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For independent software vendors (ISVs), the quality of on-premises IT infrastructure determines the quality of business results. The performance, availability, scalability, and cost-efficiency of the underlying infrastructure is business-critical—whether it’s the infrastructure that runs your applications in your customers’ data centers, the infrastructure that delivers your software as a service (SaaS) through your own private cloud, or the systems that run the applications your own company depends on.

That is why so many ISVs and their customers who deploy on-premises equipment are refreshing their infrastructure to a highly orchestrated, automated, ultra-efficient IT service delivery model. They are transforming the data center from a source of cost, risk, and constraint into a source of business agility, competitive differentiation, and strategic advantages.

Cisco is uniquely qualified to provide the data center infrastructure and expertise to help you and your customers make the upgrades quickly and effectively. Working with IT teams, Cisco can help unify compute, storage, and network assets, bridge legacy silos, and optimize the performance, availability, and scalability of data centers—to increase both internal IT efficiencies and the value of your solutions to your customers.

Independent Software Vendors: Upgrade and Unify Your On-Premises IT with CiscoWhen it’s time to refresh your data center or your customer’s, put Cisco on your team.

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The Costs of IT as Usual: Underestimated and UnacceptableThe volume of demand for IT services is in an upward spiral. There are constant requests for new functionality in product or service offerings. Power and cooling costs are rising. Skilled workers are harder to find and cost more to hire. Development and testing costs are up. Compliance costs are escalating.

But the biggest challenge for IT, and one that is often underestimated in its impact to the business, is the escalating cost of maintenance activities. In many cases the vast majority of the IT budget (often 70 – 80 percent) is consumed by maintenance and administration. This includes managing assets, adds/moves/changes, system management, and meeting existing demands.

When 80 percent of your resources are dedicated to maintenance, there is very little left for innovation. And in a business environment that requires ever-faster cycles of innovation, iteration, and deployment of new services, the inability to fund innovative projects and pilots can be crippling. A closer look at the root causes of this predicament highlights two important points:

• While server spending typically has been relatively flat or declining for the past 15 years, the cost of management and administration has increased, often representing two-thirds of total IT spend.

• The cost of managing virtualization environments contributes the most to the increased expense.

The key culprit for increased management costs is the legacy model of data center investment that fostered the creation of technology and management silos. These dedicated resources for specific departments or lines of business were not designed to integrate easily into an automated, on-demand, IT-as-a-service model.

Siloed resources are inherently inefficient because they can’t be shared, and applications can’t take advantage of the capability of the server platform. This increases costs through underutilization of resources. Virtualization helped increase the levels of server utilization, but unfortunately, the system-management functions required to manage the legacy and virtualized environments are complicated because many of the server, storage, and network resource were simply not designed to work together.

In order to hide the associated complexity, expensive management software has often been deployed to “simplify” infrastructure deployments. The result, again, is increased administration and management costs.

Finally, each of the different platforms often has a unique set of tools and points of configuration. This further adds to the management complexity and costs. For instance, change management can be a very arduous task for personnel as they attempt to continuously patch multiple systems.

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The Cisco Solution: Unified and Simplified On-Premises IT Infrastructure A partnership with Cisco can help IT move from its current method of addressing business needs with dedicated IT infrastructure to addressing them through more efficient, automated on-demand services. Now IT offerings can be more consistent, timely, and responsive to business needs.

To deliver on this promise, Cisco has taken an architectural approach to reinventing data center efficiency—an approach that involves unification of diverse IT resources. The cornerstone of this unification approach is the Cisco® Unified Data Center. (Figure 1.)

The Cisco Unified Data Center is a platform that changes the economics of the data center by unifying networking, compute, storage, and management into a common fabric-based architecture designed to deliver business agility, IT simplicity, and financial flexibility.

Unlike other solutions, which continue to build layers of management software to stitch together the legacy infrastructure, this platform is designed specifically to facilitate on-demand provisioning from shared pools of infrastructure resource across physical and virtual environments. This approach helps organizations move from legacy IT to a simpler and more efficient model for data center operations.

The Unified Data Center is made up of three components:

• Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) is our fabric-based x86 architecture. By creating a networked, highly programmable platform optimized for virtualization and cloud, Cisco UCS gives customers a computing platform that can be rapidly deployed and easily maintained, while being able to provide switching, policy, and services down to the virtual machine.

• Cisco ACI and Unified Fabric describes our switching architecture for service-enabled LAN, SAN, and converged networks. With a consistent NX-OS operating system across the Cisco Nexus® and MDS portfolios, and capabilities optimized for virtualization, and security, load balancing, and WAN optimization solutions in both a physical and virtual form factor, customers can deploy an intelligent, scalable, and highly available infrastructure.

• Cisco Unified Management brings together Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, which provides a self-service portal, service catalog, management and orchestration capabilities along with the Network Services Manager for automated network provisioning and Cisco UCS Manager for UCS programmability.

For more information, go to the Cisco Unified Data Center home page.

UNIFIED FABRIC

UNIFIED DATA CENTERUNIFIED MANAGEMENT

UNIFIED COMPUTING

Figure 1. Cisco Unified Data Center

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Cisco UCS: The Momentum Is Building

• Adoption – More than 75 percent of all Fortune 500 customers have invested in Cisco UCS.

• Market share growth – As of CY13Q1 Cisco is one of the top five server vendors based on worldwide revenue share.1

• Performance – Cisco UCS has achieved 90 world record performance benchmarks to date.

• Channel – More than 3800 Cisco Channel Partners are actively selling Cisco UCS worldwide and 1900 Cisco UCS specialized partners are in the channel worldwide.

