The Right Talent at the Right Time with New Cisco CX Business Critical Services Offerings

If 2020 has shown us anything, it's that businesses need to be prepared for the unexpected. Priorities shifted overnight, forcing businesses to adopt new ways of work, build new products and services to meet new demand, establish a fully-remote work ecosystem -all at the drop of a hat.

This type of agility and flexibility is now a must-have. Beyond building an agile infrastructure for one's business, the first fundamental need for resiliency is having the right talent-the right talent to meet your business needs today, but also the right talent to move in conjunction with any future shifts (both expected and unexpected). In fact, recent reports show that 85 million jobs have the potential to go unfilled by 2030 due to an ongoing skills shortage.

At Cisco, we understand the importance of having the right people on-hand for any given project-no matter how large or small-which is why so many customers leverage our Business Critical Services (BCS) capabilities. With BCS, customers don't need to stress about filling their skills gaps, internally. Instead, they have access to Cisco's top-tier talent and expertise to help fulfill any and all talent needs. In addition to delivering expertise, BCS provides real-time analytics, insights and automation capabilities to help ensure that digital transformation efforts are successful and resilient.

We know that our BCS capabilities are only as helpful as the talent that we offer. With that, today we announced several new BCS offerings and expansions (as well as more flexible pricing models), to ensure that our customers continue to have access to the Cisco talent that they need today, while planning for the talent they will need tomorrow.

Leveling the 5G Playing Field

Today, we also announced the addition of Service Provider Mobility-an expansion of BCS architecture coverage that specifically helps our regional provider customers bring 5G to life. Our customers are telling us that the most common challenges they face are around meeting massive growth in bandwidth consumption, adapting to changing market dynamics, and navigating the complexities of transitioning to 5G. Additionally, recent studies have shown that the telco industry at large is on the verge of a talent crisis -with Technology, Media and Telecom employers expected to face a deficit of 4.3 million workers by the year 2030. With BCS for Service Provider and its expanded Specialized Expertise for Matrix analytics, customers can now overcome these hurdles with less risk. Our Service Provider mobility experts help our customers retool and re-educate their teams, design end-to-end architectures, and gain deep visibility into their systems. Meanwhile, our customers can reduce OpEx, eliminate redundancies, and secure end-to-end protection. Their 5G journey can now be as seamless as possible.

Enabling Agility with Expert-As-A-Service

As needs evolve, one-off talent requirements might come with them. That's why we have expanded our Expert-as-a-Service offering to allow BCS customers to leverage Cisco experts with a wide range of skills and expertise to work as an embedded part of their internal teams. Whether working on bolstering cybersecurity, migrating to the cloud, developing a learning management system, etc., customers can pull the right Cisco experts into their teams to help plan for and execute IT initiatives. The Expert-as-a-Service expansion brings a new role to the table, now providing access to an Outcome Acceleration Manager-an expert dedicated to providing consultative advice and guidance that helps break down barriers and drive results through the entire project lifecycle from onboarding to optimization.

Build Independent Dedicated Teams with Scrum Services

For larger projects, or customers that need more than just an integrated expert, Cisco's Scrum Services provides customers with the ability to build an external, independent team that is personalized to meet the specific need of the customer. In order to help organizations continue to build more agile teams, customers can choose from a wide range of new Scrum Services experts with the following  skills  and automated capabilities:

• Testing
• Security and threat management
• Matrix analytics
• Automated fault management
• Compliance and remediation
• Continuous automation and integration testing (CAIT)

Both of these specialized services (Expert-as-a-Service and Scrum Services) are now fully available both onsite and through a fully-virtual services center, for customers who don't require on-site or regional expertise.

Finding the Right Talent with the Right Classifications

To help our customers in government and highly regulated industries ensure that their Cisco BCS experts have the right qualifications, classifications and citizenship, Cisco today also announced BCS National version for Public Sector. Cisco CX's public sector customer base is growing. So, while BCS for public sector customers benefit from the same services and entitlements as our existing Advantage and Premier tier customers, they can now meet government requirements by way of Cisco experts with U.S. citizenship or residence, additional security clearance options, on-premise analytics, and more.

Digital transformation requires constant evolution. Cisco understands that talent needs evolve alongside technology needs, and Cisco's BCS capabilities will continue to grow in order to ensure that customers have access to the right people at the right time.