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240x200-NEWBannerCisco is pleased to present the Cisco Virtual Forum for Education Leaders, 2013 – a free global conference that K-12 school leaders can attend from the convenience of their desktop or mobile device. Join us on March 19 (Americas and EMEA) and March 20 (Asia-Pacific) to hear education innovators from around the world who are transforming education today.  You can participate via live chat, in roundtable panel discussions on leading-edge strategies and practical solutions that are improving the quality of education.  The Forum opens with a keynote followed by  three breakout sessions for K-12 schools and higher education.

Keynote Presentation

Connecting the Unconnected—Amazing Trends that are Shaping the Future of Education

Today, education systems are facing unprecedented challenges. To address these challenges, education leaders are capitalizing on new technology trends to drive innovation and shape the future of education. This session will explore the impact of these emerging trends on teaching, learning and research in K-12 and higher education. Dr. Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium and founder of the Horizon Project, is an acknowledged expert on emerging technology and its impacts on education. His research and insights will help education leaders plan for a rapidly changing future. Ellen Junn, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at San Jose State University, is at the forefront of developing new instructional delivery models. She will provide practical guidance on how new teaching methodologies and alliances can help universities meet their highest aspirations for students.

K-12 Schools Breakout Sessions

Continue reading “Cisco Education Virtual Forum Spotlights K-12 Leaders Who are Shaping the Future of Education”



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2013 sees us host Cisco Live in Melbourne for the third time. This year promises to be even bigger and better than the last.

Over 3,200 customers, partners, media, special guests and Cisco employees from 36 different countries around the world, are on their way to the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre for what is truly an action-packed program which kicks off tomorrow. Also, a big welcome to all those participants who are joining us virtually!

Continue reading “Cisco ANZ Leader Welcomes Customers and Partners to Cisco Live Melbourne 2013!”



Authors

Linda Horiuchi

Senior Manager, Australia and New Zealand PR

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Whenever I travel for business, I take my tablet along. It connects me to work email, it plays my favorite music and it allows me to catch up on Red Sox games during baseball season. It is also a filled with pre-K apps for my son to learn his numbers and letters in preparation for kindergarten.

This use of the tablet for engaging young minds is probably no surprise to most parents, and it is no secret that tablets are changing the way our children are learning both in and out of the classroom. More and more schools are interested in ramping up the role of technology in the classroom, and with this in mind, we put together a webinar for K-12 educators on the very topic of tablets in K-12 education.

Continue reading “Tablets in K-12 Education: Design Your Wireless Network for Tomorrow”



Authors

Bill Rubino

Product Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networking and Cloud Marketing

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I have been with Cisco for more than 20 years and have seen incredible growth and change over these two decades – including hundreds of acquisitions that resulted in varying degrees of success for our business. With this recent Cloupia acquisition being strategic to data center management, I thought this would be an opportune time to lend my voice, create a blog, and join the conversation. The increasingly rapid rate of change for data center technology makes this ripe for many interesting blogs, and I hope will spur some commentary from readers. I may have to occasionally throw in some mention of the New York Yankees from time to time – which may also insight some colorful feedback as well.

As we have seen over the past decade, virtualization has transformed the data center as much as any other single technology.  Virtualization has brought flexibility and agility to the data center, while reducing the capital expenses required to stand up and maintain the physical environments. This evolution has transformed the value associated with being able to manage complex data center environments through software.

Virtualization is not a free lunch

However, as is the case with many evolutions, these changes have introduced new challenges for IT. The single largest operational cost of managing data centers today is the cost of management and administration of virtual servers. So in many respects the benefits and capital cost savings of virtualization have placed even greater pressure on the ever shrinking IT operational budget.

Why is this happening if virtualization allows users to manage through flexible software? The cause is that virtual environments and assets need to be connected to the underlying physical devices. Often times as dynamic virtualization environments change rapidly, IT staffs are strained to update and reconfigure the underlying connections to the physical devices.

A single pane of glass to manage both worlds

A differentiated approach to help IT organizations more effectively manage the data center is essential to addressing their challenges, and key to that is how physical and virtual environments must be managed together while always aware of each other’s state.

Just as software controls the virtual environment, it should also be connected to the underlying physical devices and the connectivity to virtual environments. Cisco has transformed the way IT manages the relationship between virtual assets and their underlying physical devices. With software such as UCS Manager and Cloupia, IT can dynamically manage physical and virtual assets from a single pane of glass.

Cloupia is the most recent acquisition for Cisco’s Data Center business and is truly a game changer. As our customers look  to migrate from standalone infrastructure to a virtual world, to private cloud and hybrid cloud , as well as public cloud, this easy-to-deploy infrastructure management  provides provisioning for the physical AND the virtual, across the server, the network, and storage.

