our customers turn growing pains into growing profit, and streamline operations so they can spend less time on tactical 'firefighting' and more time on identifying and trialing new revenue streams."

Cisco is leading disruption in the industry with our technology innovations in systems, silicon, optics and security, and our unrivalled expertise in mass-scale networking, automation, optical, cable access, video, and mobility. Together with our portfolio of professional services, we can enable service providers and media and web companies to reduce cost and complexity, help secure their networks and grow revenue. 

Supporting Resources

• Cisco Crosswork Network Automation Product Portfolio
• About Cisco Crosswork Network Automation
• Jonathan Davidson blog : 'Cisco Crosswork Network Automation: The Industry's Most Comprehensive Closed-Loop Automation Solution'
• Cisco Network Services Orchestrator
• Cisco Services
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Press Contact
Sara Cicero, Service Provider PR, Cisco, stutzes@cisco.com

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¹ Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast, 2016-2021
² Cisco BTA analysis on automation