Cisco Adds New Application-Centric Capabilities to Service Provider Networking Portfolio

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 17, 2015) - Today, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced three significant enhancements to the Cisco® Evolved Programmable Network (EPN) portfolio, an open, elastic, and application-centric network infrastructure framework that enables service providers to accelerate time to revenue while reducing the costs of deploying new services. The new technologies include:

• Cisco Application Engineered Routing
• Cisco IOS XRv 9000 Virtual Router
• High-density 100GE line cards for the Cisco ASR 9000 Series

With this announcement, Cisco is integrating its industry-leading programmability, virtualization and orchestration capabilities into its best-of-breed core and edge networking portfolio. These latest EPN innovations will help service providers increase overall profitability and service agility in delivering new revenue-generating services to customers.

According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index™ Global Forecast for 2013 to 2018, global Internet Protocol (IP) traffic will increase three-fold from 2013 to 2018, a compound annual growth rate of 21 percent, due to more Internet users and devices, faster broadband speeds and more video viewing. Today's service provider networks need to be able to scale for the exponential traffic and cloud growth as forecasted over the next several years, and operators recognize that they need to be more agile, flexible and profitable to remain competitive. Cisco's EPN, which works via open APIs with the complementary Cisco Evolved Services Platform (ESP), enables web-speed agility with an open, elastic, and application-centric network infrastructure.

Additionally, Cisco Consulting Services predicts that the Internet of Everything (IoE) represents a $1.7 trillion opportunity for service providers over the next decade. The Cisco EPN offers service providers the tools to evolve their network infrastructures to manage M2M data, which has its own application-specific transport requirements, as well as unprecedented, dynamic traffic patterns.

"Our portfolio is the most comprehensive in the industry, supporting the actual requirements of our service provider customers for scale, virtualization with performance, and programmability -- and not just point solutions to address the latest capability buzz word," said Brendan Gibbs, vice president, service provider routing group, Cisco. "Service providers must evaluate the unique needs of their networks, business models and customers, and deploy technologies that meet these needs. Our latest innovations will help our customers reduce costs while improving speed to new service delivery. They advance our EPN framework and arm service providers with the tools required to enhance their customers' experiences, while optimizing their own architectures for greater profitability and growth."