Listen to my recent conversation with Dominick Delfino, Sr. Director, leading our Global Data Center Architecture Technology team during Cisco Live Europe in London.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qrUbR8oMAE

Continue reading “Cloupia … More than Just Another Cisco Acquisition [VIDEO]”



Authors

Frank Palumbo

Senior Vice President

Global Data Center Sales

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Now that everyone is back from last week’s Mobile World Congress, it is a good time to shift gears to the topic of cloud.

Cloud represents a fundamental shift in how applications and information technology (IT) in general are consumed. It is pretty clear that the market is evolving with many flavors of specialized cloud services coming to market,  providing a wealth of choice for the enterprise, small and medium business (SMB),  and public sector markets and a range of opportunities for cloud providers (CP’s) to provide differentiated cloud services. These services may address industry or country/province specific functionality or compliance requirements. Cisco refers to this trend as A World of Many Clouds.

As predicted in Cisco’s World of Many Clouds vision, organizations are finding themselves with a wealth of cloud services choices from a multitude of cloud vendors. For example, research conducted by Cisco’s IBSG consulting organization found that SMBs are significantly increasing their spend on SaaS services.  Between 2011 and 2013 SMBs between 5 and 249 employees will increase the portion of their IT spend allocated to hosted or subscriptions technology services by 2.6X.Similarly, recent research from Parallels has found that SMB’s used 4 cloud services each on average in 2012 and are predicted to use 7 cloud services each by 2015. Continue reading “On the Verge of Cloud Chaos?”



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Retailers looking at the Big Data opportunity may well find themselves with an array of choices: the opportunities seem so vast, where does one begin?

Well, a pragmatic way forward is to focus on some pragmatic possibilities and then “follow the money”!

In examining the Big Data opportunity for retailers, Cisco IBSG has identified three key areas where we believe value can be generated through Big Data analytics – and we have put together a framework for assessing and comparing the financial impact of options within these areas.

As outlined in our previous report, “Surfing the Data Deluge: How Retailers Can Turn Big Data into Big Profits,” three areas – video, social and mobile data –promise unprecedented insights into what consumers want or need, at the earliest stages of interest, and will drive the Big Data thrust in retail over the next few years. These three essentials not only represent a major stream of incoming data, but also provide an outbound mechanism to communicate with customers on a more personalized basis. In other words, they are both a source of Big Data analytics and a way of implementing Big Data insights!
Continue reading “Big Data in Retailing: Follow the Money!”



Authors

Richard Medcalf

Director of Economics Practice

Internet Business Solutions Group

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I have a keen interest in the Latin American region because several of my closest friends and my respected colleagues are from this region. Also, internal market forces and global demand are accelerating the rate of data center projects, further heightening my interest. Last year, I visited the region where I got to see data center build outs and realized the extent of the “greenfield” opportunity. I very recently got acquainted with Daniel Garcia, a 12-year Cisco veteran and Security Specialist sales engineer covering the Latin American region. I found his insights most valuable and different to what I usually hear.

For Daniel the greatest difference between the Latin American Region and other regions is the number of Greenfield data center projects. But Daniel finds that many customers are looking for “cookie cutter” solutions that they implement into their environments without much customizing. This was something I hadn’t heard before but which makes excellent sense. The reason for this approach is that many customers lack in-house IT expertise and require proven solutions. The benefits of this approach mean less risk, less cost and with any validated solutions, far less time in production and testing. The downside is that each organization has distinct needs according to their business line and size, and their risk tolerance will vary. Daniel works with his customers to tweak data center reference architectures to provide customers with a tailored and secure data center environment. Continue reading “Ask the Data Center Expert: Trends in Latin America”



Authors

Evelyn de Souza

Cloud Data Governance Leader

Chief Technology and Architecture Office

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If you’re in London this week for the 2013 Cable Congress, and have any interest in the roadmap and economics of cloud-TV, you don’t want to miss the keynote address by Jesper Andersen, SVP/GM of our Service Provider Video Technology Group.

He’s on at 4P on March 5, just after the international CTO panel.

What you’ll learn: Continue reading “One to Watch This Week at Cable Congress 2013: Jesper Andersen’s Keynote”



Authors

David Yates

as Director of Service Provider Video Marketing at Cisco

SP360

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March 4 marks the beginning of the third annual Telework Week, a week-long effort to get public sector agencies, companies and individuals to pledge to telework. Once again, Cisco is proud to be a platinum sponsor of this worthwhile event.

Last year, more than 71,000 people – 94 percent of whom were federal employees – participated, saving more than 250,000 hours in commuting time and more than 6.4 million miles of driving. It was a new record, but this year’s participation promises to be even greater and we have already surpassed our goal of 100,000 pledges. Among the federal agencies participating this year are USDA, DOT, FEMA, NASA, FAA, and USPTO. Continue reading “Telework Week: A Public Sector Success Story”



Authors

Patrick Finn

No Longer at Cisco