News summary

• Cisco reveals how it is helping networks evolve by predicting application issues before they happen, enabling a new level of reliability and performance.
• The company has been building and testing predictive software engines over the past two years; Early customer trials show Cisco’s technology can predict issues with high accuracy, helping IT teams to drastically improve connected experiences.
• Cisco plans to deliver predictive technologies across its portfolio in integrated, easy-to-use SaaS offers, making Cisco predictive networks accessible to companies of all sizes.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — May 4, 2022 — For the last 30 years, Cisco has been powering the internet, keeping the world connected to what matters most. Networks have evolved to detect and react to issues to maintain performance and reliability. The next logical step is for networks to predict problems before they happen, something that has been difficult until now.

Today, Cisco is offering a look behind the curtain at how it is defining the future of connectivity with groundbreaking technology designed to help IT teams learn, predict and plan, to avoid costly disruptions. 

Cisco Predictive Networks

Cisco is bringing together new predictive technologies with its broad portfolio of observability, visibility and intelligence technologies to improve reliability and performance across all operational scenarios. For the past two years, Cisco has been working on a first-of-its-kind predictive analytics engine that will help IT teams prevent issues and elevate the user experience. Cisco has tuned and tested predictive models with customers across a variety of industry segments, incorporating advanced analytics and machine learning techniques to enable greater precision and ease of use.

How It Works

Cisco predictive networks work by gathering data from a myriad of telemetry sources. Once integrated, it learns the patterns using a variety of models and begins to predict user experience issues, providing problem solving options. Customers can decide how far and wide they want to connect the engine throughout the network, giving them flexible options to expand as they need. 

“The future of connectivity will rely on self-healing networks that can learn, predict and plan,” said Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO, Cisco. “Our research for predictive networks has been tested and developed with customers, and early adopters are seeing major benefits saving them time and money. The industry has been waiting for secure, proactive networking and only Cisco can do it right.”

Why This Is Important

IT teams are struggling to be proactive. Managing cybersecurity threats, hybrid work, hybrid cloud and more, the stakes are high to ensure the best networked experiences for employees and customers. 24/7 uptime means everything. Unplanned downtime and outages can interrupt employee productivity, customer service and revenue. 45% of IT leaders surveyed cited responding to disruptions as the top network challenge for 2021[1].

Beyond outages, the experience people get from their network connections has become business critical. People and businesses use and rely on applications for just about everything, and often an app is the critical first impression for customers. 57% of people say brands have one shot to impress them and that if their digital service does not perform, they won’t use them again [2]. To deliver on the full promise of digital business, the industry needs a way to better predict network issues, proactively avoid issues, and ensure the best possible experience.