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We just launched the Cisco at NRF 2013 website.

Cisco will be at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Convention and Expo 2013 in New York City from January 14-15, 2013.

I’d like to invite you to come visit the Cisco booth #252 to see live demonstrations of Cisco’s new innovative solutions for retail including:

Continue reading “Join Cisco at NRF 2013”



Authors

Peggy Casey

Senior Manager, Global Retail Industry Marketing

Cisco

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I presented at the BtoB Networking Breakfast (#BtoBNet) today and wanted to share my slides in this blog along with some food for thought based on my presentation:

  1. Not all social media participants will converse, comment or create. The Forrester social technographics ladder outlines 6 active social participation categories that also include people that are spectators (e.g., read your blogs), joiners (e.g., maintain a LinkedIn profile) or collectors (e.g., bookmark your content). Don’t lose sight of these groups when planning your social engagement.
  2. Lead with listening. I have spoken and written about this many times before and the new nugget here is that Continue reading “5 Nuggets to Make Sense of the Crazy World of Social Media”


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Did you hear the one about the pre-teen who installed a switch and some wireless devices in under ten minutes? And did I mention he is a regular kid? Okay, maybe an online gamer, but definitely not a member of his school’s computer club.

Maybe I made that up. But then again … I am talking about the power of Meraki. This cloud networking leader is all about making it simple to manage wireless, switching, and security solutions from the cloud. And, in case you missed it, Cisco announced its intent to acquire them for $1.2 billion on November 19.

For our partners—and our customers—this is good news. Continue reading “Child Makes ‘Networking History’ (Translation: We’re Acquiring Meraki)”



Authors

Julie Hart

Senior Writer and Strategist

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In this week’s episode of Engineers Unplugged, VMware’s Mike Laverick (@Mike_Laverick) confesses on air that his home lab is a mess and he needs help. Good news, Cisco’s Josh Atwell (@Josh_Atwell) to the rescue! No VLANs? No problem. Let’s watch and see what Josh suggests.

Sound familiar? Suffering a similar problem? Contact us (@CommsNinja) and we might solve your problem on-air.

Mike Laverick and Josh Atwell address Mike's home lab situation.
Mike Laverick and Josh Atwell address Mike's home lab situation.

Welcome to Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple:

  1. Episodes will publish weekly (or as close to it as we can manage)
  2. Subscribe to the podcast here: engineersunplugged.com
  3. Follow the #engineersunplugged conversation on Twitter
  4. Submit ideas for episodes or volunteer to appear by Tweeting to @CommsNinja
  5. Practice drawing unicorns

Questions for Mike or Josh? Join the conversation on Twitter. Follow @CiscoDC to stay up to date on all the news.



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Be it tax-credits/subsidies in different parts of the world or the recent news of California setting up a carbon trading exchange – no week passes by without the mention of “the importance of saving energy” or “reducing greenhouse gases”. Yet, with the explosion of technology and IP-connected devices; IT consumes over 25% of energy in a commercial building or office.

So why am I writing about this in a Cisco blog and what has this got to do with networking?

Continue reading “Cisco Customers can now manage energy consumption of IP connected devices at no charge with Cisco EnergyWise Fast-Start …”



Authors

Guneet Bedi

Director, Product Management

Asset & Energy Analytics

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By Uwe Lambrette, Director, IBSG Service Provider

How exactly is the enterprise migration to the clouds progressing?

In 2010, the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) sought answers in a wide-ranging survey. At the time, the path to cloud was just beginning for many enterprises. Today, with cloud evolution accelerating into an increasingly essential process, we decided to capture the current state of cloud migration.

To gain these insights and to better understand this “enterprise journey to the clouds,” we interviewed CIOs, IT general managers, and cloud initiative directors at 45 organizations around the world, many of them Global 50 companies. Our in-depth interviews focused on five industry verticals: government, manufacturing, financial services, professional services, and retail.

In short, a majority of executives are Continue reading “Six Projects To Move Enterprises Toward the Clouds”



Authors

Chris Osika

Senior Director, Global Lead

Service Provider Practice Internet Business Solutions Group

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When building a cloud, scale it out.