Cisco UCS: Changing the Economics of the Data CenterWith the Cisco Unified Data Center, you can fundamentally transform how you and your customers deliver IT—and realize a host of benefits in doing so. Below are just a few examples of the cost savings, efficiency gains, and business advantages achieved by Cisco UCS customers.

Infrastructure Cost Savings

• Audience View Tracking reduced operating costs by 25 percent.• Cineca was able to quickly and easily migrate 96 percent of its physical servers to virtual machines.

• Comverge saved as much as $200,000 in VMware licensing costs and reduced rack servers from 25 to just six.

Disaster Recovery

• Seven Corners slashed network outages for cost savings of $100,000 per month.

Accelerated Deployment Times

• Audience View Tracking reduced server provisioning from 1.5 days to one hour.

• Consert was able to get Cisco UCS racks live and configured with virtual machines actually running within three days of taking the products out of the box.

• National FFA Organization reduced time spent managing physical servers by 80 percent.

• Enspire reduced provisioning from 13 to six weeks.

IT Staff Efficiency Gains

• CareCore reduced the time needed to launch new lines of business from six months to two weeks and increased the time software engineers can devote to development from 50 percent to 80 percent.

• Columbia Sportswear reduced IT management costs for its SAP deployment.

• RUN Balzano estimates that its engineers are spending at least 10 percent less time on management.

Power and Cooling Reduction

• National FFA Organization lowered power consumption by 40 percent.Source: 1 IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, Q1 2013, May 2013, Revenue Share

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Power of the EcosystemPartnerships have always been important in any data center environment. The Cisco difference is the level of integration, validation, and testing that is done across a wide range of partners. We help ISVs ensure that their application, OS, and hypervisor will run effectively on the Cisco UCS platform. Cisco has a broad array of validated solutions across a variety of applications. The same is true for system management, which represents another huge investment by IT.

Cisco has also worked very closely with partners such as VCE, HDS, and NetApp to build converged infrastructure platforms. These platforms have been designed to eliminate artificial integration (through management layers) and the associated non-recoverable engineering investments that customers need to make.

For more information on Cisco Unified Data Center ecosystem partners visit the Cisco Data Center and Virtualization website.

The UCS Platform-Ready ProgramTo enable ISVs to sell with Cisco more effectively as adoption of the Unified Data Center accelerates, it becomes increasingly important for ISVs to validate your applications on the Cisco UCS platform. For this reason, Cisco has created the UCS Platform-Ready Program as part of the Solution Partner Program. The program is designed to encourage and facilitate developer success on Cisco UCS. Specifically, the program helps ISVs to expand revenue opportunities by being able to sell into accounts that deploy Cisco UCS infrastructure.

With the UCS Platform-Ready Program there is no need to pass any formal testing. Rather, conformity to the UCS Interoperability Matrix is required. By participating in the program and conforming to the UCS Interoperability Matrix, ISVs are entitled to use the Cisco Compatible Logo. This logo helps assure your potential enterprise customers that your application will run in their UCS environment. Learn more about the UCS Interoperability Matrix.

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Move to SaaS with CiscoIf you’re considering hosting your application as a service running in your own private cloud, Cisco and our partners offer two routes to build your own cloud:

• Cisco Cloud Enablement Services deliver the expert help you need to accelerate the adoption of a cloud model based on your current environment and business goals. The services address how cloud adoption promotes changes in your business application portfolio, data centers, and enterprise networks infrastructure and the re-architecture of data center, network, and storage environments.

• Cisco Cloud Builder Partners build and sell Cisco centric cloud solutions to end customers and cloud providers. They possess a breadth of competencies across compute, networking, security, storage, virtualization, and cloud management, helping them to produce end-to-end Cisco validated cloud infrastructure solutions, such as Vblock, FlexPod, VSPEX, and more.

If your plans include hosting your application on someone else’s cloud, Cisco has a broad set of Cloud Provider Partners who build, own, or oper-ate their own data centers, network operations centers, and assets. They offer Cisco centric X-as-a-service to multiple end customers, includ-ing ISVs. Cisco Cloud Provider Partners deploy Cisco Powered services, which give your organization the agility to blend cloud and managed services with premises-based solutions.

For additional information about the Cisco cloud strategy, cloud partners, and cloud offerings for ISVs, see our brochure, “ISVs: Run Better in the Cloud with Cisco.”

Get additional information about Cisco Powered services.

Let’s ConnectFor ISVs, a partnership with Cisco can help you and your customers refresh and optimize on-premises IT—quickly and cost-effectively.

For customers running your application on-premises in their own data centers, you can help ensure your application runs on Cisco Unified Computing servers by joining the Solution Partner Program and the UCS Platform-Ready Program. And if you’re considering deploying your application as a service—whether hosted on your own private cloud or through a third-party cloud—contact Cisco today and get expert assistance with your journey to the cloud.

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Asia Pacific HeadquartersCisco Systems (USA) Pte. Ltd.Singapore

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Cisco has more than 200 offices worldwide. Addresses, phone numbers, and fax numbers are listed on the Cisco Website at www.cisco.com/go/offices.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does

not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)

Americas HeadquartersCisco Systems, Inc.San Jose, CA

Asia Pacific HeadquartersCisco Systems (USA) Pte. Ltd.Singapore

Europe HeadquartersCisco Systems International BV Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Cisco has more than 200 offices worldwide. Addresses, phone numbers, and fax numbers are listed on the Cisco Website at www.cisco.com/go/offices.