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In every sales training I have attended, this question is always posed to me: “You meet the CIO in the corridor, how do you get a meeting with him?” To be honest, there is not a huge difference in how you answer this question whether you are a start-up seeking an investor or the attention of a mentor.

Being a business mentor for both Cisco’s British Innovation Gateway and RAPTOR research and development project, I have attended a lot of start-up events and met a lot of business owners. When I meet people for the first time, I always ask them to tell me about their start-up or business. This is exactly the type of question the start-ups pitching for the IDEALondon competition will have to be prepared for.

Cisco opened the IDEALondon competition for start-ups attending the Wired Money event earlier this month. This event, a partnership between Wired UK and Cisco, introduced the innovators transforming finance in the digital age, brought together entrepreneurs reinventing the financial industry, and highlighted the trends and risks that will shape innovation and define the future.

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Networking was a key component of the Cisco-Wired Money event

Continue reading “4 Steps to Write the Perfect Pitch for Your Start-Up”



Authors

Andrew Green

Account Executive

HealthCare

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Location Based Services in the Service Provider (SP) world is a very hot topic at present, with many SP’s looking for monetization opportunities for Wi-Fi.

Cisco has been working with our service provider customers to help deliver monetization capabilities; one way of opening new revenue opportunities is by using our new Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) Solution.

Let’s first take a brief look at some of the drivers for Wi-Fi in the SP world and some steps along the value chain.

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Authors

Brendan O'Brien

Director Global Product Marketing

Connected Mobile Experiences

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An advert from Byte magazine dating from July 1980 proudly offers a 10MB hard disk drive for only US$3495. Accounting for the effects of inflation, that equates to approximately US$10,000 in today’s prices. If data storage prices had remained constant, this would mean that the 1GB flash drive in my pocket would cost in excess of US$1,000,000, with possibly a price premium for small size and portability. In fact, it cost me about US$10, evidence of the continuing drop in the price of electronic storage media in terms of price by stored byte. The amount of storage that can be acquired for a given cost has roughly doubled every 14 months since 1980 [1]. There is nothing to suggest that this trend won’t continue for the foreseeable future. We can look forward to larger and larger data storage devices at cheaper cost. But what are the implications of this trend for security professionals? Continue reading “Security Implications of Cheaper Storage”



Authors

Martin Lee

EMEA Lead, Strategic Planning & Communications

Cisco Talos

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Next in this 9 HIPAA Network Considerations blog series, I cover the third network consideration focusing on knowing where your PHI is.  Remember, the HIPAA Omnibus Rule was released January 23, 2013, became effective March 26, 2013 with compliance to the updates se for September 23, 2013.  Audits will also start up again for covered entities and business associates in late 2013 or early 2014.

Continue reading “3 of 9 HIPAA Network Considerations”



Authors

Terri Quinn

Security Solutions Manager

Security Technology Group

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Of course you would. In a recent Forrester report on the economic impact of FlexPod, that is exactly the cost savings estimated by utilizing centralized automation and orchestration. So I ask, what new projects or services could your IT organization deliver with cost savings of $264,000? To get a copy of the Forrester report, go here.

This report details the impressive cost savings, not to mention a potential nine month ROI, available with FlexPod. But more importantly, this is the first time I have ever seen financial details or savings achieved with centralized automation, orchestration and management.

FlexPod has three certified solution partners. From my viewpoint the first to be certified, UCS Director (formerly Cisco Cloupia), provides the utmost in comprehensive management as well as the perfect complement for FlexPod. Watch this video to learn why UCS Director and FlexPod are the perfect one-two combination for your organization.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVuA1wnI5dk&feature=youtu.be

In this blog I would like to focus on two reasons why UCS Director should be your choice for managing FlexPod.

Comprehensive Management
UCS Director manages physical, virtual and bare metal environments from a single pane of glass. No purchasing of multiple product licenses that need to be cobbled together by a service engagement or dealing with component adaptors. UCS Director installs in less than two hours and can have you productive and provisioning simple infrastructure workflows in one day. Best of all, you can manage your entire IT infrastructure — not just the virtual infrastructure.

Native management
UCS Director natively manages all the components of FlexPod: Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus and FAS storage. Why does native management matter? With native management your organization has access to all the functionality of each component layer because UCS Director speaks fluent Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus and NetApp ONTAP and OnCommand. This is a significant advantage over solutions that only utilize “plug-ins” or adapters.

