Cisco : IBM and Cisco Sessions at IBM Think 2021

IBM and Cisco have been global strategic partners, working together for the benefit of our mutual customers, for more than 20 years. Together, our objective is to help our customers reduce risk and accelerate their journeys to real-world value in several areas, including hybrid cloud, security, Internet of Things, and collaboration (Figure 1).

Today, we have over 20,000 mutual customers in 75 countries, representing more than 20 industry verticals.

The IBM and Cisco alliance enjoys high-level executive commitment and support from both companies. Our alliance encourages collaboration throughout each company to deliver solutions and services that help solve our customers' most complex problems. As a result, our customers benefit from:

• Proven end-to-end solutions and services that include market-proven integrated solutions and services with robust capabilities to help meet our customers' business objectives.
• Simplified vendor relationships as the IBM and Cisco broad set of complementary and integrated portfolios bring best-in-class products and services. Those products and services help our customers simplify the number of vendors they work with.
• Our large global presence, which makes us available to support our customers wherever their businesses operate.

During the May 2021 IBM Think virtual conference, IBM and Cisco jointly presented at six different sessions now available for review on demand. Those sessions delve deeper into the following areas of IBM and Cisco partnership:

• Security
• Migration to the cloud
• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Technology support

In this blog, I highlight three of those sessions-all available at Power your digital transformation with Cisco and IBM -that fall into the areas of security and cloud computing.

Security

IBM and Cisco announced our partnership in security back in 2017, and we have continually listened to our customers to help them address their challenges and improve their cybersecurity postures. In fact, the four common security concerns identified by our customers around the globe include:

• Lowering the complexity
• Optimizing the number of vendors and products
• Bringing the technology together to support more informed decisions
• Managing ongoing security while tackling threats and risks along the way

In the session Partnering with IBM and Cisco in Security-the Cube Interview, Erin Jensen, Global Partner Executive for IBM at Cisco, and Kandyce Tripp, Partner, Global Security Services Alliances at IBM, discuss how IBM and Cisco work together to deliver a best-in-class security portfolio. They discuss the alignment of both companies' security strategies and broad portfolios of security products and services.

Kandyce also discusses the IBM Security Technology Alliance Program, which launched in March 2021. This is a targeted program designed to promote, support, and reward a select set of IBM partners in security, with Cisco as one of those partners. The program provides technical and marketing resources to support the development of innovative solutions that meet customer-driven use cases through the integration of partner and IBM products.

For more information about how IBM and Cisco are working together in security, you can also check out the session Power and Secure Your Digital Transformation with IBM and Cisco: Ecosystem and SASE. This on-demand session goes into more detail about how the IBM and Cisco combined ecosystem solutions and collaborative threat defense framework are delivering security outcomes to customers across multiple industries.

Cloud computing

Migration to the cloud began long ago, with many of our customers needing to modernize their legacy applications and associated infrastructure for several reasons, including:

• Legacy applications: Productivity is impacted by complicated and vital legacy lines of business applications.
• Aging infrastructure: Legacy infrastructure may be decades old, making replacement with identical systems impractical.
• Lack of agility: Legacy applications and aging infrastructure contribute to a lack of agility within an organization.

To learn more about how IBM and Cisco are working to help our mutual customers migrate to the cloud, watch the IBM Think on-demand session IBM Cloud Satellite: Workloads from Closets to Clouds. In this session, Jason McGee, IBM Fellow, VP and CTO of IBM Cloud Platform, discusses how customers can easily deploy distributed cloud environments, running workloads from anywhere and across multiple clouds. You will hear how IBM's new capability, IBM Cloud Satellite, helps customers deliver distributed cloud environments, leveraging the IBM cloud.

You'll also hear Jeff Gatz, Cisco Alliance Lead, discuss Cisco's vision of unified infrastructure and how it plays into secure access service edge (SASE). For instance, you will learn more about the role unified infrastructure plays in enabling IBM Cloud Satellite to help customers run their workloads anywhere and how the as-a-service delivery of software and platforms extends into the infrastructure layer.

Our continued commitment to work together to benefit our customers

The IBM Think sessions represent just a few of the many areas IBM and Cisco are working on together, with the ultimate objective of improving our mutual customers' business outcomes.

Stay tuned for the next blog where we'll highlight additional ways you can leverage IBM and Cisco market leadership and our commitment to help you and your business.

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