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud architecture and topology options enable scalability, availability, and geographic distribution. This white paper discusses several options, their strengths and uses, and the technical details underlying these options.”

Cisco IAC Availability, Scalability, and Geographic Distribution White Paper is available in the Cisco support community (log in needed)

Here’s an excerpt:

 

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) is a software-based solution for managing hardware infrastructure tasked with delivering various IT services as-a-service (XaaS). Cisco IAC provides configuration “content” to help customers rapidly deploy service-delivered, self-service enabled IT services on certain hardware architectures. Consulting services from Cisco Advanced Services or Cisco delivery partners can use the IAC infrastructure to create custom services for customers. This white paper discusses the software underpinnings of these services and options for deployment that provide scalability and resilience for large enterprises or service providers.
The major platform products which make up IAC relevant to a scaling and resiliency discussion are:

  • The Cisco Cloud Portal – The dynamic, tailored end-user web site where customers and administrators can browse available services and options, and order new services or changes to existing services. This element consists of a web tier which interacts with the browser to expose the Portal UI and an application tier which includes the Portal and Service Catalog. The Service Catalog provides the menu of available services, including new-service and update-service requests, as well as definitions and configurations for roles, business rules, dynamic form rules, and entitlement.
  • Cisco Process Orchestrator  – The delivery engine that makes the Move/Add/Change/Delete (MACD) changes to the steady-state configuration of the computing, network, storage, and application infrastructure (“Infrastructure”) needed to deliver the requested new service or service change. Orchestrator processes automate workflows which interact with applications, systems, and devices in the environment.
  • A database stores configuration, state, and runtime information from the above systems.
  • Cisco Network Services Manager (NSM) Server – a specialized engine for network provisioning. Cisco Network Services Manager’s policy-driven approach allows clouds to be created within single or multiple network Points of Delivery (PoDs), each with potentially different and unique offerings and operational behaviors.
  • Cisco NSM Controller – a local element near network devices within a network PoD which performs direct device interactions to achieve network provisioning at the direction of the NSM Server.
  • Cisco Server Provisioner – provides bare metal provisioning (remote installation) of an OS or hypervisor on a physical or virtual server, as well as bare metal imaging for system cloning and backup.

 



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The following are excerpts from an interview with Wong IK Ming, Director, eSURIA MENTARI SYSTEMS SDN BHD.

From halfway around the globe in fabulous Singapore, I was delighted to have the chance to interview Wong IK Ming, a Cisco Certified Partner covering Southeast Asian nations, to get his perspectives on data center security opportunities.

Tell me about your customers. What are their most pressing problems?

eSURIA caters mostly for the public sector but we are now extending our services to include Oil and Energy. Our customers have to adhere to new and emerging government mandates around data privacy and sovereignty. This requires a combination of strong governance processes mapped to sound technical controls and a design that is future proof, for example ensuring unified policy, dynamic and logical segmentation. Security must be thought out from the beginning—from the application to the edge of the cloud. I’ve seen a couple of instances of community clouds where security has not been thought through and it’s a matter of time before a security incident occurs.

As a partner, what benefits do you see for Cisco’s approach to data center security?

Our customers are fast adopting new infrastructure models and having the Cisco Validated Designs is a huge benefit because it enables us to attest to the technical soundness of the overall solution and to present security as an integrated element as opposed to a separate element. It also enables us to build these into the overall services templates that we provide with confidence that the necessary testing has taken place. I look forward to seeing more of these validated designs. For example, a validated security blueprint for Microsoft private cloud applications with Cisco UCS.

Continue reading “Ask the Data Center Expert, Partner Edition: Southeast Asia and the Rapidly Changing Landscape”



Authors

Evelyn de Souza

Cloud Data Governance Leader

Chief Technology and Architecture Office

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U.S. News & World Report debuted their Most Connected Colleges ranking this year, honoring the schools that best leverage technology to improve the connections between students and educators. The inaugural ranking’s first place went to Bowdoin College, a private liberal arts College located in Maine. Amazingly, they beat out traditionally techie schools CMU (#10) and Harvey Mudd (#23) and Silicon Valley gem Santa Clara University (#14) not to mention CalTech (#67).  How’d they do it?

Continue reading “Bowdoin College Takes Crown for Connected College Champion”