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Did you know the number of mobile-connected devices has broken the 1 billion mark? We have become more reliant on the Internet to get things done, take care of customers, and expand our businesses. This is a very important topic for partners, including small business partners.

Cisco’s newly expanded small business portfolio can help your customers better address their needs in this increasingly mobile world, where connectivity on a range of mobile devices is crucial. You already know that Cisco helps small businesses perform to their maximum potential through offerings that span security, connectivity, and collaboration. Cisco’s latest offerings continue that story, helping our partners fuel small business success and paving the way for future growth. To learn more about these recent announcements and how you can seize new market opportunities and add value to your customers, check out my recent post on the Small Business blog.

Continue reading “Cisco’s New Small Business Portfolio—Fortifying the Future”



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Andrew Sage

Vice President

Global Distribution & Small Business Sales

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STW Communications Group Limited is Australasia’s largest marketing content and communications services group. Within the STW group there are 75 individual operating companies which focus on advertising, design, digital, public and government relations, and specialist communications.

Being such a large group of companies operating under the same banner, naturally STW Group’s IT department faced the challenge of supporting, running and understanding the different IT needs of each organisation. Coming to grips with the idiosyncrasies of each company was time-consuming and labour intensive.

Enter Cisco and NetApp. STW were able to roll-out the joint FlexPod architecture to virtualise STW’s centralised computing platform.  STW reported that the virtualisation of its computing through FlexPod has led to extraordinary results. The once labour-intensive IT environment became a simple and easy to manage platform.

Continue reading “STW Group, Australasia’s largest Marketing Content and Communications Services Group, Consolidates and Virtualises wit …”



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Linda Horiuchi

Senior Manager, Australia and New Zealand PR

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Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the practice of building and maintaining social network profiles and activity in ways that are most likely to have a positive effect on one’s search engine rankings, increase brand awareness, drive traffic to web sites, and generate sales and leads. SMO starts with optimized profiles.

Public social network profiles tend to rank easily in search so they obviously are indexed by the search engines. At the most fundamental level, then, a well-optimized profile has the person’s or brand’s name in the manner in which people are most likely to search for that person or brand. Next in importance is including keywords for which one wants to be found in the description or biography part of the profile.

Finally, if the network allows links in the profile, the person or brand should link to their main properties on the web.  Note:  Links on some social profiles may be automatically tagged to as “NoFollow” for search engines. That means the search engines will not pass on any “link juice” from the social network to the linked-to site. However, these links can still be valuable for driving referral traffic.  There is growing evidence that search engines are experimenting with “co-citation,” where a relevant mention or link to a brand or other entity may carry some authority, even if there is no link or the link is no-followed.

How does  Search Engine Optimization differ from Social Media Optimization? 

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SMO actually overlap in the area of strategy to positively affect search rankings. SMO seeks to do that more indirectly through building influence in social networks that will send positive signals about one’s site and brand to the search engines. As described above, SMO also has concerns that go beyond search into brand identity and direct traffic generation.

SEO is entirely focused on those things which seem to have the most direct effect on search rankings. It seeks to optimize both on-site (making it easy for search engines to crawl and index the site and identify what it is about) and off-site (building authoritative links from other sites to the targeted site).

Continue reading “Optimize Social Profiles for Better Search Engine Results”



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My journey as a teleworking mom started almost ten years ago after I had my older son. I was coming back to work and in the process of changing roles at Cisco Systems. I live in North Carolina and had a job opportunity for a leader based in California. She knew that I wasn’t in a position to move and given we were already on opposite sides of the country, was supportive of my working from home. Thus my journey started as an individual contributor, working for a manager who based the decision to provide me flexibility on my track record of contribution at Cisco and her trust in my ability to do the job outside of an office.

Since then, I’ve been a part of the dramatic changes that have place in the workplace. According to a recent Harvard Business Review article on flexible work practices, the mobile worker population will be approximately 1.3 billion by 2015. At Cisco, almost 50% of our employees are collaborating with peers in other time zones and almost 90% telecommute at least one day per week. In many of our emerging countries, employees view flexibility as a right that is expected, versus a privilege that is earned.

