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hagusleoBy Henky Agusleo, Vertical Manager, and Neeraj Arora, Director, IBSG Service Provider – neerarorSingapore

A rapidly expanding, tech-savvy middle class is driving an explosion of connected mobile devices, with close to a billion smartphones and tablets in the world today. These users are looking for new cloud-based “Connected Life” experiences from their mobile devices, creating tremendous opportunities for service providers (SPs). The key is in mobile cloud. The Cisco® Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) projects a direct worldwide mobile-cloud service opportunity of more than $60 billion by 2016, with an additional cloud pull-through market of $335 billion.

But so far, service providers have not taken the lead in offering cloud-based Connected Life services. That claim belongs to over-the-top (OTT) application developers, content providers, and device manufacturers, such as Google and Apple, who have moved quickly to take the high ground in this market.

OTTs Have First-Mover Advantage

This first-mover advantage has Continue reading “Reclaiming Mobile Cloud Services from OTTs: Seven Actions Service Providers Can Take to Capture a $60 Billion Opportunit …”



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Chris Osika

Senior Director, Global Lead

Service Provider Practice Internet Business Solutions Group

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1. Define Your Voice
Writing for social media is its own discipline and different from traditional writing: it is more like writing a story, a story that you want people to share with their friends and so on and so on. Defining your voice is the combination of knowing what you want to say and how you want to say it. Your knowledge, interests, and personality will only add value to the story. Plus, telling a story in your own way is what will create a unique and authentic connection with readers. One way to define your voice is to stop writing the way you think you should–you know, the way your English teacher told you to write–and start writing the way you think and speak. The words should fit you and be easy to read aloud.

2. Hook Your Audience from the Start
In addition to easy to read aloud, social media writing should be tighter and simpler than traditional writing: the beginning of your story should hook readers fast and hard, the way a song’s hook does. Whether you love or hate Queen, you know what comes after “we are the champions” (at least if you’re older than 25). That’s right, “no time for losers.” In essence, a hook is a memorable phrase that summarizes what a song is about. Think of a title and an opening line as your story’s hook. And don’t worry that you’re giving away the best part. Knowing what to expect won’t ruin your story for readers. It will prime them for what’s next and introduce your main point.

3. Construct Clear, Compelling Copy
Speaking of your main point, get to it quickly and clearly. While using a string of straightforward, declarative sentences is too abrupt for traditional writing, it is perfect for social media. Because unlike traditional writing, readers won’t go back to re-read or stop to think about difficult sections. Your writing has to be clear and direct the first time around: don’t be coy and promise to get to the interesting stuff later. Think of your story as a first date: put on your fancy pants and put forward your most compelling, date-worthy self. It’ll make your readers want to read your story and get to know you better. At the very least, it won’t make them regret saying yes.



Authors

Deb Saunders

Technical Marketing Manager

Collaboration Technology Group

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Yesterday, “The Network: Cisco’s Technology News Site” was honored by Ragan PR Daily as “Best Online Newsroom.”  (Great .gif of Sandra Bullock on this page as well, by the way!)

And, last month, we received the Grand Prize from Bulldog Reporter 2012 Bulldog Digital/Social PR Awards for “The Network.”  I also talked to Richard Carufel, Editor of the Daily ‘Dog about “The Network” and offered some thoughts for our approach to brand journalism, online newsrooms and offering value to your audience.

Certainly, recognition is extremely nice and we all want some form of this in our lives. The Social Media Communications team at Cisco* is  honored and humbled by these awards and add them to a handful of other great honors over the past few years.

First, thank you, Ragan PR Daily. Thank you, Bulldog Reporter. Thank you, American Business Awards (The Stevie). Thank you, PR News People Awards. But, mostly, thank you, audience.

Why did we get these awards?  In a word: innovation.

Let me count the ways that (imho) we innovate on “The Network” and are continuing to innovate:

Continue reading ““The Network:” Cisco’s Technology Newsroom Garners Industry Awards”



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John Earnhardt

No Longer at Cisco

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IT managers are in an interesting situation – all the developments in virtualization, compute, and mobility are bringing new opportunities for architecting an efficient IT infrastructure. They are looking for ways to do more with less infrastructure. These developments are accelerating resource centralization, with more and more critical assets moving into the enterprise headquarters and data center and this is creating a ripple effect on branch and remote offices. To meet regulatory compliance and cost-control requirements, many organizations are optimizing resources and reducing complexity in the branch office. Continue reading “Distributed VDI for Enterprise Branches”



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Jay Chokshi

Director Product Management

Enterprise Networking

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RPODIMG_5776I really love my mobile devices, my iPhoneiPod, and rPod.

What’s an rPoD you ask? It’s my mobile getaway vehicle.

I can get access to mobile apps, listen to music, and enjoy a getaway to the coast. These devices are not just for fun though, these are powerful tools that allow me to telework from home or in reality anywhere and anytime. My mobile apps include my email, calendar, webex, jabber and other apps required for me to do my job.  I’m more productive, it’s more cost-effective, and very flexible.  And, it’s secure.

This week, I’m attending the RSA security conference in San Francisco.  Mobile device security and cyber security are some of the hot topics in the keynotes, special government sessions, and throughout the event. I’m able to attend this event to learn about the new technologies available to secure mobile devices and cloud and also the expanding cybersecurity threats. At the same time, I’m productive, mobile and secure.

Next week, like most every week, I will be teleworking. Please join me and more than 100,000 others to support Telework Week.

