If you caught Secretary Arne Duncan on the Jon Stewart show back on February 16th, the Secretary reiterated an education theme that has been common over the years for the Obama administration. When pressed by Stewart on how the U.S. Department of Education can help drive innovation in our schools, Duncan answered, the real creative breakthroughs “…need to spring from the local district, superintendents & principals themselves … and not the Washington bureaucracy.”
Enter Itasca Schools — in the very rural outstretches of northeast Minnesota. It’s another example, along with Mooresville Schools in North Carolina, of how local schools and school districts are doing exactly that.
You are probably thinking that CITEIS is a typo – but it’s not. In fact, CITEIS stands for Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services and it’s the name that Cisco’s IT department coined for our internal private cloud.
You can read more about CITEIS here, including an explanation of the two options: CITEIS “Express” for on-demand access to virtual compute resources from a shared pool of resources; and CITEIS “VDC” (Virtual Data Center) to provision your own virtual data center with a reserved pool of compute, storage, and network capacity.
We recently recorded a brief demo video of the Express version so you can see how it works:
Cisco has partnered with several outsourced vendors over the years for initial handling of many front-line calls and general information inquiries. Connecting these vendor environments into a single Cisco customer contact environment is critical for good customer care, but costly and not always easy. However, early this year we made a change: we’re using SIP trunking and Cisco Unified Border Element to bring us much closer together, and save money into the bargain.
When it came time to build a 370,000-square-foot, 72-bed healthcare facility featuring state-of-the-art services, the Chickasaw Nation had a number of important decisions to make. Among those were how to deliver excellence in medicine, tranquility, and healing to Chickasaws and other Native Americans.
Also important, according to Chuck Dougherty, CIO for the Chickasaw Nation, was providing reliable, seamless, and secure communications across its healthcare community. But technology wasn’t at the center of his decision.
In the video below, Dougherty explains how selecting to work with Presidio—a Cisco Master Security and UC Specialized Partner based in Greenbelt, Maryland—was less about technology and more about relationship building.
So what can you learn from Presidio about its commitment to customers? Read More »
