Today, marks an important milestone in the history of routing, as Cisco introduces ISR-AX (Integration Services Router Generation 2 with Application Experience) and redefines the role of the router as the application delivery platform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBw18_S3jus

Quintiles -a biopharmaceutical in Durham, North Carolina -has experienced, first-hand, the benefits of an application aware router. They have successful rolled out VDI to thousands of users globally with key services of ISR-AX, namely Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS). With this solution, they have been able to onboard new acquisition employees within days instead of months, and dramatically increase productivity.

HDR -an Omaha, Nebraska-based architecture and construction firm -also relies on application services integrated on the router to guarantee application performance. HDR runs several mission-critical engineering applications worldwide, which are latency sensitive and transport over 10 terabyte files. They depend on the Cisco Application and Visibility (AVC) services available on the ISR-AX to provide a high quality of experience and resolve issues in a matter of minutes and minimize downtime.

As organizations centralize applications into the data center and cloud, IT faces a new set of application delivery challenges due to changing traffic patterns that impact application security, reliability, performance and operations. The network must evolve to combat these emerging application issues and help IT to meet the business requirements with a high quality of experience.

Cisco ISR-AX is designed to specifically help IT simplify application delivery, by lowering the barriers for deploying applications wherever the business requires. With Cisco ISR-AX, customers can successfully accelerate application rollouts, provide granular application performance metrics, and rapidly resolve issues.

Unlike others vendors, Cisco ISR-AX provides a holistic approach bringing together routing, security with application services. We've heard directly from customers that optimization alone is not enough.

For example,Boxwood Technologies, an online career services company in Virginia, came across voice quality issues that could not be addressed by optimization. It was only when IT traced the calls in real-time using AVC, they determined that traffic was going over the Internet due to a misconfiguration. They redirected the traffic to the MPLS line and the problem was solved in minutes.

Now for the best part: the price!With ISR-AX customers can get a router, VPN, firewall, intrusion prevention, cloud web security, AVC (NBAR2, QoS, NetFlow, Media Monitoring, PfR) and WAN optimization (WAAS) for20-35% lessthan the cost of just an alternative WAN Optimization appliance. That means IT can justify their capital expense to finance on a single service, yet have the ability to deploy a multiservice platform across their network.

This is just the beginning, too. Cisco plans to extend AX capabilities across our enterprise routing portfolio, including the Cisco ASR1000 Series Aggregation Services Router and the Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000V.

Find out more on how you can simplify application delivery and provide your users a better experience from anywere by watching this video and visiting the ISR-AX website.