Avatar

cisco-automation-fair

Cisco has a significant presence at Automation Fair  in Houston this week.  This event is not only the largest gathering of Rockwell Automation users, it is also one of the most well-attended conferences for controls and industrial automation. Cisco-auto-fairThe day was busy both in the exhibit floor and throughout the sessions, industry forums and demonstration areas.

Continue reading “Day 1 Wrap-up from Automation Fair”



Authors

Chet Namboodri

Senior Director

Global Private Sector Industries Marketing

Avatar

When it comes to mobility, everyone is learning fast in order to keep up. With what seems like daily advances in mobile technology and rapid consumer adoption, it is not getting any easier for organizations to break the cycle of reactive IT decision making. For many of our customers, enterprise mobility happened to them and the initial supporting architecture was built at light speed to respond to the demands of the business. While this approach was necessary to stop the deluge, it didn’t put all of the pieces in place to enable organizations to adapt the continuous change and emerging new realities of mobility. For instance:

  • Users now connect to the network with three or more mobile/WLAN devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones, resulting in complex wireless infrastructures and network bottlenecks.
  • Inconsistent management tools and policies across the wired and wireless segments of the network increase the burden for network managers and drive up management costs and complexity.
  • Employees demand access from devices not only within the corporation, but also beyond the firewall.
  • Risk management dictates that corporate data must remain protected.

The need to balance productivity with security and coordinate business justification with the various line of business (LOB) owners has never been greater. IT leaders who want to break out of the reactive cycle of just keeping up must take a step back to evaluate what’s coming next. What changes are on the horizon? How will it impact my network? How can my network help me adapt to the changing needs of my employees?

Continue reading “An Architectural Approach to Mobility”



Authors

Sujai Hajela

Senior Vice President,

Enterprise Networking Group

Avatar

Free Cisco learningIt goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway): reliability is important, as well as ensuring that you have a backup plan to continue that reliability. Just yesterday as I was embarking on my 50-mile commute into the office, I discovered that one of my car tires was completely flat. A spare tire, a standard feature in most cars here in the States, came to the rescue. Knowing how to change the tire myself, now that’s a different story…

In all seriousness, reliability and high availability are especially critical when it comes to keeping your business – including your branch locations – up and running. After all, downtime has disastrous consequences on your day-to-day operations, productivity, customer experience, and revenue. Imagine you’re in a retail environment and the WAN goes down, even for 10 minutes: the Point of Sale (POS) system is kaput, thus transactions are halted, customers are upset, and you’ve just lost thousands of dollars or more in revenue!

So what happens if your server, WAN, or worse, total system, fails? Continue reading “UCS E-Series: The Survivability Guide | Inside the Branch”



Authors

Jolene Tam

Product Marketing Manager

Security

Avatar

Each year, thousands of U.S. veterans return from the battlefield with exceptional leadership, technical and other skills they have acquired overseas. Even so, many experience difficulty finding a job, and return feeling overwhelmed by the high unemployment rate they are up against. Today, in a program to assist veterans in transferring their military experience into successful careers, the Michigan Workforce Development Agency (WDA) and Cisco are teaming up to pilot IT training and certification programs aimed at connecting veterans with in-demand job opportunities.

Vets“We’ve got all these young people coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, have made incredible sacrifices, have taken on incredible responsibilities — you know, you see some 23-year-old who’s leading a platoon in hugely dangerous circumstances, making decisions, operating complex technologies. These are folks who can perform, but unfortunately, what we’re seeing is that a lot of these young veterans have a higher unemployment rate than people who didn’t serve. And that makes no sense.”

 – President Barack Obama

Continue reading “Cisco Collaborates with Partners to Provide IT Skills and Career Opportunities to Veterans in Michigan”



Authors

Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn

Vice President and General Manager

Cisco Services

Avatar

The mobile market continues to evolve at a blindingly fast pace. It seems that new faster, sleeker, and more powerful mobile devices are launched every day, with new device categories created almost overnight. The number of available applications to run on these revolutionary new devices is staggering, numbering in the millions. Now you can do everything, from banking and controlling your home thermostat to shopping, entertainment, and printing a boarding pass, all from the palm of your hand. In addition, we now have faster ways to connect these devices to the Internet using 4G/LTE or Wi-Fi technologies.

While service providers are clearly benefiting from the rise of mobility and all the innovations in devices applications they are constantly trying to understand how consumers are using mobility and where the mobile market is heading. To continue to derive business value from mobility, service providers need to better understand mobility from the users’ perspective and translate what they discover into new sources of business value.

To learn more, Cisco conducted a survey of 620 U.S. mobile users to understand their needs and behaviors, use of devices, applications and mobile access technologies, and how they have changed since our 2012 mobile consumer survey.

The study revealed Continue reading “Understanding the Changing Mobile User”



Authors

Stuart Taylor

Director

Service Provider Transformation Group

Avatar

InsiemeWow ! The Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)  Launch was one of these amazing events which can only rejoice a social media leader  like me .
13K+ registants for the webcast ! A Twitter storm (#ACI, #Insieme)  Over 4000 mentions in a few hours ! A blog editorial plan including so far more than 10 Cisco blogs, 15 Technology partners blogs , and numerous articles from 3rd party, analysts and journalists – A festival of  videos, podcast,  broadcast and infographics.

