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As we got past the Mayan Apocalyse day and as 2012 comes to an end, a question to reflect upon is if this has been the year of the Converged Infrastructure Solutions.   Incidentally, use of these solutions by data centers was a topic of discussion on a panel moderated by Jim McHugh last month.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Ki-iBCZr8

Just so we are on the same page, Converged Infrastructure Solutions are those which have integrated servers (CPU & Memory), server virtualization (hypervisor) and storage with the necessary network access into a single entity or logical unit.  Examples are the VCE Vblock, NetApp FlexPod, Hitachi Data Systems UCP, IBM PureFlex System and HP CloudSystem  (all names are trademarks of the respective companies).  Even Dell has started marketing converged systems.  The term pre-integrated has to be dissected carefully.  In some cases the precise choices on server, storage array and the hypervisor have already been made by the vendor.  In others, there is a choice on these infrastructure components and the solution is a reference design with tested scenarios.  For instance, the Vblock is a fully integrated and tested solution with Cisco UCS for servers and network access, Cisco MDS 9148 storage switches, EMC VNX series storage and VMware virtualization.  The misunderstanding on converged solutions is deep enough that an IBM PureFlex video goes on to compare the UCS Manager (manages only the UCS components) to the PureFlex management software, when in reality it should be compared with the Vblock management software. Continue reading “Was 2012 Year of the Converged Infrastructure Solutions?”



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Since ” ’tis the season” for giving in many parts of the world, and as end of the calendar year approaches, I’ve decided to finish my working year reflecting upon the biggest “Giving Back” initiative I was personally part of in September of this year (2012) –  my two stages of the Deloitte Ride Across Britain, or RAB as we called it in Cisco UK & Ireland – an event we aligned to Cisco’s overall involvement in the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games.  Time has flown since I initially blogged about my nerves pre-ride.  I reflected on our “Virtual RAB” – designed to give everyone at Cisco an easier chance of participating – also as part of our overall fundraising, and told you about the “Network on Wheels” or Cisco NOW Van that supported us with remote (very remote!) internet access as we cycled through all weathers from the bottom to the very top of the UK.  The Cisco team raised around £20,000 (over $32,000 USD) – while the event as a whole, with over 700 riders, raised over £1 Million in total – all for paralympic athletes.

It was indeed an experience!  While the second of my two days was a beautiful day for cycling – as the video clip from Cisco UK & Ireland Senior VP Phil Smith (quite a cyclist btw!) shows – the first day was a 12 hour test in truely horrendous stormy conditions! Let me tell you more about that day and show you some of the sights on the way.

Continue reading “So did we see the Loch Ness Monster? – Ride Across Britain to Raise Funds for Paralympic Athletes”



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Stephen Speirs

SP Product Management

Cisco Customer Experience (CX)

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Cisco employees are always ready for some friendly competition for a good cause. During our annual Global Hunger Relief Campaign, our desire to give back brings out the competitive spirit in all of us.

The Cisco team in Richardson, Texas, held the official campus-wide kickoff for the Global Hunger Relief Campaign on November 15 with its annual Bowling for Hunger. The team with the highest score won a free bowling package, and the team that raised the most money received a huge trophy. This year, the Bowling for Hunger event raised nearly US$8,000 for the Campaign.

Cisco’s headquarters in San Jose, California launched the 2012 Campaign with an executive food sort at the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties.  More than 45 executives and volunteers divided into three teams, led by Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers, Executive Vice President Randy Pond, and Chairman Emeritus John Morgridge. The teams competed to see who could sort 30,000 pounds of food to be distributed to families in need the fastest.

Randy-PondCisco Executive Vice President Randy Pond (right) and other Cisco employees volunteer at the Second Harvest Food Bank.

While internal competition is fun, Cisco employees really crank it into high gear when we’re up against other companies in giving back. The Cisco team in San Jose also participated in the 48-Hour Virtual Race to End Hunger from November 13 to 15.

The Virtual Race is an online challenge that rallies employees at Silicon Valley companies to support the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties, which provides food to a quarter of a million of their neighbors in need each month. The Cisco team earned first place, raising almost $160,000 in 48 hours. Our prize – the Cisco logo will be featured on a Second Harvest Food Bank truck.

No matter how the money is raised, Cisco employees come through every year to fight hunger around the world with their time, energy, and creativity. Finding fun, competitive ways to raise the money just makes it that much more interesting.

Join Cisco to take action against hunger: Leave a comment on the Cisco How Do You Give Facebook tab about how you give back. For every comment made on the page through December 31, Cisco will donate $1 to the World Food Programme – enough to provide 4 meals.



Authors

Kirsten Weeks

Senior Manager for Community Relations

Global Marketing and Corporate Communications

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Being a resident of San Francisco, one advantage of is the amount of shopping within walking distance.  This year several retailers timed their store openings and remodel to coincide with the holiday season shopping,  which is expected to grow 4.1 percent over last holiday season, according to National Retail Federation.

