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Supply Chain Management (SCM) has always been critical to business operations and success. Executives in large corporations remember lessons from their SCM courses back in business school. For those who have forgotten, consulting companies and universities teach SCM using well-known games such as the Beer Distribution Game. The problem the Beer Distribution Game highlights is the lack of insight people along the distribution chain have beyond a few steps.  However, I’d posit that the Internet of Things (IoT) provides us the opportunity to holistically visualize and play with our entire supply chain.  In effect, IoT may make the Beer Distribution Game a relic of the past. 

Beer Distribution Game!The Beer Distribution Game is a role-player table game created by Jay Forrester at MIT Sloan School of Management in the early 1960s to teach principles of management science. The game is played by teams who simulate the supply chain of the beer industry during 40 weeks. Each team represents a brand and the goal is to meet customer demand. Each player represents a specific area of the supply chain: retail, wholesale, distributor and factory. Within each team players cannot communicate each other and information is only passed through orders and shipments notes every week. The winner of the game is the team with lower total cost of capital employed in stock for everyone in the supply chain while avoiding out-of-stock situations. Continue reading “Winning the Beer Game with The Internet of Things (IoT)”



Authors

Rafael Maranon

Senior Product Manager

Cisco's Network Operating System Technology Group (NOSTG)

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Cisco UCS Director delivers unified orchestration and management for converged infrastructure solutions by abstracting the complexity of individual devices, hypervisors, and virtual machines.  This provides administrators with a holistic, converged infrastructure management experience.

Some UCS Director advantages include:

  • Open and flexible system, providing multi-vendor IT infrastructure management
  • Turnkey solution, quick time-to-value via setup within an hour
  • Out-of-the-box support for the most widely deployed converged and integrated infrastructure systems: Vblock, FlexPod, and VSPEX
  • Cisco’s unified management approach reduces deployment times from weeks to minutes – for either virtual or bare-metal environments
  • Automate your infrastructure management so that your staff can focus on more important business-critical initiatives instead of mundane manual tasks

But don’t just take our word for it.  Check out a live technical demo and see for yourself the value and benefits that UCS Director can bring by automating your converged infrastructure.  We are currently offering morning and afternoon sessions on December 11th, December 17th and January 14th.

To register for the live webcast, please visit here.

To further familiarize yourself with Cisco UCS Director, watch this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-NX772MR78



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This week we have two opportunities for you to learn about Cisco technologies from company experts as well as our technology partners.

The first webinar, How Smarter Branches Lower Costs,  is on Wednesday, December 11 at 8am Pacific and discusses how Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN) along with Akamai’s Unified Performance solution can help your branch offices can realistically utilize Internet as WAN for a cost-effective, reliable, and secure option.

A preview for this webinar is a quick video we did with Akamai in October!

Continue reading “Learning Opportunities This Week With Cisco Experts on IWAN and CMX”



Authors

Lauren Friedman

Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks

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TRACRecently I had an opportunity to sit down with the talented data scientists from Cisco’s Threat Research, Analysis, and Communications (TRAC) team to discuss Big Data security challenges, tools and methodologies. The following is part one of five in this series where Jisheng Wang, John Conley, and Preetham Raghunanda share how TRAC is tackling Big Data.

Given the hype surrounding “Big Data,” what does that term actually mean?

John:  First of all, because of overuse, the “Big Data” term has become almost meaningless. For us and for SIO (Security Intelligence and Operations) it means a combination of infrastructure, tools, and data sources all coming together to make it possible to have unified repositories of data that can address problems that we never thought we could solve before. It really means taking advantage of new technologies, tools, and new ways of thinking about problems.

Big Data

Continue reading “Big Data in Security – Part I: TRAC Tools”



Authors

Levi Gundert

Technical Lead

Cisco Threat Research, Analysis, and Communications (TRAC)

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Behind the Scenes: Ready, Set, Go!

Don’t make your data center refresh more complicated than it needs to be. Installing the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) is seamless and simple—not to mention advantageous in more ways than one. Cisco UCS is an integrated architecture that establishes one cohesive system for increased business agility – a unified and virtualized data center that is easy to manage, so you have more time to focus on what matters most: supporting the business for faster, and better outcomes.  

Cisco UCS can be integrated with other leading IT solutions for ideal performance. For example, this solution brief explains how Cisco UCS is the ideal platform for deploying MapR to deliver a fully optimized Hadoop solution.

See for yourself how quickly you can go from pallet to production: watch this video demonstrating start-to-finish configuration of a 16-server rack with Cisco UCS—on the clock the whole time. Try to beat that.



Authors

Adrian den Hartog

Senior Marketing Manager

Field Marketing US Commercial

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If you are an open source fan, in particular GitHub, I have good news for you.

Yes, we now have a Cisco Nexus 9000 community on GitHub. While many of the initial contributions were created by Cisco employees, ANYONE is allowed and in fact encouraged to participate and share code. Pull requests are monitored and reviewed by a group of administrators to maintain a level of quality and protect users consuming code as well.

