If you've been to an industry event over the past five years and heard a service provider speak, it's pretty apparent that our industry can no longer continue with business as usual. Cost and agility are critical business needs driving major industry transformation. But, things are a bit different this time around, since they are being accelerated by digitization.

Based on the Cisco Global Cloud Index, digitization is forecasted to increase total data center traffic by 300% between 2014 and 2019. During that time, traffic patterns are also expected to change -- increasing processing closer to the network edge by 37% and driving traffic between data centers by 31%. As cloud-based traffic scales, there will be a need for a transformed network and IT architecture and operational model. The new measuring stick for service delivery in the era of digitization is focused on operational efficiency, optimized utilization, and service agility.

At Cisco, we've been working with many large web-scale providers to develop innovative solutions to this problem. And today, we're proud to announce cloud-scale networking for service providers, which will bring the IT operational model to the wide-area network.

We haveshifted a large portion of Cisco's development focus to software, and this announcement is the perfect demonstration of those efforts. The new capabilities, which will be offered on our flagship service provider operating system, IOS-XR, include Software Modularity and Extensibility, Automation, and Visibility and Control.

So, how can customers roll this out?

These new capabilities are being introduced first in some new products (NCS1002, NCS5000, NCS5500) that can be used to build the wide area network to connect data centers. As many of you expand the deployments of data centers, this provides an opportunity for you to start immediately with auto-boot and auto-provisioning, then use APIs for scalable automation and flexibility to make network programmability changes. Lastly, I recommend our software modularity and extensibility, along with visibility and control features, to help you take full advantage of the operational efficiencies possible with cloud scale. These capabilities will also be available in our currently shipping products and can be operationalized in your existing deployments at a later date.

We've run some detailed comparisons that have allowed our customers to run cloud scale at half the total cost of ownership (TCO), as compared to their existing separate data center and network management models. It's a 52% TCO reduction when using all of these features together, while taking full advantage of Cloud Scale, with lower-power consumption and greater agility.

But, you be the judge.

I think we're only scratching the surface of what's possible. Talk with your account teams to find out how Cisco can help you in this transition.

For more questions or comments, please tweet us @CiscoSP360.