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dawoodWritten by Sultan Dawood, Marketing Manager

As SDN and NFV continue to be top of mind technologies for service providers, Light Reading is launching its first Big Telecom Event focused on bridging the gap in the telecom industry between technology know how and business acumen. In partnership with the Open Networking Forum (ONF), this event will comprises a conference with show floor demonstrations of networking technologies and applications that deliver real insight and tangible value to attendees. The BIG Telecom Event (BTE) will be a single big-tent event that aggregates all the hottest areas across our industry – including SDN/NFV and the carrier cloud, Ethernet, telco data centers, service orchestration, packet-optical transport, mobile backhaul, mobile network security, 4G/small cells, service provider IT, content management, and business services.

The event will be held in Chicago next week, June 17-18, 2014. Cisco will be Continue reading “Join Cisco at the Light Reading Big Telecom Event in Chicago”



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Greg Smith

Sr. Manager, Marketing

Cisco Solutions Marketing

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It seems as if Mobile World Congress just happened yesterday.  And on top of that, more recently, we just wrapped up Cisco Live at the end of May in San Francisco. This is the first time I attended and supported this great event with my team members Archana Goyal, Technical Marketing Engineer in MITG and Brian Walsh, Senior Marketing Manager in SP Mobility Marketing. We did not exactly know what to expect really before attending the event.  All we knew was based on the experience of our team members from the last two years at Cisco Live.  Their experiences indicated that there were not many service providers coming to this event, actually close to zero.

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Above: Me (right) with Brian (left) and Archana at the Cisco Live US 2014 Service Provider booth

But at the end, it all turned out to be a great experience for us, starting from deciding the key story we wanted to tell to getting the demo completed for supporting the mobility story; especially, on the great team work we have exemplified within our team and among a much larger team. The fact that a number of Service Provider customers visited the Mobility booth was a great experience. If you ask us whether we want to do this again next year for Cisco Live, the answer is a resounding YES.

To make our story also appealing to Enterprise customers and nicely integrating with the main theme of IoT and Evolved Services Platform (ESP) at Cisco Live, we’ve decided to use Premium Mobile Broadband (PMB) service for Continue reading “My Journey through Cisco Live 2014: Premium Mobile Broadband Services Catch it All!”



Authors

Ewald Yao

Senior Marketing Manager

Service Provider Mobility Marketing

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As we approach the second half of the year, banks are continuing to shift their IT and marketing budgets to focus on improving and differentiating the customer experience. Consumers are demanding more convenience from their banks, who are responding by expanding channel choices and offering differentiated services that attract these fickle clients. For existing clients, banks are investing in technologies to cross-sell, deepen relationships and reduce customer attrition as part of a larger customer journey initiative. I thought the insights provided by Penny Crosman in her December 2013 article, “Top 8 Ways Banks Will Spend Their 2014 IT Budgets” did a very nice job of highlighting how IT departments will invest to support these initiatives. I wanted to comment on a few of her points to add color with what I’m seeing. Continue reading “IT Spending: Top 8 Areas Where Banks Are Spending Their 2014 IT Budget”



Authors

Jim Henschel

Practice Manager

Banking, Americas Business Transformation

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It is Friday the 13th and we have a full moon, perfect time to provide a quick update from the Cisco SMB Team.

First off, we have posted a Teaser Announcement providing a quick view of some new products that are coming out later this month. The entire Cisco SMB Team has been working hard on this new launch so look for more information that will be coming out.

220 Smart Plus Series
220 Smart Plus Series

The Switching Team currently has a cisco.com for the new 220 Smart Plus Series.

Ivor Diedricks posted a new Blog earlier this month called Understanding the different types of Ethernet Switches. He explains the differences between fixed and modular switches, and goes into the details of what makes an Unmanaged, Smart and Fully Managed models. It is a good read, if you haven’t already, please take a look.

Finally, I have a new RV325 emulator on our Cisco Emulator Page. These emulators provide you the chance to take a test drive through our device user interface. You can take a look at our easy-to-use configuration wizards, configure features such as VLAN’s, Single-Point-Setup on our Wireless Access Points, and even configure VPN’s on the routers.