These retailers understand they are competing against “showrooming”  with E-commerce only retailers and consumer uncertainties over the economy.  Many have developed unique shopping experiences to attract customers  and here are some that stood out for me this holiday season before I head over to New York for the NRF 2013 Convention in January.

1. Uniqlo San Francisco

Uniqlo is a Japanese based international fashion retailer which opened its San Francisco store this October with great fanfare, including enlisting Japanese YouTube feline star Maru to promote their San Francisco store opening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA63lAdztwU

Some of the things that stood out for me at the store are:

Continue reading “New Shopping Experiences during the 2012 Holiday Season”



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Takeaway: The Cisco Enterprise Wireless group helps networking and IT professionals stay informed and get the most out of Cisco’s products and solutions, while displaying thought leadership on major technological trends. For 2012, there were 10 posts that stood out from the rest.

Cisco Enterprise Wireless products and solutions continue to grow in the enterprise space, providing best-in-class wireless infrastructure for many businesses and organizations. Out of our blogs this year, including detailed case studies of how enterprises utilize Cisco products and solutions, best practices from successful deployments, overviews of thought leadership webinars, and more, ten posts stood out from the rest.

Ten Most Popular

1. Get your Wi-Fi Network Ready for Windows 8

Jeevan Patil discusses 802.11w and Windows 8 compatibility, workarounds, why you should care and how to ensure that your network is ready.

2. 802.11ac: The Fifth Generation of Wi-Fi Technology

802.11ac is coming. Let Bill Rubino walk you through the in’s and out’s of IEEE’s latest standard, aided by trusty Techwise TV Fundamentals.

Continue reading “The Ten Most Popular Mobility Blog Posts of 2012”



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With the Mayan apocalypse safely behind us, now we can now safely discuss MPI again.

An MPI application developer came to me the other day with a potential bug in Open MPI: he noticed that Open MPI was consuming vast amounts of memory such that trying to allocate memory from his application failed.  Ouch!

It turns out, however, that the real problem was that he was never completing his MPI_Requests.  He would start non-blocking sends and receives, but then he would use some other mechanism to “know” that those sends and receives had completed.

Continue reading “Don’t leak MPI_Requests”



Authors

Jeff Squyres

The MPI Guy

UCS Platform Software

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Last week, a friend of mine jokingly asked me, “So, what is Santa bringing to Cisco’s wireless customers this holiday season?”

I couldn’t help but grin because I already knew what many of you are now aware of: Santa’s wireless holiday delivery came early this year, with Release 7.4 now posted on Cisco.com.

We at Cisco’s Wireless Networking Group are really excited to show off this shiny new release. 7.4 is jam-packed with 40+ features to improve the everyday lives of Cisco wireless customers.

You must be thinking: But you just released feature-heavy 7.3 in October AND new products, such as Virtual Wireless Controller and the highly scalable Wireless Controller 8510!

So what makes 7.4 so special? We specifically chose each feature with the goal of creating an uncompromised user-experience while keeping wireless network administrators happy by making it easy manage their WLAN more efficiently. The 7.4 release specifically focuses on four main pillars:

  • Quality of Experience for Wireless Users
  • Improved Security & Spectrum intelligence
  • Improved performance for small deployments
  • Ability to deploy innovative IT services using mobile apps

Continue reading “Santa’s Gift for Wireless Admins This Holiday Season”



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2012 has been a great year for social media marketing at Cisco! The organization as a whole is really starting to experience the value of social intelligence, social engagement and social reach which were our key objectives this past year. We have had so many wonderful achievements this past year but I’d like to reflect back and recognize what I consider to be our top 5:

1. Fully Integrated Brand Campaign! For the first time ever we delivered a brand campaign across paid, owned, and earned media which included a fully integrated cross channel experience. The campaign kicked off with a social strategy for the pre-launch phase introducing the Internet of Everything tomorrow.jpgand how it will transform the way we live, work, play and learn. For the launch we revealed our new tag line: Tomorrow Starts Here through an integrated global advertising, digital, mobile and social media strategy including augmented reality-enabled print advertising. With a smartphone or tablet, readers can bring print advertising to life. They can open up a a number of assets that they can share, like, follow or download. Social media was responsible for a total reach of 10.8M in the pre-launch phase with over 16K blog views and 34 organic blog picks from influencer sites such as Kurzweil and DailyBlogTips.

2. Social Media Listening Center – #CiscoListens! Social media listening has been the foundation of our strategy from day one. We launched the first phase of our social media listening center last year – it included 6 LCD screens strapped on our cube walls run on four struggling Dell towers. This past year we took advantage of a building remodel to create a bigger an better social media listening center in our marketing offices – now with nine touch screen LCDs we can visually represent what conversations are happening at any time. We also deployed a six-screen version in our executive briefing center where we can demonstrate to the smlc10K+ annual visitors how we listen and engage in conversations. Additionally a two-screen kiosk version outside of our executive offices allows our executives to get a quick pulse on market conversations. Lastly, our strategy includes a “pop-up” listening center that we can build for physical events. We deployed a “pop-up” listening center at the London 2012 Olympics and were awarded the 2012 Forrester Groundswell Award for best-in-class social media listening.

