As a sales team manager, I need to be available by phone or instant messaging (IM) in multiple places every day. So it’s no surprise to find me using the new Cisco Jabber for iPad client while I’m traveling because it provides the IM, voice calling, presence, messaging, and video calling capabilities that are exactly what I need to stay connected with my team, customers, partners, and colleagues.
When I’m in the office, working from my Cisco laptop, my Cisco 9971 desk phone, and Cisco TelePresence EX 90 desktop video endpoint – I have full-featured communications and application access. But when I’m out of the office, I can use the Single Number Reach (SNR) feature to move transparently to the Jabber client, which means people can dial a single number to reach me on both endpoints simultaneously while also making it easy for me to receive calls and messages wherever I go.
T.J. Hyne, one of my consulting system engineers, shares how he used the Cisco Jabber for iPad client to connect remote participants into a video call during a customer meeting, over the customer’s wireless network. The ease of the video call was an unexpected surprise for the customer, and it helped to illustrate the value of video for meaningful communication in real-time.
So you have a Cisco Wi-Fi network: what can you do to get more insight into the people using it? Do you know which part of your venue is more crowded? Ever wondered where people spend the most of the time in your venue? Where have people been before they arrived at your venue?
Whether it is in retail, leisure, travel or manufacturing, anytime there are people interacting with a Wi-Fi environment, there is also potential to improve the user experience--that is, if you can first visualize that interaction.
With the acquisition of ThinkSmart technologies, a leading data analytics company proficient in location data mining, Cisco opens up a new customer base – that of customer oriented marketing. Cisco ThinkSmart Location Analytics solution leverages your existing WLAN infrastructure and can help you gain insight on customer behavior, giving you an opportunity for better sales and operations.
The number of mobile-connected devices has broken the 1 billion mark. That’s not too surprising, given that as we grow more reliant on our devices and mobility, we also become more reliant on the Internet to get things done, take care of customers, and expand our businesses. In fact, we see a future that is defined by what we call the Internet of Everything (IoE), bringing together people, processes, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before. Yet Cisco estimates that about 99.4 percent of what could be connected by the Internet is currently unconnected. That’s pretty staggering. Imagine how even a fraction of that could affect your business—by connecting employees when they’re mobile and connecting customers and partners to keep business processes and sales in progress.
Cisco’s latest offerings are designed to capitalize on connectivity, helping to fuel small business success and pave the way for future growth.
Lief Keopsel recently discussed how the growing mobile population calls for a new approach. Cisco’s expanding small business portfolio helps customers find the right technology to meet their evolving needs—such as increasing overall productivity, bolstering responsiveness, and beating the competition. But we haven’t stopped there. We’ve recently added additional routers and wireless access points.
Ultimately, we’re developing a portfolio that helps small businesses perform to their maximum potential through offerings that span security, connectivity, and collaboration.
Security Is a Competitive Advantage Through all this, whether you’re increasing productivity or enabling collaboration, you really have to keep security at the forefront. It’s what gives you the edge. If you missed the recent blog post featuring David Lawrence from Smart Technology Enablers talking about the Cisco ISA500 Series, please listen in. David describes how the Cisco ISA500 Series helps customers safeguard against outside threats while allowing employees to securely access information remotely.
Connectivity Is Key to Productivity Check out how our newly launched products deliver greater capabilities with built-in intelligence to provide more options for getting things done and creating a more customer-centric business model, regardless of location.
Collaboration Improves Business Effectiveness Bringing together people is a key part of our value proposition. We’re helping small businesses respond to customers more quickly and cultivate stronger customer engagement and loyalty. All while lowering the cost of doing business.
We understand that making the right technology decision is critical. And to that point, we’re proud of the recognition we’ve received from Miercom. Linda Beaton’s post on February 8 highlights a recent study by Miercom. This report favorably compared the Cisco SF500, SG500, and SG500X switches with similar products offered by HP, D-Link, and Netgear.
To learn more about the Cisco Small Business products referenced here, please visit our website. Or to learn more about our Cisco Services, click here. If you’re a Cisco partner, check out our Partner Launch page to help seize new market opportunities and add value to your customers.
How are these changes affecting you? And, how can we help to strengthen our partnership?
In this week’s episode of Engineers Unplugged, Colin McNamara (Nexus IS, @colinmcnamara) and Joe Onisick (Insieme, @jonisick) take opposing viewpoints for the OpenStack, cage match. Let’s watch:
Welcome to Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple:
Episodes will publish weekly (or as close to it as we can manage)
Today we have an excellent lineup of speakers and demos to kick off Networking Field Day 5 -- at Cisco. If you don’t know what Networking Field Day is (#NFD5 on Twitter) I basically call it “Bloggers on a Bus”. Stephen Foskett organizes these events where he gets 10 -- 15 networking bloggers to fly out to the bay area, they rent a mega bus (hence the name), and drive around to networking vendors over 2-3 days. The vendors do demos and presentations for the bloggers and there is usually a lively discussion*. These sessions are both live-streamed and then available to watch later at your leisure.
Speed Dating:
The lineup of topics today is: Data Center, Campus Switching, Enterprise Routing, Lunch (we like to throw steaks at the lions), more routing, more switching, and, finally, more Data Center! One new thing we’re doing today: In the morning, during the Enterprise Routing hour (11:30 -- 12:30) the team will do three demos and then we’ll vote on the one they want to hear more about.
Three demos in a one hour period may not seem too fast, but it’s actually pretty quick and a bit like speed dating. So to continue the analogy, during lunch, the bloggers vote on which topic they’d like to hear more about during the afternoon 1:30 -- 2:30 hour -- basically, who they’d like to ask out again. Below, we’ve got the speed dating contestants the overall agenda, and the livestream embedded. Read More »
Today we have an excellent lineup of speakers and demos to kick off 