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It is with great pleasure that I can announce that two of our Australian Cisco employees have been recognised at Australian Reseller News’ (ARN) inaugural Women in ICT awards. The awards were held at a luncheon in Sydney yesterday and aim to celebrate female excellence and reward outstanding achievements by women in the ICT industry. Cisco’s two award winners were Sara Adams and Vanessa Sulikowski and Karen McFadzen was recognised as a finalist.

Sara Adams was the winner of the Achievement category. Sara won the award for her undeniable commitment to the Australian reseller channels. Her proven leadership skills saw her promoted to become Cisco’s Managing Director of the Partner Business Group in 2012, one of our largest portfolios of business in the region.

Continue reading “Congratulations to Our Female Role Models in ICT!”



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Linda Horiuchi

Senior Manager, Australia and New Zealand PR

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Here are some helpful tips for choosing the right network technical support plan that can save you time, money and customers.

As a business owner, your top priorities are to grow  your business, increase your employees’ efficiency, and serve your customers better. On top of that, small and medium-sized businesses like yours are looking to leverage a sophisticated IT network without dedicated or limited IT staff to support these goals. If this sounds like your business, you understand how increasingly reliant your company has become on your network.

As you realize the impact your network has on your success, you may also recognize the need to maintain the health of your network so that it’s always on and available for employees to connect, collaborate, and communicate with colleagues and customers alike. Network downtime can cost your business plenty in decreased productivity, tarnished reputation, and lost revenue. According to Infonetics Research, unplanned network downtime costs companies an average of 3.6% of their revenue every year. And this doesn’t even include potential damage to your reputation. In addition, dealing with unplanned IT network problems can also be very demanding on your IT staff, and time consuming.

There is a solution: If you want to reduce business-halting network downtime and stop reactively responding to IT network problems, consider purchasing a technical support plan or services from your solution provider, which can help you save time and money. A support plan gives you access to expert technical support engineers who can quickly resolve network issues, minimizing the time your network is down. Faster problem resolution and a more stable network also means your employees can stay productive. Finally, services offered by your solution provider may include additional services such as ongoing remote monitoring for proactive network management, helping to anticipate issues before they affect your business.

So before you make your decision regarding the plan that’s right for you, consider these factors when deciding which support plan best meets your needs.

  • Technical support.  For companies looking to support new technologies while saving time and money on ongoing maintenance, a technical support plan may be the solution. These plans often provide such features as phone and online support, software updates, and hardware replacement if needed, like the Cisco Small Business Support Service. Some technical support plans like Cisco SMARTnet also offer more direct, anytime (24×7) access to support engineers to quickly resolve any network issues that may occur. Talk to your Cisco partner who can help to evaluate your current and near-future needs and determine which option is best for you.
  • Proactive IT service. Like large businesses, many smaller companies rely  heavily on their network as a strategic advantage to serve customers, suppliers, and vendors around-the-clock—the network is their business. However, these companies often don’t have the in-house IT resources necessary to implement new technologies, let alone provide round-the-clock monitoring and rapid resolution should a problem arise. If this sounds familiar, your company would benefit from working with a managed service provider who offers more comprehensive services—one that provides real-time monitoring and alerting, troubleshooting, performance optimization, and routine maintenance.

Want to learn more about how a consulting firm benefited from Smart Services? Read this case study

Whether your company has 15 employees or 600, a support contract and your partner’s services can help ensure the reliability and security of your network so you can focus on your core business. To find a partner who can guide you, visit the Cisco partner locator

What features do you look for when evaluating support plans?



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Gaby Pinto

Integrated Campaigns & Strategy

Marcom COE

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Are you trying to get your arms around what’s included in a well-designed EtherNet/IP industrial infrastructure?  Look no further!  Here’s an example of how the Internet of Everything (IoE) came alive at Automation Fair recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwER8DB_MeE

An integrated design from Cisco, Rockwell Automation, Panduit and Fluke Networks demonstrates standards-based solutions for manufacturing agility and operational excellence!

