It’s that time of year again, folks. On Wednesday of next week, the Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) will release the first Cisco IOS Software Security Advisory Bundled Publication of 2013. As a reminder, Cisco releases bundles of Cisco IOS Software Security Advisories on the fourth Wednesday of March and September each calendar year. As is the case with the vast majority of our security advisories, vulnerabilities scheduled for disclosure in the upcoming bundle will normally have a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Base Score from 7.0 to 10.0.
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Tags: Cisco, IOS, ios bundle, psirt, security, vulnerability
In this great article on Cisco’s Private Cloud: Pain and Profit we learn some of the real life lessons of one of the most successful private cloud deployments in the industry. The detail of how Cisco IT increased agility, lowered costs, and enhanced security with the use of Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud for this deployment is located here. I like using Cisco IT’s experience in their journey to cloud to give us insight into what a private cloud looks like 18 months after first deployment. Morphing as planned from the first use case of Infrastructure as a Service to being an “Enterprise Store” across multiple service delivery towers is a key theme I predicted and continue to see, across many customer deployments. In the image below, we see a typical Service Taxonomy, where Cloud is just one of the icons in the total service catalog.
IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) with underlying automation is bubbling up as critical for corporate IT strategies. As IT shops increase their level of comfort with a service catalog, self service and orchestration for compute, virtualization, network, and storage; the attention shifts to other areas such as applications, virtual desktops, and other technology domains such as collaboration technologies. Let’s take a detailed look at where the Cisco IT eStore and Intelligent Automation for Cloud have gone in those 18 plus months since ignition. The home page of the eStore shows the current catalog of some key services being offered and other services being migrated over as we speak. We immediately see Virtual Desktops, and Home & Remote Access in addition the beachhead of IT Infrastructure and Platform Services
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Tags: Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, Cisco IT, IaaS, ITaaS, private cloud
The benefits of teleworking—better work/life balance and more flexibility—sure sound great from an employee’s point of view. But from a manager’s perspective, is telework really successful for getting work done? Can a team really be effective if many of the members never work together in person?
Yes, if you create the right policies and environment and give employees the tools they need in order to work productively and be full contributors to their team. Read More »
Tags: cisco on cisco, Cisco Virtual Office, coc-collabortion, CVO, jabber, manager, telecommute, telework, teleworker
Vincent Rosolen -- Cisco SE, Luxembourg
For today’s post, I’m very pleased to introduce our guest blogger, Vincent Rosolen, a Cisco Sales Engineer in Luxembourg, who developed a brief Nexus 1000V case study of his customer, CETREL, the largest PCI payment card services vendor in the country. CETREL speaks highly of the ability of the Nexus 1000V to return administrative controls to the network policy team, as well as the consistency in managing and deploying Nexus 1000V with other Cisco physical network gear (all running NX-OS).
Before I turn it over to Vincent, this is probably a good reminder that the beta version of Nexus 1000V for Microsoft Hyper-V is now widely available to practically anyone who wants to evaluate it. For more details, if you missed it, check out my recent blog or the Nexus 1000V community page for more details. And now, over to Vincent…
CETREL is the leading actor in the PCI sector in Luxembourg, serving the complete electronic payment value chain from the cardholder to the merchant accepting electronic payments.
Member of Swiss SIX Group, CETREL is investing in new applications to support its business growth into an international market. CETREL is also active in the sector of IT Services, supporting the Luxembourg Financial Industry with infrastructure and application management services.
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Tags: Nexus 1000v
Innovation is the engine that powers Cisco. Its machinery was first assembled by an entrepreneurial husband and wife team with a great idea to connect the computers of two departments at Stanford University. It has since been turbo-charged by the simple notion that an open, standards-based communication protocol can be extended across the many ways of bringing together people, process, data and things to create networked connections. Now, that innovation engine is driving Cisco to become the world’s leading IT company with the power of capturing the next phase of the internet – the Internet of Everything – to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before. Cisco will do this through building on in-house R&D and investing in employees, alongside acquiring great technologies, business models and talent during this time of massive industry change, when it matters most.
Our build, buy, partner approach is at the heart of Cisco’s innovation culture. It is an integrated toolkit that is critical to maintaining sustainable long-term differentiation, particularly as markets go through major transitions and disruption. Cisco first led innovation in the hugely disruptive routing arena by building incredibly relevant solutions during the infancy of the Internet. We then expanded into new disruptive markets, such as switching, with pivotal acquisitions of companies like Crescendo, Grand Junction and Granite. Later, Cisco extended into areas where major transitions continue to take place today, such as collaboration, mobility, data center and video with deals like WebEx, Starent, Meraki, Nuova, and NDS.
So where are we now and how did we get here?
In 2012, M&A deal volume in the industry dropped more than 15 percent while overall deal consideration dropped by a dramatic 30 percent. Despite this trend, 2012 represented the most active M&A year for Cisco in over a decade with 14 acquisitions and nearly $8 billion in transactions. After two of the quietest years for M&A at Cisco, why have we kicked our M&A motor into high gear? Well the answer can be found in the journey we have been on over the last couple of years. That journey started with a new Strategy. It has been fueled by Readiness. And, it has arrived through Actionability.
2010 and 2011 were challenging times for Cisco in which the company wrestled with driving growth across many priority areas—arguably difficult for any one company to handle. That, in combination with downward pressure on the business within Cisco’s market segments, resulted in sharpening the company strategy in 2011. We refined our focus from 30+ market adjacencies to 5 foundational priorities. This shift allowed for the development of a reinvigorated corporate strategy as well as individual market initiatives closely coupled with the priority areas.
In late 2011, with a solid strategy in place, management turned its attention back to what it had always done from its humble beginnings: lead in strategic categories and extend leadership to new markets. With a breadth of talented leadership, fresh ideas began to flow to key posts across Cisco’s engineering, sales and services ranks.
The combination of good strategy and exceptional leadership inside the business allowed Cisco to aggressively seek out opportunities in the market during a time when the tech M&A landscape seemed to be largely void of meaningful activity. As an example, the steady-step execution of a clear Cisco Mobility strategy has delivered for our customers in a big way. In the span of a quarter, Cisco acquired Cariden, Broadhop, and Intucell—all of which are part of an overall drive to bring more intelligence from the very ends of networks to the IP edge where Cisco can add value and solve customer problems. Other examples include leadership in Unified Access and Data Center where deals like Meraki and Cloupia enable Cisco to continue to stress next generation enterprise architectures and business models that are adjacent to Cisco’s core business. Finally, in the area of Video, Cisco delivered on its software-based Videoscape architectural strategy through a series of well-mapped acquisitions, culminating in the $5 billion acquisition of NDS, the largest tech deal of 2012.
As we drive a higher pace of M&A, we have kept a close eye on how to “save to invest”, ever-clarifying the portfolio through carefully selected divestitures such as the sale of Linksys to Belkin. These kinds of moves continue to help sharpen our focus in areas where Cisco can compete to win.
We continue to evaluate exciting new opportunities to lead the industry in a time of powerful market transitions and disruption. Cisco will be active, but disciplined, in our M&A approach—which has been, and always will be, built on a platform of solid strategy, operational readiness, and market actionability.
I look forward to sharing more about our moves as they unfold in 2013.
Tags: Cisco acquisitions, Corporate Development, Hilton Romanski, M&A
