The great (relatively) untapped kingdom of ‘indoor wireless’ may be the next great frontier?
With expectations of WiFi connectivity for just about any business we visit these days, there is no reason this next step for making the physical world more accessible should not be adopted. Indoor location services offer the chance for us to use our ever-present smart devices to navigate large facilities easier than ever before. This also represents great opportunity for retail to touch (and measure) customers better than ever before as the struggle between bricks and mortar vs. online shopping continues.
Fierce Broadband Wireless covered the recent Qualcomm and Cisco announcement around Hotspot 2.0 and Passpoint and you can see how this continues to heat up. It is valuable for so many reasons.
Add this to your list of parties spoilt by the Internet revolution: national sovereignty.
We all know that the borderless nature of the Internet is stretching longstanding technical and legal definitions. But recently, my colleague Richard Aceves and I got to talking about the mish-mash that social media is making of culture, language, and national identity. It should come as no surprise that cultures and languages are being diluted by the global online discussion, in the same way that the advent of television and radio had a dampening effect on certain regional spoken colloquialisms and accents. Richard will examine some cultural questions in a forthcoming blog post, while I’ll be discussing the psychological impact on national sovereignty.
Judging by the proliferation of Internet policies and legislation, it is pretty clear that bureaucrats and politicians in capital cities around the world are worried that the Internet (with special thanks to social media) is simultaneously eroding both their authority and their national identity. Continue reading “Sovereignty and the Internet”
On the eve of Microsoft’s first Lync User Conference, I think it’s a great time to start a frank and direct conversation about what’s changed in collaboration and, because of those changes, what’s really important for IT decision makers to consider as they evaluate collaboration vendors and solutions. This conversation, which I’m confident will spark a lively and healthy debate, will last for weeks and will include input from a variety of Cisco Collaboration leaders.
So, to start, what has changed in collaboration? At the macro level, I would argue that collaboration has evolved from a tolerated office tool into the single most important technology investment that an organization can make. Why? Because the next breakthrough levels of performance and productivity needed in business won’t come from a better-looking web portal or a bigger Inbox — they’ll come from the ability to tap into the collective knowledge and creativity of our people.
But, here’s the catch: not all collaboration solutions are designed to help people engage the way they want to engage, and they’re also not architected from the ground up to cater to IT’s needs and requirements.
Customers tell us time and again that a modern collaboration platform needs to deliver more than the basics like IM, conferencing and VoIP. It needs to offer flexibility and choice in support of trends such as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), high-quality video, and cloud-based deployments (private, public, hybrid, and hosted). The modern collaboration platform needs to be usable not just by office workers but by anyone, from physicians to customer care agents, executives, mobile and desk-less workers. And it needs to be as complete of a solution as possible — including the underlying infrastructure, a wide choice of compatible endpoints, and world-class support and maintenance — to maximize business and IT value.
In a recent interview, the Director of IT Operations at a New York based Enterprise said that one of the biggest problems he was facing was maintaining customer satisfaction on performance as the data deluge grew unabated. According to an IDC 2012 report “..Data creation is taking place at an unprecedented rate and is currently growing at over 60% per year. IDC’s Digital Universe Study predicts that between 2009 and 2020, digital data will grow 44-fold to 35ZB per year..”. One ZB or Zettabyte is 1000 billion gigabytes… you get the picture.
The implications are that more data will be stored and processed on servers. Data could be on local disks or it could be in some large storage arrays, which are connected to the server by a network. It may be pre-processed and stored in a database for faster analysis. The computer (server) or applications must now quickly access the partially processed or raw data. The data could be structured as in ERP solutions or unstructured and handled by scale out Big Data applications. Nevertheless, data will have to flow back and forth through the network connecting servers and the storage. Additionally as Client Virtualization gains traction, data center servers would need to access large files located in storage devices most likely connected through networks. These use cases are addressed by the Cisco UCS and Fusion-IO partnership and therefore generated a whole lot of interest in the June 2012 announcement. In a recent interview at CiscoLive London, Cisco Executive, Paul Perez, reiterated the importance of the collaboration, and benefits to Cisco UCS customers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnFheKoqeVs
So how does Fusion-io ioDrive2 accelerate data access? It optimizes the use of existing network bandwidth for data i/o intensive workloads with a low
Service Financial Management is the focus of Domain 6 in Cisco Services‘ DomainTenSM Model for Data Center and Cloud Transformation. Closely related to the User Portal (Domain 4) and Service Catalog and Management (Domain 5), service financial management is one of those organizationally challenging topics for the data center management team – although with the advent of cloud services, is becoming more widely appreciated and in many cases (e.g. a service provider offering cloud services to businesses, a public sector organization offering services to other regional public service organizations), a mandatory part of your offer. So let’s discuss this area and I’ll point you to a technical white paper from Cisco Services experts on this topic.
Cisco Domain Ten – Domain 6 – Service Financial Management
We do a lot of shows about video of course. It’s always a challenge I think when it comes to defining what the unique value of a given story needs to be. In this case, we were not featuring newly announced technology, which greatly simplifies the direction for us – but we were considering what we thought were some unmet needs.
Our goal for this episode: To make Cisco video for collaboration more approachable for every customer.
https://youtu.be/Wdvfu7qhrDw
Cisco does a lot of things in the broad category of ‘video.’ With more than 8,000 engineers working on video innovation, Cisco is a video powerhouse. Our teams have filed 1,700 video-related patents in the last five years. Innovations include TelePresence, Videoscape, Show and Share, Media Experience Engine, and Pulse Analytics. Internal innovation has been augmented with acquisitions including NDS, TANDBERG, BNI Video, Inlet, and ExtendMedia.
