Expanding our alliance with Cisco in hybrid cloud and the contact center

Over the past three years, we’ve worked closely with Cisco to deliver a number of customer-focused solutions in areas such as hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, work transformation, and contact center integrations. This week at Cisco Live in Barcelona, we’re sharing updates on our joint work in two key areas of customer demand—hybrid cloud solutions and the digital contact center.

Announcing the availability of Anthos 1.2 with Cisco HyperFlex

At Next ‘19, Cisco and Google Cloud announced a hybrid cloud partnership to bring Anthos and Cisco HyperFlex to our shared customers. After working closely across our engineering and business development teams, today we are excited to announce the general availability of Anthos 1.2 with Cisco HyperFlex, with a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for the joint solution coming soon. 

Google Cloud’s Anthos deployed with Cisco HyperFlex enables you to modernize in-place with your existing resources. You can automate policy and security at scale, track configuration and policy changes to have an audit log of system configuration, and update configurations in seconds across all of your Anthos environments. It also provides consistency, the same experience across on-prem and in the cloud.

“This is an important milestone in our hybrid cloud partnership with Google Cloud,” said Kaustubh Das, Vice President Product Management, Cisco. “With Anthos and the HyperFlex Data Platform, our customers now have a highly available and resilient on-prem data platform for running Kubernetes workloads at scale. We now have all the benefits of Anthos on a system that delivers predictable performance, enterprise-grade data services, storage optimization, security and zero downtime during upgrades.”

Cisco HyperFlex unifies compute, storage, and networking for your core to the edge. Anthos GKE deployed on Cisco HyperFlex provides a Container-as-a-Service environment based on our recently released Anthos 1.2. This solution provides end-to-end orchestration, management and scalable architecture to deploy Anthos on Cisco HyperFlex with HyperFlex CSI (Container Storage Interface) for persistent storage. Customers looking at hybrid cloud models will experience a consistent Kubernetes experience on-prem as well as on the cloud with:

• A single management control plane for the entire hardware lifecycle management.

• Scalable and highly available hyperconverged infrastructure to aid container applications with compute, network and storage needs,

• Faster turnaround time, making it a good fit for DevOps and CI/CD use cases.

• Anthos single control plane for multi-cloud management, allowing you to deploy applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments without changing the underlying code.

• Automated policies and security at scale.

“Cisco and Google Cloud have combined Cisco’s leading hyper converged technology with Google Cloud’s Anthos to make hybrid cloud containerization a reality for our customers,” said Dave Sellers, General Manager, MultiCloud at World Wide Technology.”  Leveraging our Advanced Technology Center, WWT is providing our customers a unique educational and hands-on lab experience showcasing the unique value proposition offered by these cutting-edge technologies.”

Customers in our first Anthos lab day event last week with WWT are already sharing positive feedback with us—and we’ve been thrilled by the reception. Customer centricity is a joint value shared within this partnership, and it has helped inform the direction of our products and will continue to shape the future of Anthos.

Expanding our partnership to modernize the Contact Center

We are also excited to expand our partnership with Cisco by offering Contact Center AI through Cisco's platform. Cisco is now bringing in Google Cloud’s Natural Language Processing (NLP), AI, and ML capabilities to create a seamless end-to-end conversational experience for customers. With the release of our joint solution, Cisco is now introducing Google Cloud’s conversational IVR, Virtual Agent, Agent Assist, and Insights to their contact center offering. 

Powered by Google Cloud’s innovative conversational AI, our Contact Center AI offering helps businesses create richer, more natural-sounding, and more helpful conversational experiences within the contact center. Customers can use natural language to describe the reason for their text or call. The Virtual Agent can then either assist the customer or route the conversation to the appropriate agent. Cisco Contact Center’s industry leading routing technology then routes the customer to the appropriate agent based on the understood intent.. AI and NLP continue to assist the conversation by surfacing knowledge articles, recommendations, and turn-by-turn guidance for the agent. Then the agent is assisted with wrap-up and business leaders can use the data with Insights for sentiment analysis and spotting trends.

Google Cloud Contact Center AI, in partnership with Cisco, improves the customer experience, increases agent satisfaction, and provides insights to business leaders—and it does this all while deflecting more calls, reducing average handle time, and lowering costs. And since Google Cloud and Cisco have done the hard work on the backend, the solution is easier to implement. No machine learning experts needed!

“We’re excited to launch this joint solution that infuses AI from the Google Cloud into our Contact Center and transforms how our joint customers do business,” said Omar Tawakol, VP/GM at Cisco Contact Center:  With this integration, we’re combining Google Cloud’s Natural Language Processing and AI capabilities with our industry leading contact center capabilities to empower agents to provide better customer service and vastly improve the experience for the end customer.”

You can learn more about Anthos and Contact Center AI on our website.