Make it a safe Friday the 13th!

 



Authors

Marc Nagao

Product Manager

Small Business RV Series Routers

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Grumpy cat hates small MPI countsJeff Hammond has recently started developing the BigMPI library.

BigMPI is intended to handle all the drudgery of sending and receiving large messages in MPI.

In Jeff’s own words:

[BigMPI is an] Interface to MPI for large messages, i.e. those where the count argument exceeds INT_MAX but is still less than SIZE_MAX. BigMPI is designed for the common case where one has a 64b address space and is unable to do MPI communication on more than 231 elements despite having sufficient memory to allocate such buffers.

Continue reading “BigMPI: You can haz moar counts!”



Authors

Jeff Squyres

The MPI Guy

UCS Platform Software

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As organizations seek ways to maintain real-time connections with their workforce and customers in an increasingly digital and mobile-centered world, the growth of mobile cloud will be a major force in shaping the business landscape and future tech decisions. This blog series will explore how the convergence of mobility and cloud will deliver unprecedented transformation for all organizations. This post will highlight the growth of mobile cloud and how any business in any vertical stands to benefit.

Mobile communications have fundamentally changed the way business works. At the same time, cloud computing has become the new way of delivering and charging for IT services and functionality. This collision of technology – the “mobile cloud” – stands to significantly increase the overall value of mobility, as well as radically alter the way employees work and businesses operate.

In short, what we know about mobile cloud today can be summed up in three parts:

1. Mobile cloud is growing. A leading industry report estimates mobile cloud services will increase at a staggering pace from $500 million today to $4.4 billion in 2017, a scant three years away. It’s also important to note that hybrid cloud environments are a major force in mobile cloud growth. By connecting private and public clouds, organizations can deliver the mobile, collaborative and rich video cloud services that enable today’s new connected experiences.

2. Mobile cloud is the beginning of an evolution – and it’s being driven by cloud-based applications. Mobile cloud will change not only where employees can work, but this convergence of two technology tools will completely change the way business works. A key component of this is the growth of applications in the cloud, with personalized experiences delivered in real-time, everywhere and anywhere. According to a recent Cisco study, 96% of IT decision makers said that collaboration apps are primarily accessed on mobile by employees. This behavior also supports the prediction that the percentage of enterprise apps adapted for mobile will grow from 31% to 42% in the next year.

3. Mobile cloud is a significant part of moving the Internet of Everything (IoE) forward. As people, processes and things become connected and always on the go, more data will be communicated through mobile cloud. For example, Cisco VNI data predicts that mobile cloud traffic will grow 12-fold from 2013 to 2018, a compound annual growth rate of 64 percent.

Continue reading “Mobile Cloud Accelerates the Pace of Change”



Authors

Padmasree Warrior

Chief Technology & Strategy Officer

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At F5 Agility 2014 Copenhagen this month, Applications take the central stage.  The key focus area is Application Delivery Controllers (ADC’s as Gartner calls them) and how they are increasingly becoming more important to modern IT than they used to be, allowing scale, availability, orchestration and provisioning.

F5-1

Another key focus area is around the deployment of applications and how joint technology solutions present a tremendously powerful option for F5’s customers.  F5’s partners – and Cisco is a key partner – are a large part of Agility.  Cisco is at the event to demonstrate how its ACI technology integrates with F5 BIG-IP to improve manageability, strengthen security, and ensure faster and more successful deployments.

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We have quite a few exciting things that we are showcasing at F5 Agility from a Cisco ACI perspective, and in this blog I want to take you on a quick tour of the highlights. As a testimony to our growing momentum with the Cisco ACI-F5 joint solution effort, we have demos, business and technical breakout sessions. The event features F5 CEO John McAdam’s keynote on Tuesday June 17, where he will … discuss how applications are impacting the architecture of the data center and driving IT strategy and alignment to key business drivers.