You can learn more about our social listening efforts here, here and here!

3. Social Login on a B2B site! At a big company like Cisco, implementing something like social login across Cisco.com is not an easy feat! But, we did it! Social login (okay, it’s really more of a social fill-in today, but we’re still working on it!) made its debut across all Cisco.com registration pages as of May 2012 and since then we have had tens of thousands of people choose to simplify their registration process through a social login. It’s interesting to note that while we offer Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google as OpenID providers Facebook is by far the preferred choice.

4. LinkedIn SocLIial Ambassador Program – fancy! We did an audit and uncovered 1,400 groups on LinkedIn with the word “Cisco” in the name, but little was known about the activities taking place in those groups. We then conducted an analysis of the groups to determine the best way to optimize our engagement in the groups.

The analysis revealed there were 17 active groups that were lacking a Cisco voice. We then tapped into the Cisco Ambassador Program to match subject matter experts with groups. This program enables Cisco to reach 243,000 group members to:

• Extend the face and voice of Cisco and enable peer-to-peer interaction
• Better enable the sales process through authorized responses to inquiries
• Gather market insights from Cisco followers to share in the social listening process

Since its inception, the program has grown to include over 30 LinkedIn groups. and the number of Cisco Followers on LinkedIn has grown 17% to 314k, with the highest number of new Followers during this pilot timeframe.

5. Really Cool Pilots! Okay, so this is more than five things because I’m going to talk about a coolhandful of things. Innovation is always top of mind for everyone on my team and we are constantly testing and piloting new concepts, technologies and ideas. Once a pilot can prove its value we start scaling it across the organization. Here are some early results from pilots that haven’t fully scaled yet.

YouTube Calls to Actions (CTA) – YouTube added the ability to add clickable calls to actions on your videos as of earlier this year. We immediately started testing this with a CTA at the :15 second mark and the end of the video. The first CTA is related to the video, where viewers can learn more, and the second CTA is to subscribe to our YouTube channel. We have tested this on a few hundred videos so far and are seeing an average click-through rates of 5.4%!

Social Demand Generation – We are just at the infancy of this concept however in an effort to kick things off quickly we deployed a simple no-cost pilot that involved putting a registration form to access gated content on our Facebook page. We then promoted it with social updates on Facebook and Twitter and in just 60-days, we had 1,881 click-throughs to the offer page with a 4% form completion rate! There are a lot more ideas and pilots under development that expand this concept further. For more on this program and other initiatives from this team click here.

Listening for Leads – We first ran a “listening for leads” program last year with underwhelming results. We learned from that experience and approached things differently the second time around. We leveraged a new listening process we developed called the “ABCs and 123s”. First “Action-Based-Conversations” (ABCs) are identified and tagged — we used seven categories for tagging such as question, lead, support, etc. Then, we prioritized the conversations  and used the 123s to designate the priority for responding. We used this model to identify and route leads to  call center agents who nurture and qualify the opportunities, leveraging LivePerson’s Click-to-Chat capability to enable private conversations. We are only 2 weeks into the pilot and nearly two-dozen <unqualified> leads have been identified. You can read more about this pilot here.

It’s been a busy year, and this is just a taste of the accomplishments from my team this year. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of my team who contributed to this year’s success: Charlie Treadwell, Leslie Lau, Leslie Drate, Davythe Dicochea, Roberto Araujo, Andy Grant, Bernadette Koscielniak, Richard Lam, Deanna Belle, Lindsay Hamilton, Michael Hopps, Tim Husband, Albert Qian, Jennifer Roberts, George Metrik and Nancy Rivas. This doesn’t include all the folks across the various teams at Cisco we worked with, but you know who you are and we thank you for your continued partnership!

Looking forward to more social media innovations in 2013! Happy Holidays!



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I joined the Cisco Global Social Media Team in February of this year (2012).  It has been one wild ride on this team with LaSandra Brill as my manager.  The learning curve has been steep and the team dynamics great.  When I joined the team, my responsibilities included managing the community strategy (Cisco Communities), the Facebook corporate strategy, the Twitter corporate strategy, the Cisco mobile events app, and social integration on Cisco.com (which includes social login).  I also helped lead the social execution of our #WorkTogether campaign in September.  My responsibilities changed slightly during a recent reorganization; now I focus on our blog and community strategy, social CRM, governance and policy, and social integrations on cisco.com.

Two principles have guided my team:

  1. Research – Understand what Cisco enthusiasts, customers, partners, and prospects want to see on our social channels through objective research.
  2. Delivering Value – Deliver quick wins while at the same time working on the larger initiatives.

4 Research Initiatives & Their Results:

Continue reading “Using Research to Impact Our Social Media Strategy”



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