Many of you take part in our annual satisfaction surveys.  You share opinions, discuss challenges, and make valuable recommendations. More than 65,000 customers and partners responded to our survey during the first half of FY13.  For this installment of the “We’re Listening” blog series,  I asked Joe Pinto, Senior Vice President, Technical Services, to review these responses and what we’re doing to improve your Cisco experience.

  By Guest Contributor Joe Pinto

While overall feedback from our customers and partners in FY13 has been positive, we know there is a continuous need for improvement. One of the questions you often ask is, “What is Cisco doing to make Cisco easier to do business with?” Here’s a sampling of areas you’ve asked us to address and progress we’re making in those areas:  Read More »

Tags: Cisco Services, order management, software licensing, Technical Assistance Center, Technical Support, we-are-listening

Back in March, Seth Hanford wrote about a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack aimed at the SpamHaus organization. Since then, there have been some new developments in the aftermath of the DDoS attack, most notably the arrest of the attackers’ spokesperson, Sven Olaf Kamphuis.

Update

On April 26, Kamphuis, STOPhaus activist and possibly the person behind the large-scale SpamHaus DDoS attacks, was arrested in Spain. He had allegedly been operating out of his van, which he had transformed into a mobile computing office. Read More »

Tags: Cisco Security, distributed denial of service, Kamphuis, SpamHaus DDoS, STOPhaus, TRAC

It’s no secret that new technologies are changing the way students learn. The modern classroom is no longer confined to a physical space and students have access to greater educational opportunities than ever before.

Much like video has created new models for learning; mobile video collaboration is extending the boundaries of education even more. Imagine a school where students can instant message a professor from their tablet with an urgent question about tomorrow’s test and get an immediate response, or where a student athlete headed to a competition can join a lecture from their own personal mobile device. By overcoming space and time challenges, students and faculty can connect to the people and resources they need from wherever they are. No longer is education confined to the walls of the classroom. Read More »

Tags: distrance learning, education, flipped classroom, higher education, K-12, mobile collaboration, teaching, TelePresence, video conferencing

I am drafting this blog on my laptop, sitting in the Embassy Suites lounge in Raleigh, North Carolina, enjoying the complimentary breakfast buffet. I share this not to disclose my breakfast habits, nor my whereabouts but to illustrate that we are relying more and more on mobile devices to keep us connected, both professionally and personally. In fact analysts predict that by the end of 2013, 80 percent of companies will allow BYOD (bring your own device) for employees.

As today’s workers embrace mobility, they have expectations that their experience outside of the office should mirror their experience inside the office.  With mobility trends like telework and BYOD on the rise, it’s important that government organizations stay ahead of technology trends to better deliver their employees with the right tools that allow them to collaborate from anywhere at any time.   Read More »

Tags: byod, collaboration, COOP, government, jabber, mobile collaboration, Mobile workforce, mobility, TelePresence, telework, video conferencing, WebEX

It’s May 1st again, which means it’s time for our annual Open Source Conference, a time to celebrate the multitude of free and open source software developers world wide. Even more so than last May 1st, I’m very impressed to see the large turnout and the great feedback after the keynote and four tracks on Big Data, Cloud, Internet of Everything (IoE), and Software Defined Networking (SDN). Our keynote was from Dan Frye, a wonderful friend and partner at IBM. Wonderful to see Doug Cutting from Cloudera, Adrian Cockroft from Netflix, Troy Torman from Rackspace, Chris Wright from Red Hat, Juan Negron from Canonical, Mark Hinkle from Citrix and Vijoy Pandey from IBM and the great discussions that ensued. My thanks to Bhushan Kanekar who helped me put together the SDN track and also to our other tracks leaders, Mark Voelker for Big Data, Kyle Mestery and Brian Mullen for Cloud, and Fabio Maino and Laurent Philonenko for IoE and Collaboration — it’s great to see these guys come of age in open source, enjoying the moment and helping the open community grow. To all those of you who came, contributed and enjoyed this event, we salute you! Open at Cisco is proving it has indeed become a vibrant and fast growing community. Happy May Day!

Tags: Big Data, cloud, IoE, Open at Cisco, open source, SDN