Cisco's Tetration Analytics Gets SaaSy

Cisco today expanded the reach and accessibility of its Tetration analytics platform by making it available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application in addition to providing an option for deploying Tetration on-premises using a virtual appliance.

Previously, Tetration was only available on a public cloud platform where there is typically enough data available to fuel the analytics platform. But Cisco is responding to requests from customers that have enough of data and capacity for running Tetration available on-premises by making the analytics platform available as a Tetration-V virtual appliance.

Between the three options available for deploying Tetration, the most widely employed will be the new Tetration SaaS option, says Yogesh Kaushik, senior director for Tetration product management for Cisco.

As a Big Data analytics platform based on machine learning algorithms and a variety of open-source analytics technologies such as Apache Spark, Tetration requires a significant amount of expertise to set up. By making Tetration available via a SaaS model, much of that complexity is eliminated, says Kaushik.

The tradeoff is that customers of Tetration SaaS will have to rely on AI models built by Cisco versus building their own because as a SaaS application Cisco Tetration is a multi-tenant application.

“We can’t support every unique AI model in a SaaS application,” says Kaushik.

Tetration SaaS is available via subscription model requiring one- to three-year commitments for 100 licenses or more. A one-year license starts at $525. The Tetration SaaS application also has a minimum requirement of 1,000 application workloads that is also capped at 25,000 application workloads. Initially, the SaaS instance of Cisco Tertration will be hosted in the U.S. Other geographies will be added over time based on customer demand, says Kaushik. For anything less than 1,000 workloads, Cisco is recommending Tetration -V. Above 25,000 workloads requires a dedicated instance on a public cloud.

As a core elements of Cisco’s overall intent-based approach to network, the application programming interfaces (APIs) that Cisco exposes enable IT organizations to export and enforce policies generated by Tetration across Cisco SDN controllers and security devices. Providing access to those capabilities as a SaaS application is clearly critical to the overall Cisco strategy. In fact, arguably, without those APIs, most Cisco customers are not going to able to discover what’s happening on their networks, much less express any intent as to what they might ideally prefer to occur.