On the top of that  I am pleased to welcome Cisco ACI a fast growing and independent LinkedIn  group – And I’d like to thank over 5500 professionals who already follow our brand new Cisco Data Center page on LinkedIn !
These series of facts show us how much interest our customers and partners find in this breakthrough  vision and products announcement . So I figured out that a “little ” list of what’s available now will not hurt anybody !

This blog is designed to grow over the time thanks to your contribution – So please feel free to post a comment with links (blogs, video, infographics , slideshare deck ) that I could have missed –  Or simply tell us what blog(s) or video(s) inspired you the most and why .  And don’t hesitate to follow me @drombaut to make sure that I promote your suggestions:)

And ..voila ! First iteration !

Blogs

Cisco

John Chambers    Transforming I.T. for the Application Economy
Shashi Kiran  Redefining the Power of IT with Application centric Infrastructure  
Scott Clark   Is Your Data Center Ready for ACI Transformation?
Chris Young  Security Drives Major Transition in the Network and Data Center
Gary Kinghorn   ACI  includes Strong Partner Ecosystem for Security and Network services
Joann Starke  Automation and Application Centric Infrastructure
Balaji Sivasubramanian   Introducing Cisco Application Virtual Switch (AVS) -Extending Virtual Networking to Applications
Harry Petty    Ecosystem for Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Tackes Application Agility
Gary Kinghorn    Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Application Virtual Switch (AVS)
Ravi Balakrishnan    Close Peek at Cisco ACI : Network Abstraction, VXLAN, Programmability
Gary Kinghorn  Follow-up Q&A on ACI Methodology and the Pursuit of an Application-Aware Methodology           New!
Stephen Speirs  The Quickest way to Get Started with ACI       New!

Technology Partners

CA technologies Andi Mann, Vice President, Strategic Solutions
Dawn of Application Centric Infrastructure for Cloud and Big Data 
Citrix   Abishek Chauhan, CTO, NetScaler Product Group
When Applications and Network Unite : the Age of Enlightned Infrastructure
Citrix Steve Blacklock, Sr. Director, Strategic Alliance
Cisco Citrix Why is our Partnership so Important
EMC  Connie Hastings, Director, Technology Alliance
EMC Cisco Lock Arms to Deliver Next Generation Data Center
Emulex  Rick Trujilio, Product Marketing Manager
Propelling Applications Forward with Network Visibility and Agility: Ecosystem Member for Cisco ACI
F5   Lori MacVittie, Senior Product Manager
F5 and Cisco Application-Centric : From Top to Bottom and End to End
Microsoft  Satya Nadella, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise
Microsoft and Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure, hello cloud!
Microsoft  Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Windows Server & System Center
Recap: Cisco & Microsoft at the ACI Launch in NYC
NetApp   Jay Kidd, Chief Technology Officer
Offspring of a Common Vision : Clustered Data ONTAP and Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure
NetApp JohnRollason , Director, Products, Solutions & Alliance marketing EMEA
A Vision of Application-Centric, Cloud Integrated Infrastructure
RedHat  Paul Cormier, President, Products and Technologies
Deliver OpenStack Innovation
Splunk Hal Rottenberg, Practice Manager, Datacenter Infrastructure
Cisco is bringing the Network to the Application : What does that mean in Machine Data Terms
Symantec Steve Bennett, President and Chief Executive Officer
Cisco & Symantec Put Protection at the Heart of Infrastructure Automation
VCE Trey Layton, Chief Technology Officer
Bringing ACI to VCE Vblock System

Nick Lippis  Lippis Report
Cisco’s Nexus 9000 redefines Software Defined Networking

Independent  Bloggers

Pete Welcher
The Cisco/Insieme Launch Part1   Part 2

@AmyEngineer   Just Another Day at The Office
App-Titude
Continue reading “Cisco ACI : The (Almost) Complete List of Social Media Assets”



Avatar

Well, the first day of Automation Fair 2013, Rockwell Automation’s (RA) largest user conference, is almost a wrap.  The George Brown Convention Center in Houston was the setting for today’s very busy activities- at the exhibition floor, packed sessions, hand-on demonstrations and industry workshops.

As my colleagues Peter Granger and Paul Didier describe in the video below, Cisco has now evolved to having a very pervasive presence at this event.  From our own booth (#1321) to presence in the Rockwell Automation Oil and Gas booth to the Industrial IP Advantage booth (#1223), our products and solutions are highlighted throughout the show floor and in several sessions.  It is particularly nice to know that we have evolved from showcasing from just a few products to having over 200 switches, routers and other industrial networking gear at the show floor.  And our partnership with RA has evolved and grown significantly too. There were only a handful of Cisco attendees at our first Automation Fair.  Now there are several dozen Cisco employees onsite in Houston, including key executives.

Continue reading “First Day of Automation Fair 2013”



Authors

Douglas Bellin

Global Lead, Industries

Manufacturing and Energy

Avatar

This week we’re back on Engineers Unplugged with special guests J Metz (@drjmetz) and Francois Zimmerman (@francoiszim), who discuss Flash Acceleration and the recent CVD release (Cisco Solution for Hitachi Unified Compute Solution) on the topic. Great discussion about how flash storage is changing the conversation, from the tech and business perspective:

What are you seeing in the industry? Agree or disagree, post a comment, send a tweet, follow along using one of the methods below!

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

Join the behind the scenes by liking Engineers Unplugged on Facebook.



Authors