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The Social Innovation Summit takes place this week on December 4 and 5 in Mountain View, California. This annual gathering brings together corporate, investment, government, and nonprofit leaders to explore the strategies and business innovations that are generating social transformation.

At Cisco, we apply the same technology, expertise, and partnerships we use to help our customers to also help transform lives, communities, and the planet. Through the collective power of human and technology networks, we believe we can multiply our impact on some of the world’s most pressing problems — while strengthening our business.

This “shared value” approach is reflected in the Social Innovation Summit, where other corporations, nonprofits, investors, and government agencies will describe how business innovations and creativity are enabling social transformation.

Continue reading “Social Innovation Summit: Where Business Innovation Meets Social Transformation”



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Alexis Raymond

Manager

Cisco Corporate Affairs

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As an early convert to the virtues of Cloud computing, it is fascinating to see the adoption of the ideas.  Most organizations if not all, are figuring out how to harness cloud technologies to their advantage.   It is interesting to get a perspective from an analyst who talks to users on a regular basis or better still find out what similar organizations are doing.   In a few recent conversation with Mike Spanbauer, Industry analyst at Current Analysis, Cisco Executives, Jim McHugh and Brian Schwarz discussed several topics. One of topics was “Private Cloud”, highlighting the opportunities and challenges that adopters face.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN0_Mc68YlQ

When harnessed cloud technologies should therefore help users reign in IT costs and chaos while helping IT better align with existing business needs.  It should also help IT scale up and down services with changing business needs.  Common use cases for deploying cloud technologies are elasticity, flexibility, normalization and simpler management to address a heterogeneous infrastructure for varied workload demands.  Cloud infrastructure addresses the short-term bursty nature of application development and test very well.

Cisco UCS is an innovative server platform uniquely positioned to help adopters succeed with cloud technologies. The converged server and network infrastructure is a necessity when everything is connected to the cloud. The need for scaling up and down rapidly is enabled by the programmability of the system.  Software configuration of the server with its LAN and SAN connections helps in the reliability and time to value of the server infrastructure.  This is possible with the service profiles supported by the Cisco UCS Manager. Service profiles also help normalize and abstract the physical infrastructure to meet the needs of varying workloads.  The recent release of Cisco UCS Central and the API makes large scale globally distributed infrastructure deployment possible. With virtual machines enjoying direct access to the network with the Cisco VM-FEX technology users can take advantage of server virtualization and get optimal network performance.

And of course, it is very important to see how industry peers are using the Cisco UCS to solve the very challenges Cloud adopters face. Tune in to a webcast on December 6 at 9:00 am PST  to hear from Cisco UCS customers Xerox and FICO Corporation, about how and why they used it in their Cloud environments.



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It’s that time of year again — time to start preparing for Euro MPI 2013!

Next year, we’ll be heading to Madrid, Spain September 15-18.   Here’s a snipit from the call for papers:

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • MPI implementation issues and improvements
  • Extensions to and shortcomings of MPI
  • Tools and environments for MPI
  • Hybrid and heterogeneous programming with MPI and other interfaces

Come join us for some sangria in scenic Madrid next year.  Submission deadline is March 29th.



Authors

Jeff Squyres

The MPI Guy

UCS Platform Software

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Over the last few months we’ve made some nice additions and improvements to Cisco.com. We’ll be writing in more detail about these individually, but I’d thought I’d give a short recap.

1. Faster Downloads! We’ve had some big performance improvements in the download experience, both in terms of reducing the number of steps to get a download and also in dramatically reducing the time it takes files to download. We’ve done much of this by pushing 75% of software images to the cloud – starting with the most popular and larger images for widest impact – and we’ve been contnuing this push. See this recent post for more. Here’s a chart we made to show the improvements:

2. All-in-one Product Pages. We’re experimenting with some new “all in one” product pages in the Cisco.com support area, which bring together support, documentation, downloads, product specs, community content and other information into one format. Examples: ASA 5550 Adaptive Security Appliance and AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client. More to come on this and we’d like your feedback on it.

3. The Support home page has added new personalized capabilities for customers and partners when you log in to do common things like downloading software or visiting product pages, etc.

4. Technical Support mobile app— now for iOS and Android – sports more capabilities for support case management

5. Bugs! Seldom a favorite thing anywhere, unless you’re searching for information about them. We’ve added some enhancements to Cisco.com site search to make that searching easier.

6. An enhanced Services area that Web Analysts SiteIQ called “revolutionary” while applauding a “less-is-more design”. Picture below, and their review is worth a read.

7. The recent WorkTogether site area, that SiteIQ called “an infographics tipping point.”

8. Data Center: A bit of an update to our Data Center area pages and Servers / Unified Computing:

We’re constantly making improvements to Cisco.com and our mobile presence, and, as always, look forward to your feedback via the feedback link that’s at the bottom of every page.

Enjoy!



