Service Provider

Creating value engines

When a pair of prominent IT resellers merged in 2009 to form Xigent, company leaders envisioned more than a sum of the two parts. In addition to reselling products, they wanted to turn those products into business-empowering value engines for their customers.

"Xigent is both a solutions- and services-oriented business," says Rod Lucero, CTO of Xigent. "We started by establishing Infrastructure as a Service [IaaS] and Disaster Recovery as a Service [DRaaS] in 2010, and we partnered with Cisco shortly thereafter to enhance and scale the offerings."

More recently, Xigent made the strategic decision to expand its managed services portfolio to include full-stack observability (FSO), application performance management (APM), and advanced data protection. But first, the company needed to modernize its data center infrastructure and deploy the latest FSO platforms—including Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes—to lay the groundwork for its new managed services.

Future-proof infrastructure

Xigent recently refreshed the FlexPod and FlashStack environments in its data centers with Cisco UCS X-Series, a modular, scalable computing platform that is optimized for hybrid cloud operations.

"Our infrastructure is future-proof," Lucero says. "With UCS X-Series, we have a 100G backbone that can easily move to 400G and beyond. It gives us 14 years of runway and a ton of flexibility."

Not only does Cisco UCS X-Series deliver faster processing, higher density, and lower power and cooling overhead for Xigent and its customers, it also opens up new service possibilities involving AI/ML, high-performance computing (HPC), virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and GPU-enabled workloads.

Xigent uses Cisco Intersight to manage all of its internal and customer-facing infrastructure, including multiple generations of server and storage systems. Lucero says the management platform is a game changer for IT operations.

"We can see and orchestrate all of the compute, storage, and networking systems in our data centers with Cisco Intersight, and it's so easy to move things around," he notes. "We can take excess capacity from one data center, move it to the other, and make it available to a customer within a day if they have an urgent need—all from a single console."

Unprecedented visibility

Xigent's ongoing adoption of cutting-edge data center technologies has not only fueled significant year-over-year growth, it has also enabled the company to support its customers through multiple phases of their own IT journeys.

"Three or four years ago it was cloud adoption and enablement, and before that it was virtualization," Lucero says. "Today, clients are lining up to extend their visibility and instrument their applications, so we've invested heavily in FSO and APM platforms like Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes."

In addition to providing end-to-end visibility and workload optimization, Lucero says Xigent's new service offerings have helped pinpoint and resolve issues that had long tormented its customers.

A financial services customer, for example, had spent years attempting to understand and fix the root cause of a recurring application failure. Using Cisco AppDynamics, Xigent was able to quickly identify an issue with the application's source code that was sporadically locking up the company's databases.

Another Xigent customer had experienced problems with their cloud-based, mission-critical application for more than a year. Using Cisco ThousandEyes, Xigent pinpointed two problems that were beyond the customer's control. First, an upstream ISP was erroneously routing the application to data centers in Mexico and Sweden every two hours instead of keeping the workload within the United States. Second, a DNS server that was supposed to be retired was impacting load balancing and occasionally taking the application offline.

"It's called 'full-stack observability,' but these technologies extend visibility beyond the stack," Lucero says. "The less time you spend fighting fires and chasing ghosts, the more time you have to add value."

With Cisco UCS X-Series and Cisco Intersight providing the foundations for service innovation, Xigent and its customers are gaining additional value every day.