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As part of Cisco Live! last week, Cisco hosted a Connected Mobile Experiences Dinner last night with senior executives of some of our customers and partners in  Shula’s Steak house at the Walt Disney Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando. One of the key points of the night was the presentation by Chet Patel, Director of IT at the Swan and Dolphin.

Chet discussed how Cisco’s Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) solution has been deployed at the resort and the insights and benefits they are starting to derive already. The resorts executive business management are starting to get heavily engaged with the project and understanding the value that CMX can contribute.

cmx dinner Continue reading “Swan & Dolphin Resort Showcases Connected Mobile Experiences at Cisco Live!”



Authors

Brendan O'Brien

Director Global Product Marketing

Connected Mobile Experiences

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Continuing the thread from the last blog where I discussed the first HIPAA network consideration, ‘HIPAA Audits will continue’, in this blog I’ll discuss the second network consideration on the list below.  Remember, The HIPAA Omnibus Final Rule, released January 2013, introduced some significant changes and updates.  The 2012 HIPAA audits concluded with some initial findings released from The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Civil Rights (OCR).  These two events may impact how you govern your internal organization and network for patient privacy and protection of PHI.  The deadline for compliance with the updates to the HIPAA Omnibus Final Rule is September 23, 2013.

Continue reading “2 of 9 HIPAA Network Considerations”



Authors

Terri Quinn

Security Solutions Manager

Security Technology Group

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This blog was written with Jess Wells and originally appeared on the Executive Symposium at Cisco Live!

As the Cisco Executive Symposium, IT Management Program, and Cisco Live open their doors, I’m reminded that it takes a village, and working hard in the village here are students from the Cisco Networking Academy who – alongside Cisco engineers – are building the wireless network to support the event.

Anybody who’s met me knows I love young people: their confidence, their honesty, the world of potential in their eyes. During my annual meet-and-greet with the academy students at Cisco Live I’m inspired by stories of mothers who have raised their children and now chosen network administration as their new career; of former U.S. Marines who now excel in cyber defense; of an academy student who dreams of living in Japan; of former teachers; a winner of the Army Achievement Medal while part of the Chemical Defense Program who’s now applying his determination to network defense. Each story a testimony to the ability to reinvent yourself, to adapt to changes in the economy, to follow a dream.

Ten students competed with essays and video to be selected from across the United States and Canada to attend. There’s also a large group of students from local Orlando-area academies — like Polk State University, DeVry, and Valencia College — that are also working the event as interns. A total of 40 students and 4 instructors over the course of the week — a large presence, which demonstrates the faith we have in the competence of our students! Many of them also plan to take their Cisco certification while onsite.

Founded in 1997, the Cisco Networking Academy program — with 10,000 academies in 165 countries –now teaches the skills needed to build, design, and maintain networks to hundreds of thousands of students worldwide every year. And to me, each one contains an inspiring story. Hats off to the Networking Academy!



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For the last four or five years, I’ve watched as the Idaho Education Network (IEN) has implemented and reaped the benefits from their distance education program and use of video conferencing, or telepresence. To this day, they continue to improve on success, and during a session at ISTE 2013 last week, Brady Kraft and his team once again illustrated how they consistently stay on top of their game.

Brady Kraft, IEN, presents at ISTE 2013
Brady Kraft, IEN’s Technical Director, presents at ISTE 2013

IEN is a statewide network that connects every school in the state, including higher education institutions, Internet2, private and public training providers, and first responder training organizations.

One of their mandated goals is to provide equal access to a quality education for all citizens and they’re utilizing technology to achieve that goal. As the 7th  most rural state in the nation, half of the counties in Idaho have less than 10 people per square mile, and 75% of Idaho’s schools have < 600 students. These schools havenot been able to offer a full curriculumdue to many factors, including availability of qualified teachers and budgetary restraints. Continue reading “Innovation is Standard at Idaho Education Network”



Authors

Kerry Best

Marketing Manager

Public Sector Marketing

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Virtacore, a leading cloud services provider, aims to help clients shift to the cloud. But the company was aware that in order to help others, it first needed to help itself—which meant updating its own infrastructure to provide the best IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS)  to customers.

By leveraging innovative technology from Cisco, like the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), based on Intel® Xeon® processors, Cisco Nexus Switches, and Cisco Catalyst Switches, Virtacore is now able to better leverage its internal IT to perform faster, more reliably, and on a larger scale. And, in turn, the company gained the ability to provide more cost effective, higher-standard services externally.

