Our Client
Cisco Systems, Inc. designs, builds, and sells IT networking products, cybersecurity solutions, and services worldwide. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California.
Cisco operates a demonstration facility in Bedfont Lakes, Feltham, UK, where it shows Data Center (DC) and cloud solutions to clients, prospects, and its own sales teams. The facility plays a key role in training sales teams to present Cisco's full technology stack, not just individual products.
Cisco Demo Platform Technology Stack
CISCO products
Partner products
Bedfont Lakes also opens up broader conversations with clients about Cisco's solution benefits and DevOps adoption. The demo platform includes the infrastructure and DevOps tooling IT teams need, along with automation components for engineering teams.
The goal: give clients, prospects, and sales teams a working view of Cisco's solutions inside a real DevOps pipeline.
Challenge
Cisco faced two core challenges in meeting its goals for the Bedfont Lakes demos: identifying the personas who'd actually use the platform, and choosing the right scenarios to demonstrate.
As Cisco began building its demonstrations, technical issues surfaced across its heterogeneous environment — a mix of on-prem DC and public cloud components. The platform architecture needed to be defined, the right technology stack identified, and the best scenarios and tools selected.
Other hurdles included writing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scripts, building truly immutable infrastructure, and making the environment reliable and repeatable.
Infrastructure Operations Modernization Platform
- Fully automated infrastructure provisioning, following CI/CD best practices
- IT operations automation and enhancement through AIOps
- A modern approach to configuring and managing on-prem and hybrid infrastructure
Cisco asked SoftServe to build a holistic DevOps platform by integrating and optimizing Cisco's own tools with third-party ones, applying modern DevOps practices to Cisco's DC environment. SoftServe was chosen based on its vision for the initial demo platform and stayed on through ongoing implementation.
Cisco's expectations:
- An assessment of proposed use cases, their validation, and improvement suggestions grounded in current engineering best practices
- Implementation of defined scenarios on a demo platform ready for frequent use
- Expanded monitoring and maintenance of the platform once live
Cisco's goal was a demo platform that let its sales team show existing products to different stakeholders across a customer's organization — and one versatile enough to reach not just IT specialists, but engineering and application teams too.
Solution
The project began in spring 2021. SoftServe split the work into three sub-projects, each planned separately with incremental improvements built in as work progressed:
- Demo platform assessment
- Implementation
- Adoption and expansion
Assessment. SoftServe examined how well the initial use cases would serve as Cisco's R&D demo platform, and how well Use Case 1 held up against Cisco's real-world needs. This gave Cisco a clear view of how Use Case 1's architecture aligned with its goals, through both top-down and bottom-up assessment — which shaped the platform's final architecture.
Cisco Demo Platform: Infrastructure High-Level View
SoftServe recommended a sample modern application to prove out the platform's capabilities, and worked with a small Cisco team to design a hybrid cloud use case.
Implementation. This phase focused on building the platform itself, with the technical demo flow split into:
- Infrastructure provisioning
- Continuous integration and continuous delivery
- CD process monitoring and compliance
Cisco Demo Platform: Application Awareness View
Adoption and Expansion. This phase extended the use cases further, including an automated war room and integration with modern ITSM systems.
By completion, SoftServe had built a demo platform ready to support a real-world DevOps lifecycle for both containerized and legacy applications on Cisco's DC technologies. It showed how Cisco's solutions integrate with popular automation and orchestration IaC tools, with infrastructure and application awareness built in. SoftServe also shared hybrid cloud development models with Cisco along the way.
Conclusion
With the Cisco Demo Platform complete at Bedfont Lakes in early June 2022, Cisco can now demonstrate support for cloud-native workloads, application modernization journeys, and hybrid cloud deployment models — along with its ability to separate technical flow into infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD, and CD process monitoring and compliance.
This also meets Cisco's goal of expanding demos for a wider range of customer stakeholders, from IT teams to engineering and application teams.
As one Cisco team member on the project put it:
As Cisco's customers and partners embrace the hybrid cloud as their platform for modern digital business, how applications and infrastructure interact has never mattered more. Providing business observability and insight into these infrastructures, and rapidly deploying and adapting resources, is now essential to a cloud operating model. But that only works by bringing these elements together in one unified operating approach. SoftServe has helped Cisco build a set of demonstration capabilities that showcase these modern practices — helping our joint customers and partners see what's possible, and how hybrid cloud and automation come together to deliver what customers need.