Authors

Martin Hardee

Director, Cisco.com

Cisco.com

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Once the exclusive domain of senior executives, mobile devices are now indispensable to most employees for conducting both their business and personal lives. The insatiable demand for smartphones, tablets, and other connected devices is generating staggering amounts of mobile data. In parallel, the use of Wi-Fi for Internet access is exploding as more mobile devices are Wi-Fi enabled, the number of public hotspots expands, and user acceptance grows. Once shunned by corporate IT departments, Wi-Fi increasingly has made its way into most businesses.

Business users are the most valuable customer segment for mobile operators. Changes in mobile behavior and usage, particularly with regard to Wi-Fi, could have a significant impact on service providers’ (SPs) bottom line. However, there is little research on how mobile business users are actually using Wi-Fi, how they want to employ it in the future, and, more specifically, what is driving them to connect their devices to the Internet using Wi-Fi.

To learn more, Continue reading “Mobile Business Users Embrace Wi-Fi”



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Stuart Taylor

Director

Service Provider Transformation Group

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Fellow Technologists,

Why are standards so important in Information Technology?  Standards enable interoperability between complex systems.  Many enterprises look to products that use these standards for easy integration between their existing and new systems, as well as lowering design, development, and production costs.  Further, standards allow innovation, enabling new solutions that solve business problems.

Cisco has been a member of the Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) since 2006 and has contributed to many white papers and standards over the years, including Cloud, SOA, Mobile, and Social Blueprints.  Many of the standards created by ARTS focus on the messaging syntax used between systems that enable products from a diverse set of vendors to interoperate and communicate with one another—complexity made simple.

ARTS is the IT standards division of the National Retail Federation (NRF), and is comprised of over 200 international vendors and retailers dedicated to reducing the costs of technology through standards. Since 1993, ARTS has been delivering application standards exclusively to the retail industry. ARTS has four disciplines: the Standard Relational Data Model, Unified POS, XML, and Standard RFPs. The National Retail Federation (NRF) will be having its next Big Show in January at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City.  ARTS is targeting to release several new publications at this show and Cisco will be there sharing our latest solutions developed with our technology partners. Continue reading “Cisco and the Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS)”



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Bart McGlothin

Solution Architect

Compliance Solutions Group

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In this business, “monetization” is often a nice way to say “profits”.   And profits usually come at someone else’s expense.

But what if I told you you could be profitable giving away your product?  Further, what if I told you you could be profitable, and your customer would also make money in the deal?

Too good to be true?  Not at all.  Telefonica’s O2 UK has found a way to give away mobile broadband service and make money doing it.

When O2 Continue reading “Give It Away Now”



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Who doesn’t know the Xerox company ? As long as I can remember, Xerox products have always been part of my professional life . In fact, even before working for a company, I used a Xerox machine.

Originally known worldwide as a print and copier innovator, Xerox today has established itself as a leading business process and document services company, delivering popular solutions that include Xerox Managed Print Services (MPS) and Xerox Cloud Services.

On December 6 , at 9:00 am PST , Xerox Delivery Officer, MPS Technology Tom Force will join Forrester Analyst James Staten (@Staten7) as well as Jeff Hanson  and Rick Schlander , IT engineering leads at FICO Corporation to discuss with Cisco VPs Satinder  Sethi and Jim McHugh(@JimMcHugh) how to maximize the value of cloud by making the right architectural choice. You don’t want to miss this one hour highly educational webcast ! 

In fact, after registering, and before joining us for this unique webcast, you may want to have a quick look at the Xerox cloud story , which is pretty remarkable!

“The Xerox MPS global delivery centers consisted of static rack servers that were difficult to scale due to multiple hardware configurations. The centers were also reaching capacity, causing concerns about poor response speed that could slow transactions and worsen system reliability resulting in outages. As a service relied on by businesses worldwide, Xerox MPS needs to offer a 24-hour service and could not afford downtime. “ Sounds familiar ?

“With its years of experience providing outsourcing services to customers, Xerox also expanded into the cloud with services beyond printing and print management. Xerox Cloud Services started with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) before adding backup, disaster recovery, and mobile device management. With excellent features and services, Xerox Cloud Services is growing rapidly as a service that not only provides backup and storage, but also runs mission-critical applications for customers.”

So did you like this story ? Are you interested in getting more details on infrastructure capabilities that will allow you to achieve the full potential of your cloud deployment ?

Continue reading “Xerox uses Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) as a Foundation for Cloud”



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It is important to understand that the real value of the Internet of Everything (IoE) lies in both the number and value of connections.

To illustrate this point, consider the following scenario. When your car becomes connected to the Internet of Everything in the near future, it will simply increase the number of things on the Internet by 1. Now, think about the numerous other elements to which your car could be connected—other cars, stoplights, your home, service personnel, weather reports, warning signs, and even the road itself. It is from these multiple connections that your driving experience will become better than it is today. You will be safer, more informed and entertained, arrive on time, and even save on fuel and maintenance costs as you travel to your destination.

It’s the connections that matter most. Continue reading “Internet of Everything: It’s the Connections that Matter #IoE [Infographic]”



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