At CiscoLive San Francisco held last week, Soni Jiandani, Senior Vice President of Cisco INSBU, highlighted our continued industry momentum for Application Centric Infrastructure.  She discussed customer deployments, new ecosystem partners and the enormous simplification of cloud and application delivery.

So it's timely to review both ACI's architectural approach and get a first look at the actual business value that large customers expect from adopting ACI.   This two part blog introduces:

• A new Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) white paper that explains the principles of ACI's application-centric approach and how it helps data center teams keep pace with business agility, risk management and the need for resource efficiency.
• An economic analysis from IDC showing the three year return on using ACI in one of the largest data center environments in the world, Cisco's own IT Elastic Services.

In the first paper, Enterprise Strategy Group shows how the rise of mobile, social, and e-commerce applications are driving a fundamental IT transformation. Web 2.0, Big Data, and collaboration applications are built using a modular approach, leveraging Dev Ops and Cloud Ops models and consumed on traditional and mobile devices. These applications are far more dynamic than ever before.  Therefore, the supporting underlying IT infrastructure (compute, network, and storage), has to be more flexible and adaptable to their specific needs.

The paper explains how Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) architecture provides a common programmable infrastructure policy model for enterprise network, application, security, and virtualization teams. Policy based provisioning of applications makes IT more agile in both application deployment and optimized operations.  It offers full visibility and integrated management of both physical and virtual networked IT resources, supporting an "application anywhere" model with complete freedom of application movement and placement.  In addition, through open OpFlex protocol, ACI's policy-based approach can now be extended to a growing vendor ecosystem, allowing customers to protect their existing data center investments.

In the paper, Bob Laliberte, Senior Analyst at ESG, addresses the following topics:

• How applications are driving IT transformation
• How infrastructure obstacles inhibit responsiveness to the business
• A new approach in which there is a much tighter link between the applications and the underlying networking infrastructure
• How Cisco ACI complements and accelerates the IT transformation in the networking space

Download the ESG paperhere. And stay tuned for the IDC business value analysis.