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Cisco Marketing Manager Ravi Balakrishnan is presenting a business breakout session-4 titled “Unleash the power of Cisco ACI and F5 Synthesis for Accelerated Application deployments,” on Wednesday June 18. This session gives a detailed overview on the benefits of our joint solution and the customer pain points it addresses, so do not miss this. I’d also encourage you to attend Paolo Pio and Nicolas Menant’s technical breakout session-3 on Wednesday June 18, where they will walk you through details of ACI/VMDC joint solution.

We also have an exciting demo at the Cisco ACI kiosk, where we are showing how the Cisco ACI and F5 BIG-IP joint solution works with step-by-step illustrations of configuration, deployment and execution. The demos run Tuesdays and Wednesday at the Exhibit Hall for the entire duration of the day. Stop by our demo kiosk to get a deep-dive architecture type white-boarding or brainstorming type engagement with Cisco subject matter experts on ACI-F5 integrated solution. There are several other solution areas where Cisco and F5 are working together including F5 LTM-Cisco Nexus 7000 integration, F5 LTM-SourceFire NGIPS integration etc, so come by our demo booth to learn more.

To learn more on Cisco and F5  partnership visit the Cisco-F5 Alliance web page.

 



Authors

Ravi Balakrishnan

Senior Product Marketing Manager

Datacenter Solutions

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Yesterday we hosted 80 Girl Scouts from the Girl Scouts NorCal chapter for an afternoon of STEM mentorship.  It was an amazing opportunity for our senior leaders at Cisco to learn from and engage these impressive young women in an Internet of Everything brainstorming session and aspeed mentoring activity.

STEM Mentorship
STEM Mentorship

 

STEM Mentorship
STEM Mentorship

The enthusiasm that these incredibly talented Girl Scouts had was contagious and it was an invigorating experience for all of us!  The candid discussions included topics ranging from the importance of a quality education, encouragement to excel in science, technology, engineering and math and inspiring them to envision themselves as leaders in the 21st century workforce. I am a big believer that if you try something new and you don’t succeed what is the worse than can happen?  We encouraged the Girl Scouts to always remain curious, to value diversity in teams and if they are the only girl in the after school App Development program, to stick with it.

STEM Mentorship
STEM Mentorship

A favorite parting comment from a participant yesterday was about what she learned from our CEO John Chambers:  “When we are young and have a specific passion in a field, feel free to see where life will take us.  Don’t be so focused on only one path, we might fall in love with something else down the line.  Have fun and explore!”

So proud to be a partner with US2020 and for the opportunity to host the bright young women of the Girl Scouts of Northern California this week.

 

 

 

 



Authors

Blair Christie

Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer

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In mid-May, we told you about our plans to broadcast live keynotes from Cisco Live  on Cisco.com, specifically from our home page.

Well, we did it. For four days, May 19-22, our live video coverage on our home page included:

    • John Chambers keynote
    • Rob Lloyd keynote
    • Industry keynote — IoT
    • Guest keynote — Sal Kahn from Kahn Academy

Here are a few snapshots of what it looked like:

cisco live day 2a

cisco live home page_mobile

Now that the event is over, what did we learn — and where do we go from here?

  1. Video is engaging. Over 7,000 people clicked on the spotlights to view the live streaming videos in just four days.
  2. Video and screen size matter. The larger the screen, the longer the attention span. We delivered a fully responsive experience across PCs, tablets, smart phones and connected TVs and were able to track the attention span accordingly. It was the greatest on PCs (29 minutes), followed by tablets (12 minutes) and phones (8 minutes). There was a single view on a gaming console that lasted 28 minutes.
  3. Video needs to be purpose-built. Personalization is key to increase engagement opportunities. Video is no different. It needs to create mutual value between the viewer and the business.
  4. Video needs to be a priority. Partnerships and prioritization across IT, user experience, digital strategy, analytics and video teams are crucial to the success of your overall video strategy. The whole is greater than the sum of all parts.
  5. Video requires innovation. We plan to explore new and exciting ways to leverage video on our Cisco.com homepage — and pull cross-functional teams together to help us test, experiment and innovate.

 What are your discoveries around video? What have you found works and doesn’t work?

 

 



Authors

Heather Alter

Senior Manager

Digital Engagement