Cisco Expands Tetration Consumption Model

Published by CRN on April 10, 2018:

With new cloud and virtual appliance options, Cisco Systems is pushing its Tetration security and analytics platform into new markets and firmly reiterating its commitment to "open" software solutions.

"We could have easily picked to take a closed approach, but open is the new game in Cisco," Yogesh Kaushik, Cisco senior director and Tetration product manager, told CRN. "We've heard it loud and clear for a few years now. As we've realized that we want to be a software and subscription-based company and expand this opportunity, we want to decouple our software pieces from our hardware pieces."

Tetration-V is available now. Tetration SaaS will be available in May.

Jon Duren, data center networking practice manager at World Wide Technology, a large St. Louis-based Cisco partner, said the new buying options for Tetration considerably broaden its appeal, especially among customers concerned about moving to the cloud in an efficient and cost-effective way.

That decoupling comes with the new Tetration virtual appliance, known as Tetration-V. The system requires VMware's bare metal ESXi hypervisor, but is delivered on-premises on customers' existing hardware, whatever it may be.

Kaushik explained that the virtual appliance is aimed at smaller-scale commercial customers that deploy fewer than 1,000 workloads or customers looking to do a quick proof-of-concept. "They don't have to buy hardware anymore," Kaushik said. "They can buy the software from us and run it on the hardware they already have."