In the video above, a single Converged Plantwide Ethernet enclosure is outfitted to include: Continue reading “Cisco and Partners demonstrate Converged Plantwide Ethernet, All in One Place”



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Prologue

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the protocol leveraged within the Internet´s distributed name and address database architecture. Originally implemented to make access to Internet-based resources human-friendly, DNS quickly became critical infrastructure in the intricate behind-the-scenes mechanics of the Internet, second only to routing in its importance. When DNS becomes inaccessible, the functionality of many common Internet-based applications such as e-mail, Web browsing, and e-commerce can be adversely affected—sometimes on a wide scale. This short blog post will explore some real-world examples of DNS abuse. I would like to welcome and thank Andrae Middleton for joining me as a co-author and presenting his expertise on this article.

There are a few different types of DNS attacks: cache poisoning, hijacking attacks, and denial of service (DoS) attacks (which primarily include reflection and amplification). In the news as of late are widespread and focused DoS attacks. Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO), with its distributed sensors, is able observe and measure various aspects of the global DNS infrastructure. What follows are two vignettes detailing recent Internet DNS DoS attacks against the Internet’s DNS infrastructure. We will see that, though the attacks are different, the results are similar and the countermeasures and mitigations are the same.

Continue reading “Real World DNS Abuse: Finding Common Ground”



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Cisco is proud to be a partner in Giving Tuesday, a campaign to create a national day of giving at the start of the annual holiday season.

We are celebrating Giving Tuesday by:

1. Promoting Cisco’s signature employee giving initiative, the Global Hunger Relief Campaign. Our goal: contribute $1.25 million in employee donations to hunger relief agencies globally and 12,500 volunteer hours by December 31, 2012. Cisco employee donations to the Campaign are matched twice – once by the Cisco Foundation and once by Cisco Chairman Emeritus John Morgridge – multiplying their impact.

2. Volunteering at several Cisco locations. In Lawrenceville, Georgia, Cisco employees will pack meal boxes for the underserved in Gwinnett County in partnership with Gwinnett Technical College. In Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, Cisco employees will sort food at the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina. In Richardson, Texas, Cisco employees will volunteer in the food pantry at The Network, providing much-needed groceries for the nonprofit organization’s clients. And, Cisco headquarters in San Jose, California will partner with Stop Hunger Now to pack meals for distribution to hungry children around the world.

Employees from Cisco’s Research Triangle Park office volunteer at a Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina on Giving Tuesday 2012.

3. Donating meals to the World Food Programme (WFP) through its How Do You Give Facebook campaign. For every comment someone makes on Facebook, Cisco will contribute $1 – enough for WFP to provide 4 meals to people facing hunger.

Here’s how YOU can be part of Giving Tuesday:

  • Follow #GivingTuesday on Twitter


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Alexis Raymond

Manager

Cisco Corporate Affairs

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Each year Windows IT Pro announces their Editors’ Best and Community Choice awards recognizing the hottest  products in the world of Microsoft. The Editors Best award highlight products that the Windows IT Pro editors and contributors believe are worthy of recognition. The Community Choice awards lets the Windows IT Pro readers from around the world decide which products are the best.

For 2012 Cisco was honored with 5 awards – covering Gold, Silver, and Bronze. Our Catalyst switch took home Gold in the networking category with Cisco’s Technical Support organization winning Silver. We wrapped up this medal trifecta with a Bronze for our UCS server family.

The Windows IT Pro awards complement our June 2012 Best of Tech Ed award for UCS Manager and when combined together they show the breadth and depth of our capabilities for our Microsoft server and workload solutions.

Read more on the awards and recipients here. To learn more on Cisco and our offerings for Microsoft Windows Server, Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL Server please visit www.cisco.com/go/microsoft.



