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Partner-Weekly-Rewind-v2

Every Friday, we’ll highlight the most important Cisco partner news and stories of the week, as well as point you to important, Cisco-related partner content you may have missed along the way. Here’s what you might have missed this week:

Off the Top

Cisco introduced a newly defined Small and Midsize Business (SMB) Specialization this week. Steve Benvenuto, Cisco Senior Director of Business Development for the Strategy, Planning and Partner Programs team in the Worldwide Partner Organization, took the time to explain just what the evolution of that specialization means to the channel in his most recent blog.

Cisco has simplified the specialization by reducing the training courses significantly. In addition, the program exams have been updated and the benefits of the specialization have been updated.

Be sure to check out Steve’s blog and get up to speed on the new SMB Specialization. Continue reading “Cisco Partner Weekly Rewind – September 6, 2013”



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Anna Sui

Social Media Strategist

Global Partner Marketing, Cisco

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What if we could change learning in the classroom to better suit students’ needs and accommodate individual learning styles? That’s exactly what Denton Independent School District in Texas is doing through flipped learning and collaborative video technology.

In his recent blog, Barry Fox describes what the future of education looks like at Denton ISD, and the potential for other school districts throughout the country to adopt a similar model. Through flipped learning, students experience a rich virtual classroom experience, with video-based material made available to students from any location through multiple devices, bringing learning beyond the classroom. This provides the flexibility desired by students, enabling them to easily connect with teachers, re-watch content and learn at their own pace.

Help us share the Denton ISD story of championing student-teacher relationships at next year’s SXSW. Vote for our panel at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/23959.



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Kerry Best

Marketing Manager

Public Sector Marketing

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Right now, with business up 23% year over year, we’re proud to continue to see good performance in our Service Provider Video business– which underlines the importance of having a finger on the pulse of a thriving industry.

And, when one works for a company like Cisco that is focused on helping its service provider customers execute on service velocity, staying ahead requires careful and thoughtful adjusting.

To that end, I recently Continue reading “Updates from our SP Video Business and Welcome Joe Cozzolino!”



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VMware launched NSX, its Network Virtualization platform at VMworld last week. In his keynote, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger portrayed Network Virtualization as a very natural extension to what VMware accomplished in Server Virtualization. However market fundamentals and early drivers for Server Virtualization are not quite the same as Network Virtualization. Hence any comparison and contrast between the two should be understood and weighed on in their respective contexts.

The drive for Server Virtualization fundamentally was an attempt to address the growing gulf between faster rate of technology advancement in server space relative to customer ability to utilize the excess capacity. It was a trend that was driven by the focus towards gaining efficiency in an era where cost was becoming important. Over nearly a decade now Server Virtualization has accomplished this goal of better utilization of assets:  And server utilization levels have increased by a factor of 4 over the years.

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Networks in the data centers today however do not suffer from this excess capacity problem. If any, the problem is the reverse – user demand for networks capacity continues to outpace what is currently available. As long as there remains a growing gulf between user expectations for capacity relative to technology advancement there will remain opportunity for vendors to innovate in this space. In other words unlike the server world, network virtualization does not shift the value away from the underlying infrastructure.

Server Virtualization is transforming IT by providing greater business agility. Goal of Network Virtualization should be to bring similar business agility for the network. However, this goal need not require complete decoupling of the virtual network from underlying physical network as some vendors may lead you to believe. Any goal of gaining agility by completely decoupling physical and virtual network can only be done with some confidence, by significant under-provisioning of the physical network. For if the bandwidth is plenty the overlays have less dependency on understanding or integrating with the underlying infrastructure. This shortsighted approach, which focuses on business agility, but ignores business assurance, will increase the network capital expenditure and operating expense spend over time. Note that even in the server world where compute efficiency was attained, the benefit did not come at any capex or opex savings. Capex savings attained on server hardware was offset by increased cost of virtualization software. And we have seen opex continues to increase over the last decade.

As IT increasingly begins to take on a service centric view, more intelligence will be needed at the edge – physical or virtual edge.  Cisco’s launch of Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA) last July, address this view of an optimized fabric infrastructure with a more intelligent network edge that can enable any network anywhere, supporting transparent mobility for physical servers and virtual machines. Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) takes this a step further by enabling application-driven policy automation, management and visibility of physical and virtual networks. They however also integrate the physical and the virtual network for an agile service delivery that also assures full lifecycle user experience.

 You may want also to read on this topic

Dynamic Fabric Automation : http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/ns340/ns517/ns224/ns945/dynamic_fabric_automation.html

Shashi Kiran’s blog :  The Next Paradigm Shift: Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) gets ready to rumble 

Padmasree Warrior’s blog : Limitations of a Software-Only Approach to Data Center Networking 



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Last week, I presented at the Colorado Innovation Summit in Denver, Colorado where leaders from higher education, industry, start-ups, government, and research labs came together to discuss a wide array of innovation topics such as technology, education, social entrepreneurship and economic development.  The need to transform and revitalize communities around the world to make public services and communications anywhere and on any device more accessible was one of the hot topics. 

Photo Credit: Blue House Photography
Photo Credit: Blue House Photography

Today, we are experiencing the largest economic and social shifts in history including an aging population – countries like the U.S., Japan and China are going to see its elderly population over 65 years old more than double before the year 2050.  As a result, millions of new jobs will need to be created and productivity needs to be significantly increased to absorb the burgeoning working-age population.   We are also observing other shifts: economies are shrinking in Europe, Germany and Russia while economies like Nigeria and Saudi Arabia and Egypt are seeing hyper-growth numbers. In both these economic situations, increasing productivity to increase income and overall living standards is vital.  These and other trends we call the Internet of Everything (IoE) highly resonated with attendees as they saw that having the ability to anticipate customer needs and how to solve their problems creates a huge opportunity for global companies.