My life has evolved as well. I’ve had another child and become a manager of a virtual team, with responsibility for a number of HR processes, including flexible work practices at Cisco. My experiences have offered me a few insights on how to be effective in our increasingly virtual world of work. Let me share these with you.

From an employee perspective, I have three tips that I think have been important toward my success. Continue reading “What I’ve Learned as a Teleworking Employee and Manager”



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Jennifer Dudeck

Vice President

Global Learning & Development

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This quarter, I had the privilege to work on a stretch assignment in the Education Marketing Team, to manage the Exhibit Booth and the dashboard for the Virtual Event Forum for Education Leaders, 2013.  It will be held on March 19 (Americas, and EMEA) and March 20 (Asia-Pacific), and will feature sessions with nineteen education thought leaders and innovators who  transforming education today.

I didn’t know what I was signing up for other than my colleague, Gary Serda, telling me it was going to be easy.  From bi-weekly, weekly, daily meetings, planning an event is anything but easy.  However, it’s been a very rewarding experience being able to work with colleagues in the Field, Sales, Events and so many others to learn about their passion and commitment to Education.  Continue reading “Sneak peek of the Exhibit Booths at the Cisco Virtual Forum for Education Leaders”



Authors

Wendy Leung

Former Marketing Manager, Private Sector Industries

No Longer with Cisco

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Johnson Winter & Slattery (JWS), a 60-partner corporate law firm in Australia, has announced it is rolling out Cisco video and collaboration solutions across its five offices. The law firm has partnered with Cisco to deploy an integrated collaboration suite including Cisco WebEx, Cisco Jabber, Cisco TelePresence and Cisco Show & Share.

The comprehensive collaboration suite delivers benefits externally from a client management point of view, as well as internally in terms of professional development and training.

Corporate law is a complex domain. Clients engage law firms because the matter requires collaboration, time and face-to-face discussions. Given the sheer distance between capital cities in Australia, face-to-face discussions are often substituted for phone calls. Cisco TelePresence allows clients to tap into the experience of multiple lawyers across different cities in a realistic, face-to-face environment. This enables greater mutual understanding and better problem solving for these complex issues.

Continue reading “Leading Modern Law in Australia with Cisco Collaboration”



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Linda Horiuchi

Senior Manager, Australia and New Zealand PR

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In light of the recent announcement of MSE Release 7.4 and Advanced Location Analytics Availability, we thought it would be timely to pick up where we left off on our MSE blogs series. In the first two, my colleague Anshul Tyagi covered how the MSE optimizes the CleanAir experience and discussed other MSE enhancements. Now that we have expanded the MSE to cover advanced location analytics, let’s use this blog to dive deeper into how to monetize your Wi-Fi infrastructure using our new functionality.

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.

How does the Cisco+ThinkSmart Analytics work?

Continue reading “MSE Blog Series Part 3: Monetize Your WLAN using Cisco Location Analytics”



Authors

Aruna Nukala

Technical Lead

Mobility Services Engine Group

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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?



Authors

Andrew Sage

Vice President

Global Distribution & Small Business Sales

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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:

  1. Episodes will publish weekly (or as close to it as we can manage)
  2. Subscribe to the podcast here: engineersunplugged.com
  3. Follow the #engineersunplugged conversation on Twitter
  4. Submit ideas for episodes or volunteer to appear by Tweeting to @CommsNinja
  5. Practice drawing unicorns
The OpenStack Unicorn?
The OpenStack Unicorn?

Where do you stand? Is OpenStack Enterprise ready? Thoughts, comments, or feedback? Join the conversation @CiscoDC.

 

OpenStack Cage Match with Colin McNamara and Joe Onisick
OpenStack Cage Match with Colin McNamara and Joe Onisick


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