Avatar

The most wonderful time of year is upon us. With the holidays just around the corner, many will be crossing off wish lists by shopping via their laptop, tablet or smartphone. Last year I was one of those that waited until the last minute to shop for the holidays and by the time I arrived at the mall, there was virtually nothing left to buy for my nieces!  I had to fight for a parking spot and was exhausted after the first half hour!

A recent prediction from e-Marketer states that online and mobile spending will increase about 15.1% year over year this November and December, showing just how quickly the Internet of Everything is enabling more e-commerce spending than ever before.

Kathy EnglishWith this increase in anytime, anywhere online shopping, how are delivery companies meeting this influx in demand? How are they ensuring on-time deliveries? How are they lowering operating costs and expanding reach? Over the next few months – and coincidentally during the busiest shopping time of the year – I’ll be discussing how advances in cloud and mobility are propelling the Internet of Everything and transforming the shipping industry. And this change is starting with the customer.

Continue reading “The Internet of Everything Connects Customers to Shipping Logistics, One Package at a Time”



Authors

Kathy English

Former Cisco Global Sr. Director, Global Data Center Marketing Programs

No Longer with Cisco

Avatar

The road to the connected factory was made easier today by the announcement of new features which will be highlighted in two new design guides for industrial networks.  The design guides help manufacturers deploy an industrial network that pulls best practices from operational technology (OT) and IT.

Many manufacturers are looking to gain the business benefits of a connected factory.  A connected factory gives the business more access to real-time information on factory operations, inventory, supply chains, the machines on their production lines, and more, so that manufacturers can better manage their businesses. By converging industrial and enterprise networks, manufacturers can advance their business agility and build a gateway to the Internet of Everything.  Many manufacturers have been challenged by the task of connecting these industrial factories, so Cisco, together with industrial partners like Rockwell Automation, are enhancing these design guides to ease the convergence process.

Continue reading “Road to the Connected Factory is made Easier”



Authors

Tony Shakib

No Longer with Cisco

Avatar

1“Software is Eating the World” is a quote attributed to Marc Andreessen and somewhat further explored by his business partner Ben Horowitz.  Mark Andreessen gives compelling reasons to validate this quote.  To some extend I have to agree with some of his reasons (but I am also a little bit biased as a software engineer). On the other hand, when I read this (and this is partly based on working in different domains on software), I wonder if software is that disruptive? If you look “under the hood” of software applications, you find that a lot of software is based on fundamental software principles that are already 20-30 years old, yet Continue reading “A Software Aware Society Driven by Sensors, Analytics and APIs”



Authors

Frank van Lingen

Manager Business Development

Corporate Strategic Innovation Group

Avatar

This is the fifth post in a series from Dimension Data and Cisco Channels looking at user adoption and integration of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) solutions. Findings stem from Dimension Data’s 2013 Global UC&C Survey, developed with ICT researcher Ovum and featuring responses from more than 2,700 participants in 18 countries across 20 vertical industries.

In the last blog based on Dimension Data’s research, Nagi Kasinadhuni expanded on the idea that certain technologies were merely a ticket to the game. In this edition of the UC&C series, we had the opportunity to interview Neville Cousins, solutions director for voice and applications at Dimension Data. Cousins gave us more insight on the data from the UC&C study from his perspective.

He focused on the idea that the market has seen a slow uptake of cloud deployment. Based on Dimension Data’s research the adoption rate has certainly been slower than Cousins would have anticipated. Continue reading “Why Has the Journey to Cloud Been Slow for So Many Clients?”



Authors

David Durham

Content Strategist

Channels

Avatar

This week, Cisco will receive the National Partner in Innovation Award from MIND Research Institute, based in Southern California.

We are honored, but that’s not what is most important.

While many such awards are given annually by nonprofits to recognize their donors, this award actually acknowledges a decade-long partnership between Cisco and MIND to improve student math achievement.

Such a long-term funding relationship is rare; most giving spans at best three to five years. But MIND is rare, too. We have been supporting the organization this long because they have developed one of the best and most effective approaches to helping students learn math that we’ve ever seen, with rigorous and significant student outcome data to prove it.

Our introduction to MIND’s work was at one of their annual meetings, back when they were still serving a relatively small set of schools in their local region. Flying into Orange County, California, I recall remarking to a colleague that there had already been many unsuccessful attempts to technology-enable math learning, and I did not expect to see anything new at the conference.

