600-455 techniques - Deploying Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (DUCCE) Updated: 2023

Networking giant Cisco has announced seven new modules on its Observability Platform, looking to help customers fulfil their specific observability needs and utilise additional value from observable telemetry.

First announced in February 2023 and launched for general availability in June 2023, Cisco Full-Stack Observability is designed to allow teams to bring together telemetry data from their own context and drive correlated insights across the entire IT estate, whether they are DevOps engineers, site reliability engineers, cloud ops, ITOps, line of business or members of C-suite management.

As IT and application environments become ever more complex, observability – the ability to see and get ahead of network-based issues and everything in the tech stack that could affect customer experience – has become a board-level imperative.

Cisco said the background to the launch in February was the battle among consumer brands to gain market share by focusing on the experience customers have in accessing their products and services. This is quickly reaching into the enterprise arena, whereby hybrid workers expect the capability of their IT services to be identical wherever they are. As these expectations increase, Cisco said it was aiming to allow firms to deliver the required digital experiences by staff, customers and partners alike.

The company now says that modern businesses are digitally led, with customer and user experiences achieved with and through applications. It believes the speed and complexity of how these applications are built demands that IT teams, security teams and business leaders observe all aspects of application performance and experience in real time. Yet the company cited a exact IDC report showing 60% of IT professionals are panic that most observability tools serve narrow requirements, failing to supply IT teams a complete view into current and trending operating conditions. Further, 65% stated the need for a programmable and extensible observability solution that could be used for use cases specific to their own business.

As a solution, the new open, extensible and API-driven stack was built by Cisco’s development partners and created to expand its full-stack observability ecosystem. The new modules are focused on five critical areas: business insights, SAP visibility, networking, MLOps and service-level objectives (SLO), and sustainability.

Business insights functions aim to correlate telemetry data with business performance across multiple domains, providing customers with full visibility and insights on how business interacts with IT. The new platform can now help customers achieve holistic observability across often changeable, expanding and complex SAP landscapes and ecosystems and use Cisco’s networking expertise to correlate key network telemetry with business metrics and application stacks.

With the growing use of generative AI and the mainstreaming of modern applications, the Cisco Observability Platform is also designed to allow customers to monitor these applications, their SLO and bring the monitoring of large language models (LLMs), and MLOps models together with application observability. Cisco also sees the upgrade as being able to help assist customers achieve their sustainability goals by providing data around the carbon footprint across multiple IT domains and help optimise around energy consumption.

Commenting on the launch of the new modules and what they could deliver, Will Townsend, vice president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy said: “Full-stack observability is unlocking a host of use cases that are providing enterprises with deeper levels of cross-domain visibility for improved application performance, network insights, security postures and assurance. The resulting benefits of reducing risk and improving the resilience of IT infrastructure are immeasurable. [The Cisco Observability Platform] ecosystem has the potential to provide a diverse set of solutions that can help customers reduce tool sprawl and more proactively manage business operations through partner-led observability practices.”

New modules available immediately covering these capabilities are: CloudFabrix - SAP Observability; CloudFabrix - Campus Analytics; Evolutio – Claims; Evolutio – eCommerce; DataRobot – MLOps by Evolutio; Climatiq - Cloud Carbon Insights; Nobl9 – Service Level Objectives (SLO).

There's no question that GenAI applications are starting to make a big impact on enterprise applications. Until recently, most of the attention given to GenAI in the business context was focused on text-based Large Language Models (LLMs) and chatbot-style applications that leverage them. However, at their exact Webex One conference, Cisco highlighted how foundational models and other GenAI tools can also profoundly enhance communications and collaboration.

Cisco announced several enhancements related to AI integration across its Webex suite. Many of these involve adding an extra layer of intelligence to Webex, while others focus on audio and video quality improvements. Moreover, Cisco continued its history of collaborating with Apple by introducing enhanced support for Apple devices, including the Apple TV and Apple Watch.

Like its competitors, Cisco initially introduced AI-powered features in Webex, such as automatic transcription and meeting summarization, but the new capabilities they announced demonstrate a new level of sophistication. These updates offer insights into how GenAI-based tools are expected to evolve.