Continue reading “#ExecInsights: Top Five Ways The Internet of Everything Can Be Realized Today”



Authors

Wim Elfrink

Executive Vice President, Industry Solutions & Chief

Globalisation Officer

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Today I’m introducing a new series that focuses on the collective power of connections in the Internet of Everything (IoE) — and some of the new companies that are creating value from those connections. The industry is ripe with emerging IoE-focused startups that deserve to be recognized for their work in building the Internet of Everything, brick by web-enabled-brick. These various startups are making an impact in education, healthcare, home automation and more. They are led by thinkers and doers who are helping to create the future. Periodically over the next several months, we’ll take a look at some of these startups and learn more about how IoE is enabling their success — and how they, in turn, are enabling the Internet of Everything.

Recently, we had a chance to talk with John Funge, co-founder and CEO of BrightContext, a cloud-based data-stream processing platform that is helping to turn Big Data into actionable insights. Here’s how BrightContext is pioneering the growth of the Internet of Everything:

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John Funge, Co-Founder_CEO of Bright Context
John Funge, Co-Founder & CEO, BrightContext

What is BrightContext? And how does your business meet new demands in our increasingly connected world?

BrightContext is an ultra-scalable, cloud-based data-stream processing platform that makes it easy to deliver real-time stream analytics from any data source. BrightContext is used for stream analytics, live visualization, monitoring, and generating alerts from high-volume data sources such as web click and activity data, mobile activity data, social media, audience sentiment data, point-of-sale data, and transactional data.

BrightContext is taking on one of the major problems of the century – how to process a deluge of data in real time, immediately derive insights, and take action. BrightContext provides companies with a platform for monitoring and analyzing streams of Big Data in motion. It enables customers to mine that information instantly to make it actionable. This, in turn, makes it easier to use input streams to create and distribute sub-streams for others to use.

Continue reading “An Internet of Everything Startup Spotlight: John Funge, Co-Founder & CEO, BrightContext”



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In every school district in America today, educators are faced with a simple, yet critically important, question.  How do we obtain, implement, and integrate transformative technology into all of our schools and classrooms?

Some districts have embraced technology and put mobile and collaborative devices in the hands of students.   In The Katy School District in Texas, for instance, performance on math tests increased from 70th to 90th percentile following adoption of mobile technologies and devices. Similarly, in the Mooresville Graded School District in North Carolina, the district increased levels of competency in all subject areas from 60 percent to over 85 percent, and graduation rates increased by 22 percent.

But in too many schools and school districts today, the promise of connected classrooms is just that – a promise, and not reality.

That’s why it’s so critical that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) modernize and streamline the E-Rate program.  E-Rate is the cornerstone of America’s effort to provide digital education to students.  Since the program’s inception 15 years ago, E-Rate has connected more than 100,000 schools and libraries to the internet. It has a proven track record of success.

Continue reading “Connecting Every School in America To High – Speed broadband”



Authors

Renee Patton

Former Global Director of Education and Healthcare

Global Industry Solutions Group

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The previous blog on CleanAir went in depth on how MSE uses CleanAir information to locate interferers and the impact zone for each interferer. This blog takes a step back and gives an overview of the CleanAir technology.

How Interference Affects Your WiFi

802.11 devices operate in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz unlicensed bands. These are unregulated and experimental bands. As such, there are way more non-802.11 devices, including but not limited to cordless phones, video cameras, microwave ovens, Bluetooth headsets, DECT phones and even X-Boxes. Now even more devices are coming out that emit in these bands. These devices interfere with your WiFi network since they don’t work cooperatively with 802.11 devices, causing reduced network capacity and coverage, poor quality of voice and video, and link failures.

When an 802.11 device is ready to transmit and it senses interference, it will hold off transmission until it is finished.  If it is in the middle of a transmission where it has sent a packet and never receives an acknowledgement, then it will try to send the packet again. Issues like these  impact the throughput and capacity of your Wireless Network. An interferer like a microwave oven, which emits interference on a 50% Duty Cycle, will reduce the throughput by 50 percent. In the case of an interferer like a video camera, which emits interference at 100% Duty Cycle, when seen at Access Point above CCA threshold will stop the Access Point from beaconing. Due to this clients will not attempt to associate. Continue reading “Interference Detection and Mitigation with Cisco CleanAir”



Authors

Amit Hakoo

Technical Leader

Connected Mobile Experience (CMX)

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What happens when the camera stops rolling? Often the conversation doesn’t stop, and sometimes we don’t either. Welcome to a special After Hours edition of Engineers Unplugged, where we do a deeper dive into the earlier conversation with Colin McNamara (@colinmcnamara) and Jay Cuthrell (@qthrul) around DevOps, the evolving way of working, and the pros/cons of waterfall vs iterative build.

“Expectations are being set in the marketplace.” “The ruthless removal of annoyances.” And more intriguing soundbites discussed by Jay Cuthrell in this episode.

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
Multilingual? Get your geek button on.
Multilingual? Get your geek button on.

What’s your take from the DevOps or the end user side? Have you employed a different methodology in your org? Post a comment here, or join the conversation on Twitter. Follow us @CiscoDC.

Habla Geek? Join us for Season 4 shoot at VMworld Barcelona! Ping me @CommsNinja for details.

 



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