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As more and more provider networks turn to accountable care organizations, a greater emphasis is being placed on telemedicine for care management. At Cisco Live 2013 this week, we’re seeing this trend manifest as the focus of many of our healthcare customers turns to improving patient access to care and transforming the clinician experience.

One such customer is Nemours Children’s Hospital. Today, Bernie Rice, chief of information technology at Nemours demonstrated how physicians and specialists are able to collaborate over distance to examine patients, bringing care regardless of where the patients are located. Through a series of demos, attendees witnessed firsthand the connection of a physician in a hospital directly to a patient at her home, as well as the interaction of physician, nurse and patient all located in three different locations.

The demo illustrated how a remote physician can listen to a heartbeat, receive vitals—blood pressure and temperature— and interact with patients through high definition video. Other capabilities include the ability to view ultrasound images, look into the ear canal and examine magnified images of skin.

Continue reading “Care at a distance: Connecting the previously unconnected”



Authors

Marc Musgrove

Former Director, Internet of Things and Digital Industries PR

No Longer with Cisco

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Tomorrow at Cisco Live!, I will be moderating a roundtable discussion featuring four government thought-leaders:

During the roundtable, each customer will discuss how they are using technology to address current challenges – such as greater demand for mobile technology, fewer resources, limited budgets and new models for delivering citizen services. Continue reading “Government Roundtable at Cisco Live!”



Authors

Patrick Finn

No Longer at Cisco

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Hotels and guests have had a love-hate relationship with Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi has become an expected service, not just a luxury, leaving hotels struggling to find the right setup that is both cost-effective and meets visitor needs. In the last few years, there has been an explosion of mobile devices being used in the market, resulting in guests arriving with laptops, tablets and smartphones all ready to connect to speedy and reliable Wi-Fi. And when Wi-Fi isn’t operating smoothly, the complaints come through loud and clear.

In this constantly connected world, how can hotels provide the service and reliability that their guests are depending on, while keeping costs down?

Cisco Wall Access Point (AP) – Better Service and Cost Savings

Cisco’s new Aironet 702W Series Access Point is a wall AP, which solves several problems at once. In the past, bulky hardware switches and access points have been installed in the hallways, which isn’t ideal for in-room Wi-Fi access, nor is it visually appealing. The Wall AP combines hardware switches and access points into a single unit, about the size of a dollar bill, making it much more aesthetically pleasing and less obvious to guests. Cisco Aironet 702W Series is a compact access point, designed for ease of mounting to numerous global wall-box standards. In addition, the Wall AP features a dual radio, running two frequencies at once and allowing for both older and newer devices to connect easily and with less interference. Continue reading “Cisco’s New Wall Access Point Helps Hoteliers Deliver In-Room Wi-Fi Access”



Authors

Antonio Dimilia

Industry Director - Hospitality and Travel

Business Transformation Team

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Within the next five years, more than 1 million armed forces personnel are expected to transition from U.S. military to civilian life. As our veterans return from deployments such as Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them will need new jobs to support their families – and additional training to get those jobs.

Unfortunately, our veterans typically experience higher unemployment rates than the national average and sometimes have difficulty matching their skills and training with jobs in the private sector. That’s why Cisco established a corporate veterans program in 2011 to support veterans and their spouses. We provide funding, training, technical expertise and technology to help them through what can be a difficult transition period. Continue reading “Supporting Veterans in Transition to Civilian Life”



Authors

Patrick Finn

No Longer at Cisco

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Cisco IT has always encouraged employees to use the tools that help them work most efficiently from anywhere on any device.

As the range of IT services we offered has increased, we noticed that the process of acquiring the various tools became complex and confusing. We had a number of different internal sites (aka “stores”) within Cisco, each offering different systems for employees to request services.  This complexity impacted the user experience and productivity of these employees.

In order to simplify the employee experience with Cisco IT, we made the decision to consolidate all these different systems into a single online service catalog – effectively a unified e-commerce storefront for our IT services – where our employees could find services they needed to do their jobs.

We thus created Cisco IT’s “eStore”.

Our goal was to improve employee satisfaction, decrease support costs, and increase employee productivity. We had to find a way to increase adoption and transparency of our existing IT services.