Our GitHub presence comprises two sections:

1. Cisco NX-OS Standalone Mode: Focuses on the Nexus 9000 series of switches running enhanced Nexus OS. These products include NX-API, Puppet, Chef, and scripting capabilities using Python and other shell scripts.

2. Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Mode: Focuses on the Cisco APIC controller and Cisco ACI Object Model. This includes Python, Puppet, and Chef code samples. Additionally, it includes Tenant creation examples, Application profiles which are XML-based configurations that model applications, and southbound device automation scripts, which can be used to integrate 3rd party L4-7 devices.

If you are wondering how you take advantage of this offering, first and foremost I can assure you these code samples can speed up your learning curve with Cisco ACI and Nexus 9000 programmability aspects. Refer my Cisco ACI blog on Cisco Nexus 9000 programmability details.

Related Links

http://developer.cisco.com/web/n9k

www.cisco.com/go/aci

www.cisco.com/go/nexus9000



Authors

Ravi Balakrishnan

Senior Product Marketing Manager

Datacenter Solutions

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Partner-Weekly-Rewind-v2Each week, we’ll highlight the most important Cisco partner news and stories, as well as point you to important, Cisco-related partner content you may have missed along the way. Here’s what you might have missed this week:

Since the last Partner Weekly Rewind, I took a nice long weekend to enjoy the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. I hope that those of you here in the United States took the time to relax a little as well.

I was able to visit some family and enjoy what amounted to one long, continuous meal from about 1 p.m. until 7 p.m. last Thursday. Now that I am out of my food-induced stupor, it’s back to providing you an update on what you might have missed this week.

Off the Top

CRN held it’s Women of the Channel event where they honored 295 women in channels whose expertise and vision deserved recognition. Cisco is proud that seven women were honored from our company this year.

Wendy Bahr, Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn, Maria Cannon, Michelle Chiantera, Julie Hens, Jennifer Rillera, and Karen Walker were all honored this year. Please catch up on what they had to say to CRN and join us in congratulating them.

In addition, Wendy Bahr, Maria Cannon and Julie Hens were each included in this year’s “Power 100: The Most Powerful Women Of The Channel 2013.”

Again, congratulations to all the women honored at this year’s CRN event. Continue reading “Cisco Partner Weekly Rewind – December 6, 2013”



Authors

David Durham

Content Strategist

Channels

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Sourcefire

 

 

 

 

 

Last October , Cisco confirmed that Sourcefire was now part of our family of security products and solutions .

“With this acquisition, we take a significant and exciting step in our journey to define the future of security. As one company, we offer an unbeatable combination that will greatly accelerate our mission of delivering a new, threat-centric security model. Through the addition of Sourcefire’s competitive talent and technologies, I see vast opportunities to expand Cisco’s global security footprint in both new and emerging markets, broaden our solution sets and deepen our customer relationships “

Chris Young, Cisco Senior Vice President Security Group
in his blog “Delivers Threat-Centric Security Model “

“Beyond the technology, one of the things that is important to me is that Cisco and Sourcefire both share key values that transcend our company names, HQ locations and number of employees. Much like Sourcefire’s Firemen Principles, you can be confident that these values will continue as one team at Cisco.”

Martin Roesch, Sourcefire founder and CTO and now VP and Chief Architect of Cisco Security Group
in his blog ONE Team 

These days , John Stewart , Senior Vice President, Cisco Chief Security Officer , announced that we completed the  deployment of Sourcefire at Cisco . John Stewart oversees at Cisco the Threat Response, Intelligence and Development ( TRIAD ) organization .

The implementation is already giving us insights into our data center that we never had before

To know  more about this deployment and John’s first impressions check his blog
 The First Inline Production Deployment at Cisco 

 

The Cisco security architecture helps data center networking teams take advantage of security capabilities built into the underlying data center fabric, to accelerate safe data center innovation. There are three important security measures that every IT organization should follow to securely support data center innovation. 
To learn more, download the Cisco white paper “Three Must-Have Security Measures that Accelerate Data Center Innovation.”

Tell us what do you think of the acquisition of Sourcefire by Cisco .

 



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IT leaders today are faced with solving challenges on a daily basis. They must determine solutions that create more efficient businesses, develop innovative ways to reach customers, and all the while positively impacting the bottom line. What’s helping drive these solutions and transformations in business?

The answer is mobility. Leaders are leveraging mobility to improve business – from personalized experiences to new operating strategies. This is what is keeping business ahead of the curve.

Our latest edition of Mobilize offers insights from other C-level executives that can help you realize the need for innovation to keep your business at the top of its game. In addition, you can gain insights from industry experts across many industries, such as:

  • The Mobile Marketplace
  • Security
  • Education
  • Healthcare

Learn more from your peers in Mobilize and help your business face the challenges of innovation and keep it moving forward toward success.

Read the full article:  Gathering Frontline Insights on Mobility Innovation.