Sure, there are many events and conferences going on this week, but stick a reminder on your calendar to watch this week’s episode of Engineers Unplugged. Ed Saipetch (@edsai) of Speaking in Tech and other fames and Andre Leibovici (@andreleibovici) of VMware talk about the evolution of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), VDI, EUC, and the changes brought about by new devices.
Bringing the 1970s office to you, unicorn style.
Welcome to Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple:
Episodes will publish weekly (or as close to it as we can manage)
Submit ideas for episodes or volunteer to appear by Tweeting to @CommsNinja
Practice drawing unicorns
What have been your challenges (IT or client side) as we move into the world of mobile employment and endlessly proliferating devices and apps? Post a comment here, or join the discussion on Twitter, #EngineersUnplugged.
This BizTech video is a first in a new series where I am hoping to find a middle ground that is certainly more business oriented than TechWiseTV but not so distant and high level that we can’t be specific.
Storywise -- these can be a challenge. Coming up with good visuals in a story like this is more difficult I think because you need both time and budget to cover these subjects well.
Before I share some of the production stuff I enjoy talkng about -- let me set up the content…let you watch it, then read on if interested in the other stuff.
The subject for this one was cross-departmental with underlying technologies from both Cisco Collaboration and Borderless teams. Virtualized Workspaces , a very specific term to denote something beyond (but certainly including VDI) is covered with Laura and her guest Phil Serburne. Jaishree brought in Neil Anderson to talk strategy around mobility…an area of incredible impact these days. We also secured Kenneth Daniels from Samsung to talk about SAFE: Secure Architecture for Enterprise . We finish out with an intro level voice over for Cisco Remote Expert
Our first step here was using co-hosts Jaishree Subramania and Laura Powers. Both great Cisco managers in thier own areas (and frequent hosts for topics on TechWiseTV). But we also stretched with a few metaphors during the transitions.
Part of this becomes an excuse whenever I can to practice my weak skills in walking and talking to a camera…(not as easy as one would think), but also, again, just to try and keep the pacing up a bit. We were shooting the Samsung interview in Richardson, TX. We had to scramble and capture that interview at the Cisco campus since we did not have a room at Samsung reserved. No worries…we shot that inside one of our conference rooms (not easy to make look interesting…but Director Steve Ewertz did his normally creative touch and made it great). We then shot my standups outside the Samsung building to make it look like we had been there. This was all authorized..but its funny how quickly security always shows up. I could only flub my lines so many times with pressure increasting from the building security guys…we pressed on…but if you look closely, you can see we are about to get approached for the last time…
One other bit of ‘behind the scenes’ I think was interesting. This same shot, if you watch it in the video, was done on a slider. These are great little additions to your camera gear for video as they can give you that cinematic movement IF you set it up correctly. Good slider shots require foreground objects or you can’t see the move. Once again, Director Steve to the rescue…if you look at the beginning of that shot…
The cameras movement is only apparent due to that green leafy branch at the start. Reality is -- Steve picked that up off the ground and held it in frame just so we could see some foreground motion and sell the shot. I love that stuff…it dawned on me that he could have kept the camera still and just pulled the branch over and we would have THOUGHT the camera was moving. So keep that in mind if you need a slider shot for you next video and you don’t have a slider!
Hope you enjoy this first BizTech. We are working on a few others that we will to bring to you soon.
Cisco’s Financial Services Industry Marketing team is pleased to welcome a monthly contribution from industry professionals sharing their insights and observations on key trends in the Financial Services industry. The opinions expressed in these posts are those of our welcomed guests and may not reflect the opinions of Cisco.
Jerry Silva, Principal at PG Silva Consulting, is a 25 year industry veteran and thought leader in retail banking. He recently had the opportunity to discuss what comprises a high quality customer experience with Kelly McSwain-Campbell, Customer Experience Director at US Bank. In this role, Kelly is responsible for working across the enterprise with all lines of business and channels to help ensure teams deliver a differentiated customer experience that builds stronger and deeper relationships.
Delighting the Customer: Simple Works
As a banker and technologist, I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with systems that manage customer self-service channels like the ATMs and online banking, or with the systems that bank staff uses to interact with the customer. As a consumer of banking services myself, I’ve always been interested in the people side of services delivery and how banks can deliver quality experiences at the branch and the attended contact center.
I recently had a chat with Kelly McSwain-Campbell, SVP and Customer Experience Director at Minneapolis-based US Bancorp, and asked her for some insight into today’s challenges and how she manages to delight the customer in spite of the increasing complexity of the banking environment. Organizational and technology complexity sometimes work to hinder our ability to provide an excellent customer experience and we as bankers sometimes find ourselves even more distant from our customers.
But during my discussion with Ms. McSwain-Campbell, she made it clear that given the challenges with managing customer expectations across the multiple delivery channels, she is focusing on simple but effective ways to stay connected with customers at each point of interaction. We spoke about three areas that can ensure customers continue to enjoy the best banking experience possible. Read More »
The Cisco telework program has evolved over the years from a convergence of top-down company practices with bottom-up changes in employee expectations. From our experience we have learned how several factors can make flexible work a success for everyone.
Clear policies and company culture. Cisco has adopted a flexible policy that enables many employees to telework, based on their job requirements and their manager’s approval. Where necessary, this policy is customized to reflect country-specific laws and employee entitlements. Also important is creating a company culture of trusting employees to work responsibly, strong performance management practices and finding the right balance of autonomous and collaborative action.
But a successful teleworking program requires more.
3 years ago Cisco entered the server platform market with the Unified
Computing System (UCS). This server platform was built from the ground up
for virtualization and immediately started making an impact and gaining
market share. Today it holds the number 2 position worldwide for blades.
At this same time Cisco began to deepen its partnership with SAP. SAP
customers who had relied on Cisco for their networking gear looked to
expand the Cisco relationship by moving their SAP instances to UCS. SAP
HANA accelerated many of these customers move to UCS. Because SAP HANA
operated outside the bounds of the Data Center, it has allowed the
companies to look at UCS without affecting their current SAP instance
while proving UCS as a fast, reliable, scalable, cost reducing platform,
giving the customers confidence that Cisco UCS can more than handle the
mission-critical application workload
But that was just the beginning of the relationship between these two
giants. The diversity of both Cisco and SAP has allowed for a much more
strategic and far reaching relationship allowing each of us to expand our
business together.
SAP Afaria and Precision Retail in SAP’s mobility area combined with the
Cisco mobility and Cisco UCS platform business is bringing mobility to
the masses in a cost efficient way. In addition SAP has begun
collaboration with Cisco’s Jabber collaboration product again using UCS
as the basis platform for these products. Teamed together, Cisco’s and
SAP’s Cloud business has also made a big impact in the form of Vblock and
Flexpod.
Last but not least, Cisco, unlike its platform competitors, partners with
EMC and NetApp for the storage and SANS product in order to complete all
solutions with SAP. Customers enjoy the flexibility of these solutions
allowing them to keep the vendors they have already standardized on. An
added bonus to these customers is that it allows them to also maintain
their reseller relationships using the massive channel capabilities of
Cisco, where over 95 per cent of Cisco products are sold
Cisco and SAP recently completed a 20 city world wide SAP HANA and Cloud
road show generating millions of dollars of new revenue for both
companies. Cisco and SAP are the world leaders in their respective
areas, reinforcing their position in the market connecting the world in
the Internet of Things.
