Much is being written about companies that have become digital businesses, including Gartner Group analysts, McKinsey consultants, and book writers. In Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation, early in the book, the authors talk about Digital Masters, the companies that are succeeding in the becoming digital, saying "the masters are 26 percent more profitable that their average industry competitors." Digital Masters make "digital technologies work for them even though the technologies keep changing."

Many of Cisco's valuable customers are well underway to becoming digital and I think they have taken a strategic approach to making digital technologies work for them by adopting a powerful policy-driven framework, ACI, for integrating multiple digital technologies to achieve agility, security, scale, and performance.

In this second blog on our ACI Application partners, I want to share how Apprenda is helping to enable customers to transform into agile digital enterprises. You will find additional blogs on more ACI solution partners appearing here in the coming weeks.

Figure 1Application Partners

As a PaaS technology vendor, Apprenda's customers create hundreds or thousands of applications that they must manage through DevOps cycles. Many of their customers are in highly regulated industries and Apprenda needed to guarantee isolation across all shared infrastructure including compute, storage, and network. They did not have a good answer for network isolation and security until they integrated with ACI. By integrating with ACI's policy framework, Apprenda provides its customers with the required security and compliance. For example, the policy model simplifies the job of assuring developers at certain financial services institutions that their hundreds of buy side applications are completely isolated from the hundreds of sell side applications even though they may efficiently share infrastructure. Similar protections can be established for developers of healthcare applications to automatically isolate networks connecting patient data. Here is Rakesh Malholtra, head of products and engineering at Apprenda, describing their secure PaaS integration using Cisco ACI.

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Cisco ACI partners like Apprenda help companies do more than program infrastructure and enable them to automate the whole application lifecycle.

If you are here at Cisco Live Berlin, and want to learn more about how ACI enables digital business, please visit or attend some of these options:

Presentation -"Application Innovators Embrace SDN"

At 11:30AM on Tues/ Wed/ Thurs

Where: Cisco Live World of Solutions Data Center theater

Partner Pavilion Demonstration stations featuring integration with Cisco ACI:

Partner Village [PV2] CliQr: Automating infrastructure and application provisioning across multiple clouds

Partner Village [PV4] Apprenda: Improving application security and compliance in the cloud with secure PaaS

Partner Village [PV9] One Convergence: Policy-Driven Network Service Delivery in OpenStack

For More Reading

Unleashing IT magazine, 2nd ACI special edition

Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation (2014) by authors: Westerman, George/ Bonnet/ McAfee, Andrew

Blog: ACI Applications Spotlight: Microsegmentation and New Application Partners

PR: Apprenda Announces Reseller Agreement with Cisco, Companies to Sell Apprenda PaaS with Cisco Metapod and Cisco ACI