Cisco, in partnership with the Mobile Work Exchange, is a proud supporter of Telework Week from March 4-8. Telework Week 2013 is a global effort to encourage government agencies, business organizations, and individuals to pledge to telework anytime during this week. Please take a minute to visit this site to learn more about the benefits of Telework, pledge to support this initiative, and use the calculator to estimate savings. I have been teleworking for nearly 20 years and plan to continue to enjoy the benefits for mobility and telework for years to come.

Continue reading “Mobile Telework: Cost Effective, Flexible and Secure”



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Kacey Carpenter

Senior Manager

Global Government and Public Sector Marketing

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This week, Juniper Networks announced a new cloud-based threat intelligence service focused on fingerprinting attackers’ individual devices. We’d like to officially welcome Juniper to the cloud-based security intelligence market—a space where Cisco has a proven track record of leadership through Security Intelligence Operations (SIO). Imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, but in Juniper’s case, they entered the market years late and with limited visibility.

Let’s take a closer look at Juniper’s latest offering.

To start, here is what we know for certain: cyber threats take advantage of multiple attack vectors, striking quickly or lurking for days, months and even years inside your network. Not only this, but the Cisco 2013 Annual Security Report showcases how the web is an equal opportunity infector, with cyber threats crossing national, geographic and organizational boundaries as quickly and easily as users can click on a link. Security solutions must understand the attacks and infrastructure they are launched from, with tracking individual hackers doing far less for your defenses than blocking malicious activity being actively distributed over the network.

The Problem of Visibility

When a detective walks onto a crime scene, they don’t just focus on one thing. The only way to understand an event is to look at the entire scene: interview witnesses, check the neighborhood and look into the history of everyone involved; in other words, context—or the “who, what, where and how” information using every available piece of data.

Just as a skilled investigator builds a holistic picture, security solutions are only as reliable as the intelligence they receive, with Juniper’s being limited by the number of “honeypots” across their customer base. In network security, focusing on a single piece of information, a single attack vector, or one delivery mechanism misses the global visibility and context needed to stop advanced attacks. Cisco SIO powers our security solutions, receiving over 100 terabytes of network intelligence across 1.6 million deployed web, email, firewall and IPS devices. We correlate this data from physical, virtual and cloud-based solutions with a world-class threat research team, augmenting all of this with an ecosystem of third-party contributors. Fingerprinting is one small tool you should deploy in your arsenal, even though it has limited utility and perhaps even limited accuracy.

Continue reading “Missing the Mark on Cloud-based Intelligence”



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It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but remember a couple of months ago when we were all reading articles like “5 ways technology will impact higher ed in 2013” about trends to watch in 2013? Well, at the beginning of the year, I highlighted four of those high-impact trends educators should be on the lookout for. Three of those trends were around the rise of the cloud, personal devices and flipped teaching, but one trend I’m really excited about is that of hybrid learning.

As new technologies begin to be used across campuses, educators are often challenged to find ways to best integrate the old with the new. As John Chambers recently said in his post around the Internet of Everything,  “My perspective is that it’s best to accept change as inevitable – to embrace it, lead it, and use it to shape desired outcomes,” and that’s exactly what I think will happen with hybrid learning. Continue reading “With Blended Learning Students and Educators Get the Best of Both Worlds”



Authors

Kerry Best

Marketing Manager

Public Sector Marketing

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This has been an exciting week. Further expanding its Big Data portfolio, Cisco has announced collaboration with Intel, its long term partner, for the next generation of open platform for data management and analytics. The joint solution combines Intel® Distribution for Apache Hadoop Software with Cisco’s Common Platform Architecture (CPA) to deliver performance, capacity, and security for enterprise-class Hadoop deployments.

As described in my blog posting, the CPA is highly scalable architecture designed to meet variety of scale-out application demands that includes compute, storage, connectivity and unified management, already being deployed in a range of industries including finance, retail, service provider, content management and government. Unique to this architecture is the seamless data integration and management integration capabilities between big data applications and enterprise applications such as Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP and others, as shown below:
CPA Magt 1
The current version of the CPA offers two options depending on use case: Performance optimized – offers balanced compute power with I/O bandwidth optimized for price/performance, and Capacity optimized – for low cost per terabyte. The Intel® Distribution is supported for both performance optimized and capacity optimized options, and is available in single rack and multiple rack scale.

The Intel® Distribution is a controlled distribution based on the Apache Hadoop, with feature enhancements, performance optimizations, and security options that are responsible for the solution’s enterprise quality. The combination of the Intel® Distribution and Cisco UCS joins the power of big data with a dependable deployment model that can be implemented rapidly and scaled to meet performance and capacity of demanding workloads.  Enterprise-class services from Cisco and Intel can help with design, deployment, and testing, and organizations can continue to rely on these services through controlled and supported releases.

A performance optimized CPA rack running Intel® Distribution will be demonstrated at the Intel Booth at O’Reilly Strata Conference 2013 this week.



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Raghunath Nambiar

No Longer with Cisco

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In this week’s episode of Engineers Unplugged, Brian Gracely (@bgracely) of Virtustream takes on the challenge of explaining the industry’s top buzzword, Software Defined Networking, using doughnuts. Seeing is believing:

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

Technology made delicious and simple. Thoughts, comments, or feedback? Join the conversation @CiscoDC.

Join us next week for Engineers Unplugged Episode 3: OpenStack, featuring Joe Onisick and Colin McNamara.



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