Business in Kenya are bound to unlock new ways to innovation and profit through the newly launched Application-centric infrastructure from Cisco.

“A new paradigm shift driven by cloud, mobility and big data is redefining IT, with the web-based economy shifting to an app-based economy,” said Sabrina Dar, Cisco General Manager East Africa.

“Today’s data center and cloud application and infrastructure requirements call for a new approach. We need solutions that are simple and that cut across different technological and organizational silos without compromising on scale, responsiveness, security and end-to-end visibility. We need solutions that deliver network automation and programmability, and we need models that are designed from the ground up to be explicitly application-centric,”she added.

Complemented by associated professional services and an open partner ecosystem, Cisco is now able to deliver the first data center and cloud solution built around the needs of applications.

Cisco’s launch comes as technology-focused market intelligence firm IDC predicted that worldwide service providers will continue to drive IT spend and will account for a quarter of the entire datacenter space by 2016.

The challenges facing data-centers was highlighted in Cisco’s recent Global Cloud Index, saying that annual global data center IP traffic, will reach 6.6 zettabytes by the end of 2016. Global data center IP traffic,by 2016, will reach 554 exabytes per month (up from 146 in 2011), at an annual growth rate of 31 percent.

In 2016, about two-thirds of all data center workloads will be processed in the cloud, with annual global cloud IP traffic rising to 4.3 zettabytes. This amounts to around 355 exabytes per month (up from 57 in 2011). Overall, cloud IP traffic will have grown at a CAGR of 44 percent from 2011 to 2016.

The ACI system can reduce application deployment from months to minutes by unifying physical and virtual networks and offering unprecedented security, compliance and real-time visibility at system, tenant, and application levels.

Furthermore, Cisco data center switching innovations allow the network to rapidly respond to application development teams while delivering up to 75 percent total cost of ownership savings compared to merchant, silicon-based switches and software-only network virtualization solutions.

“IT leaders want innovations that enable application automation for rapid deployment of infrastructure and dynamic adjustment to real-time events, integrated visibility with telemetry for performance monitoring and resilient recovery from failure. They also demand optimized performance across diverse applications needs with simplicity and control,” said Sabrina.

Cisco’s innovation also addresses other issues like static and inflexible security models, the operational headache of multiple management points, proprietary licensing models, software version control issues, and consistency across multiple hypervisor environments.

Cisco’s ACI comprises the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), enhanced versions of the NX-OS operating system and the new Nexus 9000 portfolio.