A couple of weeks ago, I announced a new name and a new mission for the group I lead at Cisco. I’ll do my best to minimize reader exposure to boring administrative details, but the long and the short of it is that the former Cisco Global Government Solutions Group (GGSG) has become the Cisco Threat Response, Intelligence, and Development (TRIAD) organization.

Any organizational name change is only a label placed on more fundamental transformations in missions, strategies, and desired outcomes. While the new organization will continue to serve government customers, the time has come to mobilize the expertise we have built up over the years to help critical infrastructure and enterprise customers strengthen their abilities to deliver IT-based services and value with minimal disturbance from unauthorized sources.

Vectoring the organization’s mission to threat is the key to understanding what TRIAD is all about. Through our work with Cisco customers, observation and analysis of phenomena visible in Cisco and customer networks, and application of innovative thinking about security practices and processes, we see enormous potential for developing and delivering threat-focused approaches to cyber security into products, services, and solutions. Read More »

Tags: Cisco CSO, Cisco Security, Cisco Threat Response-Intelligence-Development, cyber security, emerging threats, GGSG, security, TRIAD

At Enterprise Connect we made a number of announcements about Cisco’s pervasive conferencing strategy and new solutions that caused quite a buzz at the show and are really resonating with our customers. More and more I talk to business leaders who understand the value of pervasive video collaboration and their next questions are:

• How do I extend HD video to everyone in the organization on any device, from their personal mobile or desktop system through to group telepresence systems?
• How do we ensure each participant gets a high quality experience, matched to the capabilities of the device(s) they choose to use?
• And how do I provide this flexibility and scale affordably?

Recently I spoke to my colleague, Richard Mullen, about how our new optimized conferencing infrastructure is supporting this explosion of video-enabled users. With flexible and intelligent resource pooling and orchestration enabling a tailored service model, we are delivering affordable personal HD multiparty conferencing at an equivalent of only Read More »

Tags: collaboration, enterprise connect, hd conferencing, HD video, optimized conferencing, pervasive conferencing, TelePresence

I was just recently informed that my talk was accepted at the Midwest Open Source Software Conference (MOSSCon).  w00t!

MOSSCon will be held at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky, USA, on May 18-19, 2013.  It’s being organized by people from the Kentucky Open Source Society (KYOSS) and other open source / maker-oriented groups in Louisville and Ohio.

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Tags: HPC, MOSSCon, mpi, open source

Cisco Chief Technology and Strategy Officer Padmasree Warrior offers a commentary on the Internet of Everything today on CNBC.com.

She states in part:

“The Economist magazine cover story recently explored whether innovation was dead. Is it possible that after five years of a tough economy with a slow recovery that we’re done when it comes to new ideas? …

… There are indicators now that we’re about to launch into the next era, driven by what people are calling the “Internet of Everything” or IoE. It’s the next stage of Internet growth with the intelligent connection of people, process, data, and things. …

There is a lot at stake here: $14.4 trillion to be exact—just for the private sector. That’s the amount that our research shows could be gained globally in the next decade from the intelligent connections.” …

Read her full commentary here.

Additionally, read Cisco’s white paper on the Internet of Everything…and, our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document.

Tags: $14.4 trillion, cnbc, innovation, Internet of Everything, IoE, padmasree warrior

Self-Service Arrives to Workload Automation. Have Your Users Paint Your Fence.

It’s close to 11 p.m. on the last day of the quarter. And I.T. gets an urgent request to post-pone a closing of the books process because there’s a large order stuck in the CRM system.  This means that it won’t hit the books and be recorded as a sale.  The customer won’t get her order, the salesperson won’t get paid and finance will show a missing number.

Making matters more complicated, there’s a large marketing workload to process sentiment analysis that kicks off after close of business.  That whole workload looks like this:

This generates an urgent call to the team that manages the workload automation platform: Hold the closing workflow!  Stop the presses! And postpone the Hadoop workflow.

The admins have to get to their console find the job and pause it.  Not a huge deal, except there are thousands of jobs to be run and hundreds of business people calling on a regular basis, at all kind of hours.

Some customers have created help desks for their workload automation teams or even off-shore to serve these kinds of requests.

Read More »

Tags: automation, Cisco, cloud