Cisco IT knew that a platform to consolidate these services into one unified service request system could be built on top of Cisco Prime Service Catalog, our own end-user portal and service catalog solution. This solution provides enterprise IT management capabilities that enable entitlement, approvals, service taxonomy control, and even chargeback.

Continue reading “Introducing the Cisco IT eStore and a Service Catalog for BYOD”



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The mobile satellite communications market is experiencing strong growth globally with mobile workers, cargo, and remote applications driving the industry. This diverse market consists of handsets, modems, ships, human passengers, and machine-to-machine (M2M) modules that bring satellite services to a diverse range of applications, further driving rapid traffic growth and bandwidth demand from machines and humans alike.

As a result of this, however, Satellite Communications (SATCOM) service providers are straining to keep up with this tremendous demand and growth. They are challenged to seamlessly integrate with terrestrial networks, and as if this is not enough, much like the similar challenges faced my terrestrial mobile operators, they also need a solid plan for how they will address the data traffic explosion coming onto their networks in the next three to five years. Continue reading “Satellite Communications Come to the Mobile Internet Services”



Authors

Doug Webster

Vice President

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When was the last time you turned on your new gadget, opened an app, or logged onto a website and found that you needed to attend a training course before you could use it effectively?

At times, we in the IT industry fall into the trap that we need the most advanced technical capabilities.  After all, this is the great force that has produced numerous inventions and has made our lives better.  However, when we focus too much on technical details rather than meeting our users’ needs, we fail to deliver not only for our customers but also for our business.

The IT team at a major global manufacturer recently told me about their company’s major investment in user experience design, because it is important for their brand image and business success.  They are applying user-centered design not only to the products they make, but also to the IT systems they implement in-house.  Even the U.S. government has a usability and user-centered design practice under http://www.usability.gov/basics/ucd/.

This year, our software development team embarked on a user experience update for our IT service catalog software by applying the user-centered design principle.  We are showcasing this new user interface and introducing a new product name for the software – Cisco Prime Service Catalog – at Cisco Live Orlando this week.

Here is a preview of the next-generation user interface for Cisco Prime Service Catalog:

Cisco Prime Service Catalog

This new user experience highlights the services that end users may be interested in, with lists like “Most Popular Services”.  If a user has a certain model of IP Phone, the service catalog may feature associated items such as a compatible headset.   This familiar ecommerce experience is still governed by the service catalog’s entitlement and approval process, so the service owner has full control over service consumption.   User experiences like this will help transform employees’ impression of their IT department.  Service providers will also find that they can configure this new user interface to portray the brand image and customer experience they want to project.

Continue reading “Introducing Cisco Prime Service Catalog – Focusing on User Experience”



Authors

Song Toh

Senior Manager, Product Management

Cisco Network Services Orchestrator

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Some of our Cisco Services strategy and design consultants and leaders are at CiscoLive in Orlando this week.  If you are around, please take some time to learn from their hands on expertise.  They are the leading exponents in designing and deploying Cisco data center solutions.   If you’ve following my blog posts over the past few years, especially more recently on Cisco Domain TenSM and Cisco ONE as our solution for the challenges of SDN, you may well indeed be interested to meet some of the people behind the innovation and successful customer transformations.

 

Cisco Domain Ten - Cisco Services Framework for Data Center Transformation
Cisco Domain Ten – Meet the Leading Cisco Domain Ten Experts at CiscoLive this week

 

We have a few presentations in the Cisco Campus Solutions Theater and also some “Design Centers”.

Continue reading “Meet our Experts @ CiscoLive!”



Authors

Stephen Speirs

SP Product Management

Cisco Customer Experience (CX)

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Cisco partner Anittel has announced that it will be implementing a new communication system, based on Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, for the Tasmanian Government.

By hosting its communication and collaboration systems in the cloud, the Tasmanian Government will optimise internal processes and improve overall employee productivity.  Based on a Cisco Powered Cloud implemented by Anittel, it’s expected that Tasmania’s whole-of-government shared service initiative will also benefit from the ability to move forward with more agility, flexibility and speed.

Continue reading “Anittel begins roll-out of Cisco HCS with Tasmanian Government in Australia”



Authors

Linda Horiuchi

Senior Manager, Australia and New Zealand PR