Reducing deployment from six weeks to just a few hours, providing a single-pane-of-glass management, and ensuring improved performance are a few of the benefits that have confirmed the worth of implementing new technology and rebuilding the IT environment.

Read the full article and learn just what Virtacore did to unleash their IT potential – and how they can continue to do so in the future.



Authors

Adrian den Hartog

Senior Marketing Manager

Field Marketing US Commercial

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Social media now makes up more than 20 percent of all time spent online, and it’s easier than ever to see the value it can have for businesses, brands, and even personal reputations. According to a Nielsen survey, 65 percent of social media users surveyed use social activities to learn more information about brands, products and services as they’re making buying decisions. On top of that, increased adoption of mobile devices including tablets and smartphones provide the means for users to connect anywhere, at any time, meaning social media interactions can also happen anywhere, at any time.

For businesses, it can be a huge challenge to get everyone within an organization who will be participating in the social stream up-to-speed on policies, best practices, and integrated strategies, from how and what to blog about to social media’s role in marketing campaigns. To help meet this challenge, Cisco Social Media Training offers on-demand courses and one-on-one team consulting to help partners realize and implement the benefits of social media in your organizations.

Cisco offers two complementary training options for Cisco partners:  Continue reading “Cisco Social Media Training Opportunities for Partners”



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Last week, I was at Cisco Live in Orlando, Florida where I experienced first-hand the magnitude of opportunity and marketing value that lies in interacting with the customer.

This year’s Cisco Live theme is “What You Make Possible,” and this relates well to today’s B2B marketers and their customers. The message that resonates with customers today is not what “we the company” do, but how we help our customers succeed and thrive long term. As marketers, this means exercising foresight on our customers’ behalf, as well as advocating near-term solutions to help drive their success.

As a marketer, implementing these B2B best practices is the best way to enhance this focus on customers: Continue reading “The Customer is King at Cisco Live”



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Hi All!  For this video my trusty film crew and I are still here in Orlando for CiscoLive 2013 and got in some great interviews!  In this episode I learn about Smart Connected Vehicles (and why you shouldn’t hack them),  meet with Chris Tillett (@christillett) of Halifax Media Group and find out why the new Cisco ISR 4451-X is the router for him, I get to sit in and program the Delorean time machine we had in our booth, and JOHN CHAMBERS GIVES ME AND MY TRUSTY FILM CREW A THUMBS UP.  Yes, that needed all caps, because it is awesome and I didn’t even realize it until the episode was posted!  Also, I tested the tensile strength of the CiscoLive sign.

Continue reading “Enterprise Networks At CiscoLive Video Interviews Continued!”



Authors

Lauren Friedman

Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks

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Reduce the barriers to mobile productivity while making sure the corporate network is secure. Impossible? Seems like it. But that’s what the business continues to demand.

SAP Afaria support for Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) is a key component of policies based on conditionality that attempts to negotiate the gap between employees who want to use their own mobile devices and good security practice. Employees want to and should control their personal devices. But they also want to use those devices for email and to access services on the corporate network. So while it is true that the employee can install any software on their device, they should know that only compliant devices can get email and access to the corporate Wi-Fi network. In some circles, this is known as “carrot” (do not install apps that put corporate information at risk) and “stick” (if you do, email is blocked on that device and no access to the Wi-Fi). The value to IT is that the enterprise network has an additional level of security – only mobile devices that are under management and deemed compliant are granted access, period.

In addition, now that you have ISE and SAP Afaria working together, you can answer questions like what percent of Afaria managed devices connect to the Wi-Fi network on an average day? And how does that vary between Boston, Brussels and Bangalore?
IT Managers and Administrators are looking for a single, holistic view into the compliance status of network identity across all regions with detailed visibility into all kinds of devices management information. They are looking for immediate insights into non-compliance devices trying to connect to network with drill down capabilities for root cause analysis of each kind of non-compliance devices.

SAP HANA running on Cisco UCS solves this by giving enterprises the ability to capture high volumes of data from all required external/internal sources – Afaria, ISE, HR systems, Microsoft System Center, etc. HANA brings together the ecosystem of technologies that provide different business controls, including app management, mobile identity and access management and mobile analytics. Customers can then generate real time analysis of Compliance trend/Posture Compliance across regions and types of devices with rich reporting & dashboard capabilities with great user experience.

To learn more go to www.cisco.com/go/sap



Authors

Rick Speyer

No Longer with Cisco