Solutions that utilize plug-ins, place the development responsibility of these solutions onto the hardware vendor. With already busy development schedules, vendors develop to the minimum viable feature set.

Best of all, UCS Director speaks fluent FlexPod 7-Mode, Cluster Mode ONTAP, and ExpressPod.

Forrester has lots of financial data in their report and the $264,000 is only an estimate that is worth your time understanding. Across the board industry analysts agree that seamless, automated orchestration and management is crucial for organizations to achieve the full experience of elastic infrastructure pools that become the foundation for as-a-service.

Cost savings of $264,000. Just imagine what your organization could do.

To obtain an evaluation copy of UCS Director, go here and choose free evaluation copy.



Authors

Joann Starke

No Longer with Cisco

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Partner-Weekly-Rewind-v2Every 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

On Tuesday, July 23, 2013, Cisco announced an agreement to acquire Sourcefire. The agreement means Cisco and Sourcefire, a leader in intelligent cybersecurity solutions, will combine their world-class products, technologies and research teams to provide advanced threat protection across the entire attack continuum.

Check out the press release from Tuesday and read Cisco SVP of the Security and Government Group Chris Young’s blog post for full details.

Impact of Cloud Consumption Models

In Edison Peres’ latest blog, he showed you the “Impact of Cloud on IT Consumption Models” study. This study was created in collaboration with Cisco Consulting Services and Intel.

We already know that a large amount of IT spending is devoted to cloud and that number is only expected to increase during the next several years. Let Edison’s blog guide you through the resources that help you prepare your business for the cloud opportunity and plan your IT spending accordingly. Continue reading “Cisco Partner Weekly Rewind – July 26, 2013”



Authors

Anna Sui

Social Media Strategist

Global Partner Marketing, Cisco

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Cisco was recognized yesterday by the San Francisco Business Times as #6 on its list of Top Corporate Philanthropists in the Greater Bay Area.

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Cisco has a long history of supporting the communities where its employees live and work.

For example, one of Cisco’s longest-running traditions is a special program for Bay Area nonprofits, which has offered Community Impact Cash Grants to carefully selected community organizations for more than a decade. In recent years, the grant amount has been set at $15,000 each for programs focused on K-8 education and health. Cisco employee volunteers drive every aspect of the grantmaking process – from evaluating the applications to performing site visits to identifying the strongest applicants from a large and worthy pool.

Cisco gave $12.3 million to Bay Area-based charities in fiscal year 2012.

Read more about our current grantees at csr.cisco.com.



Authors

Alexis Raymond

Manager

Cisco Corporate Affairs

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In our most recent post, Steve Morrisey from the Ease of Doing Business team highlighted his key takeaways from Cisco Live US back in June, including the Cisco Software Simplification team’s exciting presentation of the new Smart Software Licensing solution.

Smart Software Licensing is a major change to Cisco’s software strategy – we’re moving away from a Product Activation Key (PAK)-based model to a new approach based on advanced consumer-based models. This new approach removes today’s entitlement barriers and provides information about a customer’s or partner’s software install base, thus enabling greater flexibility and making it easier for customers to buy, deploy, track and renew Cisco’s software.

Ben Strickland, Manager of Product Management in Cisco’s Engineering License office, led the presentation at Cisco Live, and I’ve invited him here to share his first-hand experience and what you can expect for your software experience in the coming months. Continue reading “The We’re Listening Blog Series: Smart Licensing Gets a Great Reception at Cisco Live”



Authors

Curt Hill

Senior Vice President

Customer Assurance

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Venturing off the beaten path may just be the only way to stay ahead of the competition.

And while IT-as-a-service and cloud computing concepts are not as precarious as once perceived, there are still a lot of unknowns as businesses and organizations set out to explore new possibilities.

Discover how industry thought leaders are paving new roads by enabling new business opportunities.

Subscribe to Unleashing IT today, or log in, for a fresh perspective and innovative approaches to business.  Hard copies of the Summer 2013 edition—produced in collaboration with Intel®—are now available in addition to the electronic PDF. And don’t hesitate to check out the newest event listings, offers, and resources on the website.

To get in touch with a Cisco representative regarding any solutions found in Unleashing IT, fill out this form or send a message to info@unleashingit.com.



Authors

Adrian den Hartog

Senior Marketing Manager

Field Marketing US Commercial