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Two new predictive services – Business Critical Services and High-Value Services – announced today by Cisco, use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to help businesses mitigate IT risk and anticipate failures. The new services are touted as a way for businesses to use advanced technologies to provide expertise that is tough to find.

Cisco says that the new services represent opportunity for partners to add to what they are already selling or to get started selling services as a part of their business.

Cisco’s Joseph Pinto

“These services are offered with our partners in mind. They support partners being able to offer their customers an end-to-end solution,” Joseph Pinto, senior vice president with Cisco technical service, told us. Cisco Services is the vendor’s second largest business and 90 percent of the services business represents recurring revenue, he noted.

Taking a closer look at the new service offerings:

Cisco Business Critical Services apply actionable analytics, automation and technology expertise to help customers predict opportunities, preempt risks and navigate technology transitions. Like the new High-Value Services, the Business Critical Services target the increasing IT complexity organizations face today. Cisco Advanced Services’ experts deliver capabilities that include analytics, automation, compliance and security, driving more informed decisions, lower complexity, reduced risk and threat protection, the company said. Cisco cites an IDC study that says the new Business Critical Services seek to help reduce downtime by 74 percent, resolve issues 41 percent faster and reduce operational cost by 21 percent.  

The new Cisco High-Value Services are designed to improve utilization of advanced software, solutions and the network. More specifically, the new services offer support for Cisco software via multi-level service options such as enhanced and premium, in addition to basic level support. There is centralized support for Cisco hardware and software, and third-party partner solutions from first call to resolutions. Solution support is the default service offering for the Cat 9K/DNA; technical services (TS) advantage offers network-level support.

“Over the past four years, we’ve been introducing more high-value services because that’s where the market is going because users want more advanced capabilities around onboarding, third-party solutions, and things of that nature,” Pinto said. As an example of how Cisco services are adding more capabilities, Pinto said that the advanced and premium offers for software support include working with partners or customers around integrating software into the workflows, and giving analytics around consumption to help customers achieve their objectives more quickly.

“Professional and managed services are core components of Carousel’s offerings,” noted Brian Davies, VP of Cisco sales for Carousel Industries, the VAR/MSP. “They are also increasingly important to our customers because their technology teams are constantly being …

… pushed to deliver true business value to their organizations while facing budget restrictions and insufficient qualified technical resources available for hire. At the same time, Cisco is developing new architectures and solutions at an incredible pace which widens the skills gap even further. Cisco’s new Business Critical and High Value Services will be extremely valuable in augmenting our own advanced services capabilities, allowing us to deliver the best possible overall solutions to our customers.”

Again, Cisco cites IDC research noting that a lack of digital skills in an organization is the single largest challenge to successful implementation of digital transformation. According to IDC, 69 percent of digital leaders lack the right people, knowledge and technology to transform. Frost & Sullivan research notes 1.5 million unfilled positions in the global cybersecurity workforce by 2020.

Gartner offers good news for partners: Seventy-four percent of CIOs say using IT services is essential to business success and 54 percent plan to increase their use of IT services.

The new services target the sweet spot in the market, such as data center, cloud, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), security, IoT and collaboration.