I was never so happy to be proven wrong.

Continue reading “Investing in Innovation Pays Off for Math Students”



Authors

Peter Tavernise

Climate Impact and Regeneration Lead

Director, Cisco Public Benefit Investment

Avatar

A couple of months ago, we introduced the new Cisco MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Directors. The new Cisco MDS 9710 Director establishes a new benchmark for performance – delivering more than three times the bandwidth of any Director in the industry.  Since the launch, several of our customers deployed MDS 9710 successfully and reaped the benefit from it.

In this blog, let me share with you on how LinkedIn used Cisco MDS to solve their storage growth needs. Since the company was founded, it has enjoyed steady growth in members and revenues. In fact, based on LinkedIn’s calculations, LinkedIn adds more than two new members per second. This means that the company’s storage needs and storage area network (SAN) are growing fast, and its SAN switches need to keep pace. With more than 259 million registered members, LinkedIn is connecting the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.

 LinkedIn deploys MDS 9710

Continue reading “Customer Adoption Series: LinkedIn deploys MDS 9710 to reliably connect world’s professionals”



Authors

Tony Antony

Marketing

Solutions

Avatar

For those who are not familiar with the Cisco Prime Security Manager, it is a management application that was introduced in 2012 to manage Cisco ASA 5500-X Series Next-Generation Firewalls. It is built on Web 2.0 technologies and supports both single-device and multi-device manager form factors to help manage various features such as Application Visibility and Control (AVC), along with web security in a simple, light-weight, and scalable manner. The AVC capability helps to block around 1200+ applications and 150,000+ micro-applications, in addition to specific users, behaviors, micro-applications, and devices. The web security service also provides URL filtering and Web reputation features to proactively restrict web application usage based on reputation of the site. Through Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO), these services provide a comprehensive view of the local and global threat intelligence landscape. This is eventually translated to actionable items such as security polices and information feeds that protect your business from near real-time zero-day threats. Continue reading “Cisco Updates Its Next-Generation Firewall Management Application – Prime Security Manager”



Avatar

“Software is Eating the World” is a quote attributed to Marc Andreessen and somewhat further explored by his business partner Ben Horowitz.  Mark Andreessen gives compelling reasons to validate this quote.  To some extend I have to agree with some of his reasons (but I am also a little bit biased as a software engineer). On the other hand, when I read this (and this is partly based on working in different domains on software), I wonder if software is that disruptive. If you look “under the hood” of software applications, you find that a lot of software is based on fundamental software principles that are already 20-30 years old, yet they are still frequently used (and for good reasons).  That does not mean there are no new advances in software, however old and proven technologies still play an important role (like we say in mathematics, it does not become old, it becomes classic).

1So maybe the reason that “Software is Eating the World” is due to the advances in hardware? Would you run modern enterprise applications in the Cloud 20 years ago? One of the challenges could certainly be the bandwidth. Was the IPhone a victory for software or hardware? A lot of the IPhone GUI was not that revolutionary IMO but the combination of hardware and software made for a potent technology disruption.

Continue reading “A Software Aware Society Driven by Sensors, Analytics and APIs”



Authors

Frank van Lingen

Manager Business Development

Corporate Strategic Innovation Group

Avatar

If I told you there’s something all around us that, if connected, could significantly help reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, reduce pollution on a massive scale, reduce the amount of time we spend in our cars, make entire cities smarter and contribute to an overall improvement of peoples’ physical and mental health all at the same time, would you ask why we’re not already doing everything we can to harness its potential?

There are approximately 3.9 million miles of road in the US today, and while there are large stretches of road that don’t suffer from constant traffic, connecting high-traffic, urban roads to the IoE could accomplish all of the above. While we’re connecting roads, we can coat the surface with photosensitive material in the tar/asphalt mixture that would use sunlight to produce energy to power streetlights and much more!

Intersection

With connected roads, traffic lights can dynamically shift their sequences to allow for an optimal flow of traffic, while cars can truly drive autonomously making commutes more like riding a train and roads safer for pedestrians, cyclists and passengers alike. Continue reading “3.9 Million and the IOE”



Authors

Isaac Naor

SVP & Chief Technology Officer

Ping Mobile