Recently I had an opportunity to sit down with Thomas Raabo, Network Operations Manager of Zitcom, a premier partner-driven hosting company based out of Denmark. Thomas and his team address companies and applications of various sizes, and were one of the early adopters of Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). At the time of my conversation, they had this architecture in production for almost 10 months.

Thomas's take on it was quite interesting. When I asked him to compare the before vs. after scenarios with Cisco ACI, he shared some insights -

• Time to market dropped from hours to minutes (applications, VMs were deployed much faster)
• Making firmware upgrades (usually a challenge for any NetOps person), became "kid's play".
• Application teams are better integrated with the network team and have access to the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) if they want to. This helps reduce silos.
• Interestingly, programmers without network knowledge are able to program into networks rapidly deploying new services

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBQXLcUFBu0

Every company's deployment is unique. For hosting companies the very nature of their business makes it very important to focus on agile service delivery at scale. This is what keeps them competitive and where the network, IT and operations teams can deliver true business impact.

Watch more customers share their perspectives and learn more on http://www.cisco.com/go/aci