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Empowered Branch Services

Cisco Empowered Branch Services

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Product Overview

Q. What is the revenue opportunity for service providers offering the Cisco® Empowered Branch Services solution?
A. The worldwide managed services market is projected to be $40B by 2009 according to Ovum LTD. A significant portion of this opportunity relates to managed services for branch office and small business. Service providers can capture new revenue and expand their market share with an integrated managed services offering based on a single, cost-effective platform provided by the Cisco Empowered Branch Services solution. Services can be packaged in a flexible and modular design that helps to accommodate growing businesses. This flexibility enables service providers to choose the most appropriate service to offer when assessing the best approach with specific customers. The flexible design also enables service providers to create service bundling strategies to align with customer requirements over their lifecycle - remotely enabling enhanced and premium service features as part of an upsell strategy.
Q. What types of managed services can be provided with the Cisco Empowered Branch Services solution?
A. Cisco has a continuum of services that can be part of a bundled service offering, including:

• Managed router and LAN services, with a range of access types

• Managed security services for external threat protection including firewall and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation, and enhanced security bundles for internal threat protection covering intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDSs and IPSs), Cisco Network Admission Control (NAC), and endpoint protection

• Managed VPN services such as IP Security (IPsec) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN, and "tunnel-less" VPN based on group-encrypted transport

• Managed IP Communications services with voice and video call control enabled by Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express (formerly Cisco Unified CallManager Express), Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking, and advanced rich-media voice and video applications

• Managed wide-area application services to improve application performance over the WAN and provide more effective access to centralized application servers

• Managed wireless WAN with the integrated third-generation wireless WAN interface card (3G WIC) from Cisco for a variety of new applications

See your Cisco account manager for a complete listing of service offerings.

Q. What business segments are addressed by Empowered Branch managed services based on the Cisco Integrated Services Router?
A. Cisco integrated services routers allow service providers to deliver profitable managed services that empower their branch office customers. By providing a single platform for the secure deployment of data, voice, and IP telephony, these routers meet the evolving business requirements for a converged application environment and connectivity delivered over an intelligent network. Managed services based on the Cisco integrated service router platform enable service providers to extend compelling managed services to enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with multiple branch locations. Examples include finance, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and professional services.

The introduction of the Cisco 1861 Integrated Services Router further expands the range of segments to include comprehensive managed services for IP voice, VPN, firewall, IPS, and endpoint protection (including NAC threat containment) to meet the needs of small offices with eight or fewer users delivered on a single platform.

Q. How does Cisco support service providers in delivering a Cisco Empowered Branch Services offering?
A. The overarching Cisco strategy is to enable service providers' success based on four primary strengths:

• Build networks: Cisco provides the extensible and efficient infrastructure that progressively increases return on investment and reduces operating expenses.

• Deploy services: Cisco delivers a comprehensive and highly flexible service-creation portfolio that helps service providers capture new revenue and expand their market share.

• Accelerate demand: Cisco provides special expertise, routes to market, and relationships with businesses that enable service providers to accelerate demand.

• Optimize business: Cisco helps service providers transform their business by providing domain expertise and efficiencies.

Q. Is the Cisco Empowered Branch Services solution linked to the Cisco Powered Program?
A. Yes, service providers that meet the general program requirements have access to Cisco Powered Program resources. Resources include marketing and technical tools designed to help providers envision, build, certify, and market managed services based on Cisco integrated services routers.
Q. How do managed security services benefit the service provider?
A. Service providers must look at security as both a feature and a service. Infrastructure security offers a hardened platform on which IP services (VPN, unified communications, wide area application services) can be offered in a reliable manner. However, new revenue generation generally comes from security services such as firewall, DDoS mitigation, IDS/IPS, secure messaging, content filtering, and endpoint protection.

Businesses face threats from the Internet, and encrypted VPN, firewall service, and DDoS mitigation allow them to combat these threats from outside the business. However, weak links in security also include the endpoint as well as the user sitting behind it. Technologies such as IDS/IPS, URL filtering, content filtering, and endpoint protection with NAC provide protection from threats from the internal network. Combining external and internal threat mitigation measures, service providers can provide defense-in-depth.

Q. What specific opportunities do application-optimization and application-acceleration features offer service providers?
A. Service providers can capitalize on numerous opportunities with these features, such as:

• Increase customer productivity and perceived value to customers consolidating branch resources

• Enhance profitability by extending management into the LAN and bundling WAN optimization and acceleration capabilities with existing managed network, voice, and security services

• Generate incremental revenue streams through managed wide-area file services

• Generate incremental revenue streams through managed application-acceleration services

• Generate incremental revenue streams through value-add services such as managed security, storage, and business continuity

Q. How do managed application-optimization and application-acceleration services benefit service providers?
A. Service providers realize many benefits from these services, such as:

• Increased customer loyalty: With an optimized WAN access solution, customers perceive a faster network and thus higher value.

• Competitive differentiation: Managed services support consolidation efforts.

• Incremental revenue: Expanded bandwidth offers the opportunity for additional revenue from additional services including managed security, colocation, and storage services

• Increased productivity: Adding optimization and acceleration services to data, IP Communications, and security services on a single platform can boost productivity.

Q. How do integrated managed security solutions benefit service providers?
A. Managing security services at the customer premises is one of the critical "layers of defense" in network security solutions. As a managed service offering, threat detection and response can be scaled to meet the core needs of business subscribers, while maintaining an affordable total cost of ownership. The advantages of delivering these services in an integrated fashion include:

• Full-featured, high-performance threat protection in the branch or SMB network

• Modular scalable architecture provides flexibility to tailor services to meet customer requirements

• Interoperates with data, security, and voice services to provide additional value-added solutions while simplifying configuration and support

• Cost-effective network and service management platform for managed security offers

• In-line security services offered with network routing and transport provides a cost-effective network access and security service platform

Q. How can a managed SIP trunk service in support of managed IP Communications benefit service providers?
A. Managed SIP trunking services based upon a Cisco Powered Program IP Trunking designation and Cisco IP Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) enable service providers to deliver simple, cost-effective, and scalable IP communications and rich-media value-added services, thereby realizing opportunities for revenue growth and increased customer loyalty. Service providers can benefit in terms of

• Service acceleration in the form of immediate access to the enterprise IP private-branch-exchange (PBX) market, a converged foundational trunk for managed IP Communications up-sell opportunities, and ubiquitous IP connectivity throughout the enterprise as a path to additional managed services opportunities

• Enhanced profitability by removing costly, older TDM hardware and installation and configuration services, and increased revenue from value-added service extensions from SIP-based network applications

• Competitive differentiation in the form of the service portfolio and time-to-execute enhancements coupled with the strength behind a Cisco validated design

Q. How can service providers offer 3G wireless WAN services?
A. The Cisco Integrated Services Router is the first solution to provide true enterprise-class, wireless data services to the branch office with the integration of wireless and wireline services on one platform. The 3G wireless WAN provides new opportunities for managed service differentiation and customer loyalty:

• For backup: Does not depend on the local loop for connectivity, providing a true alternative to wireline WAN services at a lower cost than traditional backup services.

• For primary access: Provides an alternative enterprise-class data path to corporate networks and includes management capabilities that reduce costs and complexity for IT teams.

• For portable or temporary access: Enhances business resiliency and continuity by not requiring extensive reprovisioning cycles and physical installation each time the office is moved.