Undoubtedly, the most intriguing development is the introduction of a new type of model that Cisco is calling the Real-Time Media Models (RMMs). These are based on audio and video data. Cisco claims that RMMs can furnish supplemental data about a meeting derived from visual cues, gestures, body language, message tone, and more.

While text-based meeting transcriptions and summaries are valuable, they often miss the subtle yet crucial nuances in how things are said and how participants respond. These nuances can significantly influence how certain ideas or messages are interpreted and conveyed. Cisco believes it can enrich its existing AI-powered meeting notes by integrating RMM data with its current LLM-based text content.

In theory, these sound impressive, but it will take some real-world usage to see how effective they are in capturing and integrating this information into meeting summaries. Regardless, it's an interesting example of how Webex continues to innovate while trying to stay a step ahead of its competition – not an easy task in a market that moves as quickly as video collaboration.

One of the other benefits of leveraging RMMs, according to Cisco, is the ability to create meeting summarization in video form. This allows people to get a movie preview style summary of a meeting, allowing people to easily watch what happened instead of simply practicing about it. Again, the proof will be in the pudding, but it's unquestionably a great concept.

RMMs also enhance the Webex AI Assistant. Similar to other digital assistant features, the Webex version is geared to furnish intelligent responses to user queries inputted into a chat-style interface. For instance, users can prompt the Webex AI Assistant to summarize meetings they missed or underscore remarks from specific attendees, like whatever your boss said. The integration of RMM data differentiates this feature by providing deeper context. By analyzing the video feed, future Webex AI Assistant iterations could potentially auto-generate summaries of segments a participant missed, ensuring continuity.

The Webex AI Assistant can also suggest responses for customer service agents, helping them Boost their responses, and can even make suggestions in the tone of how things are (or should be) said. Additionally, Cisco mentioned their intent to support multiple LLMs alongside their RMMs within the Webex AI Assistant. Essentially, they could interchange the GenAI engine, optimizing it per customer or employee type.

The final piece of the new Webex AI strategy is an enhanced set of AI audio and video codecs. These tools can dramatically minimize data requirements and, through GenAI, can even recover lost packets, ensuring uninterrupted audio. On the video front, employing super-resolution techniques, akin to those used in AI-image enhancement, allows Webex to upgrade video quality and resolution over subpar connections. The end product should be a smoother, glitch-free meeting experience.

The evolution of meeting and collaboration tools like Webex and its competitors continues at a breakneck pace. It won't be long before rivals like Microsoft, Zoom and Google start to catch up. Still, it's great to see how Cisco is pushing forward the integration of GenAI into Webex and providing an intriguing view into how these technologies continue to evolve.

Bob O'Donnell is the founder and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a technology consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech

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Shares of Cisco Systems Inc. fell more than 11% in extended trading today as the company warned it will likely miss analysts’ expectations in its fiscal second quarter by a wide margin.

The company expects this to have a knock-on effect, and its forecast for the current fiscal year also came in low.

The disappointing guidance came in the wake of a solid earnings beat. The company reported first quarter earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of $1.11 per share, with revenue up 8% from a year earlier to $14.67 billion. The results were better-than-expected, with analysts looking for earnings of just $1.03 per share on sales of $14.61 billion.

All told, Cisco reported a net income of $3.64 billion for the quarter, up from $2.67 billion a year earlier.

Cisco said its problem is that it has experienced a notable slowdown in new product orders during the quarter. This is because many of its clients are currently busy installing and implementing products that were delivered recently, over the prior three quarters, Cisco Chief Executive Chuck Robbins (pictured) said in a conference call with analysts.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company had been stuck with a backlog of unfulfilled orders caused by component shortages. But its supply chain constraints eased rapidly about a year ago as China exited its lockdown strategy, leading to a glut of product deliveries over the last four quarters. Now, customers have their hands full implementing all of those products.

“Our customers and our sales organizations have been very clear with us over the last 90 days that this is the issue,” Robbins said, though he also admitted that sales cycles are still longer than is usually the case.