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Rex Backman

Senior Marketing Manager, Big Data Solutions

Data Center and Cloud

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Please join me in welcoming Bob Dean to the Manufacturing Industry Blog!

I am pleased to introduce Robert (Bob) Dean to the Cisco Manufacturing Industry Blog.  Bob is the Executive Director with Cisco’s Americas Business Transformation team and is responsible for building and leading the go-to-market ans sales development strategies for the Manufacturing Industry Vertical in the United States, Canada, and Latin America.

Bob has an extensive background with technology and management consulting firms and specializes in integrated supply chain management in the manufacturing industry on a global scale.  His expertise includes both international and domestic client engagements across the entire spectrum of manufacturing industries and supply chain processes.

With over 35 years of industry experience, Bob has demonstrated skill in assisting organizations in rethinking the way they do business with a focus on globalization, innovation and value creation, extended enterprise collaboration, and operational excellence.  As a catalyst for change, he is considered a strategist with a global operational/implementation focus.

Continue reading “Welcome Bob Dean to the Manufacturing Industry Blog”



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Peter Granger

Senior Sales Transformation Manager

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Total (consumer) spending for the (Thanksgiving 2012) weekend reached an estimated $59.1 billion, a 13% increase from a year ago, according to the National Retail Federation.  Online spending on Friday alone topped $1 billion for the first time, according to the data-analysis firm comScore Inc.

We can analyze the seasonal patterns of traffic by studying the Alexa reports such as the one below for different retailers.  In the case of walmart.com the holiday traffic is 400% the average during the year.  It remains to be seen how much more the traffic would spike today – Cyber Monday 2012. It is clear that retailers like Walmart need the ability to scale up the e-commerce infrastructure during the holiday season.

A retailer’s e-commerce infrastructure would include software applications, middleware, server, network and storage resources.  Virtualization technology has made scaling of e-commerce applications easier.  However, virtual machines can only start on physical servers after they are racked, stacked and necessary network and storage access components have been properly configured.  The preparation of the physical infrastructure is still mostly a manual task, unless they are using something like the Cisco UCS.  The Cisco UCS Manager embedded in the system, handles the simplified configuration.  With large environments (thousands of servers) infrastructure management software such as Cisco UCS Central becomes increasingly important. Cisco UCS Central, which simplifies compute infrastructure scaling, became generally available last week.   With it, physical compute infrastructure management can now be policy based and automated.  This in turn can increase the velocity of changes and reduce the possibility of errors while scaling rapidly.  This blog by Steve Kaplan and the short video below give a nice overview of Cisco UCS Central software.

Continue reading “Just what we need on Cyber Monday – Cisco UCS Central”



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When was the last time you sifted through the pile of coupons and special offers that fill your mailbox each day? Extreme “couponers” aside, most of us rely more on the daily coupons we receive via email from online sites, rather than the thousands that end up in our recycling bin each month.

Today, technology has influenced the purchase decision, and buyers are bringing their own technology – smartphones and mobile devices – on their shopping excursions. In a world where 74% of smartphone owners use their mobile phones to get real-time location-based information, retailers need to harness the power of the loyal customers and market to those consumers in real-time.

Cisco’s partnership with SAP for a new Retail Mobility Solution offers a unique business-to-consumer shopping experience that brings real-time and location-based deals to shoppers and allows businesses to improve customer service and more accurately track ROI. Supporting the solution, Cisco’s Context Aware Services, Cisco’s Mobility Services Engine (MSE) and Cisco Prime Network Management with SAP’s Precision Retail Application (Apollo), optimize the in-store experience for consumers and retail decision makers. This mobility retail solution leverages the indoor-location and analytic capabilities of the Cisco Connected Mobile Experience platform to drive a premium consumer experience, allowing shoppers to make quick decisions and receive instant discounts on their mobile devices to put towards their purchases.

Continue reading “Cisco and SAP Collaborate to Offer a New Shopping Experience at Retailers”



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