As we talked to customers and experts within Cisco, we kept coming back to a structure best defined as ‘where are you now’. In other words, video itself is not new as a concept…but as we narrow down to say this is about interactive video…it became helpful to consider where most Cisco customers might be starting from:
Cisco Voice – you are familiar with call manager but have not explored the video capabilities inherent to the platform.
Telepresence – you have some high quality video deployed but its special…only for high end events or people.
Tandberg – you are good with video but its a distinct system from your other communications – Cisco or otherwise
Third Party and Cave Dwellers – Anything from non-Cisco mixed environments to the luddites among us.
The assumption is that video is valuable and that the more pervasive and simple it can become in your organization, the more competitive and nimble you can be. So, with value established, the question becomes about execution.
Our executive guest has a very diverse business and video background who joined us from Tandberg. Jacob Nordan is Senior Director of Product Management for the Collaboration Business Unit. Powers had the honor of hosting his interview. Jacob set the tone for us by highlighting not just our success with various customers, but specifics around how these leaders were using video to pioneer change in their business.
Nathan Shaw joined us for our segment on ‘Understanding Video Endpoints.’ Nathan has been a guest on our show dating back to the very first Telepresence show we did where we helped him load up a Toyota 4-Runner with a CTS 500 so we could get it in the studio. Nathan is an awesome guy with a great background – AND…he is a gushing, proud new father. Could not be happier for him…and very impressed with his photography skills.
From endpoints, we pursued ‘Understanding Video Infrastructure’ with Cynthia Lee. She was a bundle of energy grabbing the pen from Jimmy Ray to help us understand where things like MCU’s and Border Controllers become important to achieve certain video communication objectives.
Jimmy Ray did a Master Class on the intersection of video and security. Its was pure fun with Network Address Translation (NAT), Application Level Gateways (ALG)…avoiding risk and things that will go bump in the night.
We stole a segment from our upcoming new BizTech show that covered some advancements in using ‘Remote Expert’.
We wrapped up with Phil Marachel. We wanted Phil on to talk strategy as he is with our Cisco Services team. His street creed for video is fantastic however as he was doing video way before it was mainstream. As an engineer Phil worked on the biggest systems from PictureTel, the first MultiPoint bridges from Accord…all giants in the earlier years of video.
Hope you enjoyed the show. This is officially episode number 126 of TechWiseTV and we are loving the support you all continue to show us.
More and more people, actually. With the commoditization of HPC, lots of newbie HPC users are intimidated by special, one-off, traditional HPC types of networks and opt for the simplicity and universality of Ethernet.
And it turns out that TCP doesn’t suck nearly as much as most (HPC) people think, particularly on modern servers, Ethernet fabrics, and powerful Ethernet NICs.
A good segue to Fabric-Based Infrastructure is Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Blade Servers (March 2012), by Andrew Butler and George Weiss. To fully understand the tie in with Fabric-Based Infrastructure I suggest reading the section on Cisco UCS. Their observations are important because they tie directly to the subject of this blog. You will also get a better feel for why Cisco UCS is having such rapid customer adoption worldwide.
The emphasis for Fabric-Based Infrastructure is delivering value-add functionality that enables data centers to operate more efficiently and cost effectively. A good place to start is by looking at this Gartner report by George Weiss and Donna Scott – Fabric-Based Infrastructure Enablers and Inhibitors Through the Lens of User Experiences (April 2012). In this short research note, George and Donna go into the key drivers and reasons for the FBI architecture and the benefits that their clients have seen. My take away for the key benefits of Fabric-Based Infrastructure are:
OpEx and CapEx savings
Increased VM density
Time-To-Deploy reduced from months to hours via automation and standards implementation;
Reduce cost and complexity and improve agility;
Improved resiliency by recreating servers and connectivity in minutes using profiles and templates
While reading about a technology innovation is helpful, actually listening to experts discuss the architecture and give their individual perspectives can be more so.
I suggest that you make time to listen to this 34 minute video with featured guest Donna Scott (a VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner) and Paul Perez (VP and CTO for the Data Center Business Group at Cisco Systems) – Fabric-Based Infrastructure (FBI) in Today’s Data Center. Donna looks at the motivations and impact of customers moving to a Fabric Based Infrastructure with an eye toward what is important to adopters. Then Paul discusses Cisco UCS innovations and how they let FBI adopters achieve their goals. If you would like, you can download a podcast of the video from theCisco Analyst Reports page.
From my perspective the truly compelling part of this story is the extent to which Cisco UCS makes the promise of Fabric-Based Infrastructure a reality, while emphasizing safety, security and the risk reduction. These are critical considerations in today’s IT environment. Cisco continues to be a key innovator in data center technology and is continuing to grow from strength to strength, delivering value and benefit for your long term application solution needs.
Below is how I think a Fabric-Based Infrastructure should look. Of course I am predisposed. Cisco UCS architecture provides the ability to define and manage over 120 different server identity parameters via service profile templates, using a native tool with Roles Based Access Controls and across geographies. UCS enables you to have a distributed environment that is centrally managed. Your admins can also use CLI, custom designed tools / scripts, or third party tools as they choose to meet the needs of their current management structure.
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