According to Robbins, “customers are now taking time to onboard and deploy these heightened product deliveries,” hence the slowdown in new orders. He said it’s mainly larger enterprises, service providers and cloud customers that are facing these challenges, adding that the issue was “most pronounced in October.” On average, Cisco’s biggest customers are waiting to implement one to two quarters’ worth of shipped products, he added.

Cisco had a good quarter, but is now suffering from its post pandemic high, when it was finally able to deliver pandemic orders it could not fulfill due to supply chain challenges. Now that it has fulfilled those orders, the demand has weakened as enterprises are implementing and the channel reducing inventories. The good news is all product lines are growing, which has not been too often the case, and Cisco delivered approximately 1B more in profit on roughly 1B more in revenue, which means Chuck Robbins and team have kept costs constant and EPS per share are up a quarter. Let’s see if this trends continues.

Because of these customer issues, Cisco could only offer a much lower forecast than Wall Street analysts had been anticipating. Officials said they’re looking for earnings of between 82 and 84 cents in the second quarter, with revenue of $12.6 billion to $12.8 billion, implying a 7% decline from one year earlier. That compares very badly with the Street’s forecast of 99 cents pre share in earnings and $14.19 billion in sales.

For the full year, Cisco is reducing its revenue forecast while bumping up its view on earnings. The company now sees full-year earnings of between $3.87 and $3.93 on revenue of $53.8 billion to $55 billion. Previously, it had forecast a range of $3.19 to $3.32 in earnings and $57.0 billion to $58.2 billion in revenue. In any case, the new forecast is not great, as Wall Street is hoping for earnings of $4.05 per share on sales of $57.7 billion.

The after-hours stock decline masks the fact that Cisco delivered strong quarterly results, thanks to it finally being able to deliver pandemic-era orders that could not be fulfilled earlier, said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. “But now those orders have been shipped, it is faced with weakening demand as enterprise implement those products and the channel reduces inventories,” he explained.

Charles King of Pund-IT Inc. said Cisco has been caught on one of those “damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations”, because it did a great job in recovering from the pandemic-related supply chain chaos and has gotten back its manufacturing mojo. However, he said many of its customers have been slower off the mark. “Many are still struggling to deploy and configure the new kit they ordered months ago, so you can’t really blame them for slowing or stopping orders to deal with the backlog,” King said. “But investors appear to be blaming Cisco anyway, for failing to live up to analysts’ consensus. That may be short-sighted, but no one ever said that life, let alone the markets, are fair.”

In the longer term, Cisco’s prospects do look better. During the quarter, it announced that it intends to buy the data analytics and cybersecurity software giant Splunk Inc. in a bumper $28 billion deal, which would be its largest-ever acquisition. The move catapults Cisco, which is best known for its networking gear as well as other data center equipment, to the leading ranks of cybersecurity providers.

Robbins said at the time the deal was announced that the combination of Cisco’s and Splunk’s data would have real value for enterprises, allowing them to “move from threat detection and response to threat prediction and prevention.” He said it will enable Cisco to become one of the world’s largest software companies.

Besides its cybersecurity ambitions, Cisco has a lot of hope for artificial intelligence in the longer term. During the conference call, Robbins told analysts that his company believes it can win more than $1 billion worth of orders in fiscal 2025 for AI infrastructure from cloud providers alone. He said cloud providers are looking to move to “more of a standard, broad-based technology like Ethernet, where they can have multiple sources” to support AI networking workloads.

Mueller said it’s also notable that Cisco is running a tight ship in terms of its business expenditures. “Investors can be pleased that all of Cisco’s product lines grew during the previous quarter, which has not been the case too often,” he added. “That allowed Cisco to deliver approximately $1 billion in profit on almost $15 billion in revenue. That shows Cisco has kept its cost base constant, resulting in increased earnings per share. Cisco needs to continue this trend.”

The after-hours stock decline means that Cisco’s shares are now up just 12% in the year-to-date, trailing the wider S&P 500 index, which is up 17% for the year.

Photo: Fortune GLOBAL FORUM/Flickr

Cisco Partner Summit is the tech giant's premier gathering for the its colossal global channel partner base. This year, more than 2,000 partners descended onto Miami to learn about Cisco's latest innovations and to hear from the company's executive leadership team. From generative AI, to security and hybrid work, to the impending Splunk acquisition and the company's new global channel chief, here's what partners need to know from Cisco Partner Summit 2023.

