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Pay as you go with new Cisco Tetration analytics SaaS
The latest versions of Cisco Tetration analytics include a software-as-a-service offering with pay-as-you-go pricing. Cisco is also offering a software-only version.
Cisco has launched a software-as-a-service version of Tetration, providing companies with the option of pay-as-you-go pricing for the application analytics system. The company also introduced this week a virtualized version of Cisco Tetration analytics, which customers can run on the hardware of their choice.
Before the latest versions, companies using Tetration had to buy the hardware from Cisco. By removing that requirement, the company expects to make the product appealing to more companies, while offering potential customers a faster return on investment.
In general, having multiple ways to buy technology helps broaden its appeal, said Brad Casemore, an analyst at IDC. "It's a logical move by Cisco to increase the addressable market for Tetration technology."
The SaaS version lets companies start small and gradually increase their use of the software as their budgets increase. The minimum SaaS subscription is a 100-workload license, which typically amounts to one or two applications, said Yogesh Kaushik, senior director for Tetration product management. A subscription license is for one to three years.
Cisco is running Tetration SaaS on leased infrastructure from one of the "top cloud providers," said Kaushik, who declined to name the company. Tetration is running on two separate data centers, so if one fails, the other would take over.
The market for enterprise SaaS grew 31% year over year in 2017, making it the second fastest-growing segment of the cloud services market, which also includes infrastructure as a service, hosted private cloud, and infrastructure hardware and software, according to Synergy Research Group, based in Reno, Nev. The total market grew 24% to $180 billion.
How Cisco Tetration analytics works
All the Tetration models collect packet data from network traffic to establish the interrelationships of hardware and software components, a process called application dependency mapping. Having this information lets managers perform network tasks while knowing in advance the potential impact. Tetration can also recommend and enforce policies affecting application performance and security.
The new virtualized Cisco Tetration analytics lets companies use spare capacity on their servers to run Tetration in the data center, Kaushik said. "Think of this as pure software that we're delivering to the customer now, as opposed to just a physical appliance."
Before the latest releases, companies had two options for buying Tetration -- both on Cisco hardware. One, aimed at large enterprises, carried an average price tag of $1 million. The second was a rack-mounted version that started at $25,000 and comprised six servers and two Cisco Nexus 9300 switches. Cisco also made the smaller version available as virtualized software that could run as an instance on Amazon Web Services.