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To go after the soon-to-be $34 billion observability market opportunity, Cisco has unveiled its observability ecosystem with seven new partner modules which lets developers create new modules on the Cisco Observability Platform.

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An affiliate member of the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware cartel has turned to malvertising techniques beloved of fraudsters to compromise its victims, masking its payloads as legitimate software downloads including Advanced IP Scanner, Cisco AnyCOnnect, Slack and WinSCP, and buying Google ads to lure in victims.

The ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware-as-a-service operation has been linked to exact cyber heists including attacks on two Las Vegas casinos, an international cosmetics firm, and a prominent NHS Trust.

Historically, the group’s members use fairly standard methods of achieving initial access to its networks, either through stolen valid credentials, exploitation of remote management and monitoring services, and browser-based attacks.

The latest twist in BlackCat’s tale comes after researchers from eSentire’s Threat Response Unit (TRU) responded to a number of intrusions within its customer network in which unsuspecting business users were drawn to attacker-controlled websites via fake Google ads bought by the affiliate.

Once lured in, explained Keegan Keplinger, TRU senior threat researcher, the victims unwittingly downloaded not the product they thought they were getting, but the Nitrogen malware.

“Nitrogen is initial-access malware that leverages Python libraries for stealth,” explained Keplinger in a newly published disclosure blog. “This foothold provides intruders with an initial entry into the target organisation’s IT environment. Once the hackers have that initial foothold, they can then infect the target with the malware of their choosing.”

Nitrogen is so-named after an artefact found in the naming convention used by the ransomware operator. It is unique among initial access malwares in that it uses highly obfuscated Python libraries to skirt the victim’s security controls.

This is possible, said Keplinger, because Python libraries are legitimate tools – often known as living-off-the-land binaries or LoLBins – and typically do not raise suspicion. This also makes it more difficult for investigators to figure out what happened after an incident goes down.

In the incidents the TRU teams responded to, the activity was stopped before an real ransomware attack could be deployed.

However, warned Keplinger, because much security awareness training still centres malicious email attachments, browser-based malware downloads are gaining traction as an access vector, and this could be particularly damaging to organisations where end-users are free to download their own software.

“Organisations need to start including browser-based attacks, including those that use fake advertising, as part of user awareness training. Browser-based attacks are increasingly leading to hands-on ransomware intrusions and infostealers that enable ransomware intrusions later,” wrote Kepliner.

“Make sure you are implementing attack surface reduction rules around script files such as .js and .vbs, but keep in mind that when these attacks arrive in .ISO files, the ‘Mark of the Web’ is lost so Attack Surface Reduction rules won’t detect the files from the internet.”

“Employ endpoint monitoring to ensure you can catch malicious execution, when social engineering attacks bypass user scrutiny – and make sure that endpoint coverage is fully comprehensive. TRU has observed a tendency for ransomware attacks to make it further down the kill-chain when they begin on endpoints that are out of scope for endpoint monitoring.

“[Also] employ logging to ensure you are capturing telemetry – especially for devices and services that don’t support an endpoint agent, including VPN, device enrollment, and server software for applications that don’t generate endpoint telemetry, like Citrix, IIS, and cloud services,” he added.

Credit: Cisco

Cisco has revealed new features, enhancements and tools for partners as it embarks on the biggest change to its incentive program. 

The networking giant has initiated a significant evolution of its flagship incentives to reward partners for selling Cisco hardware, software, and as-a-service solutions. It is also adding six new solution specialisations within the next nine months.

The Cisco Partner Incentive will combine elements from several incentives such as VIP 42; CSPP and Lifecycle Incentives into one integrated view.

It will focus on rewarding partners with rebates to drive predictable and profitable growth and will specifically support new logo acquisition, up-sell, and cross-sell opportunities. 

“The Cisco Partner Incentive is the biggest change we’ve made to partner incentives in more than a decade and is the capstone on the Cisco Partner Program evolution started in 2020,” Cisco vice president of partner strategy and programs Marc Surplus said.