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It’s that time of year again. Next week in San Francisco, an estimated 22,000 customers and partners will convene for our annual Cisco Live user conference in the U.S. It’s also when we make big announcements … and this year is no different. The event hasn’t even started and we just made our first major announcement this morning.

In today’s press release, we announced that Cisco is delivering on our vision for Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) – including the release of the new Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) later this summer. In that same time frame, we’ll be releasing version 5.0 of Cisco UCS Director – including APIC integration and support for ACI.

Cisco UCS Director is unique in the industry because it offers the ability to automate the provisioning of both virtual and physical data center infrastructure resources – including compute, network, and storage – from a single management console. Building upon other recent releases, this major new release of UCS Director provides richer automation, greater extensibility, and broader device support. Some of the new capabilities in UCS Director version 5.0 include:

  • Support for APIC and the Nexus 9000 Series to provide automated deployment of application-ready infrastructure across both traditional and ACI-based data center networking from a single user interface.
  • Enhancements to the core platform including a new software development kit and open APIs that allow third party hardware and software vendors to integrate directly with UCS Director.
  • Expanded support for Cisco’s complete UCS and Nexus product portfolio; third-party compute, storage, and virtualization vendors’ products; and integrated infrastructure systems including NetApp FlexPod, VCE Vblock Systems, and EMC VSPEX.
  • Rapid customer deployment and even faster time-to-value with over 800 pre-built tasks in the updated UCS Director task library.

You can learn more about what’s new in UCS Director 5.0 in this “at-a-glance” overview:

Continue reading “Announcing Cisco UCS Director 5.0 – with Support for Application Centric Infrastructure”



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Hi all,

DevNetZone-CallingAllDevelopers

The DevNet Developer Conference at Cisco Live starts this week! Here are the Top 5 Reasons Hackers, Developers and Designers Should Attend DevNet Zone at Cisco Live:

  1. Hands-on learning labs for APIs you’ve probably never tried
  2. Networking – meet people in real life
  3. 24 Hour Hackathon where you can show your coding chops
  4. Get in on the ground floor
  5. All levels welcome – Show you’re 1337. [+ opportunities for n00bs]

 

  1. Hands-on learning labs to Cisco products and APIs: We have 50+ hands-on learning labs where you can learn the ins and outs of our technologies and APIs in live working systems.  These are short, sharp, self-paced sprints lasting about 10 minutes each. Continue reading “Top 5 Reasons Hackers, Developers and Designers Should Attend DevNet Zone”


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Susie Wee

SVP & CTO

Cisco DevNet Ecosystem Success

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There is no disputing that both enterprises and service providers are embracing cloud.  What’s different today is that not only are telcos cloud providers, but enterprises and governments are also becoming cloud providers through a community cloud model.

A community cloud model is a collaborative effort where infrastructure is shared and  jointly accessed by several organizations from a specific group that share specific computing concerns such as, security, compliance or jurisdiction considerations. The community cloud can be either on-premises or off-premises, and can be governed by the participating organizations or by a third-party managed service provider.

A community cloud model   helps offset common challenges across universities, government agencies and enterprises,such as  cost pressures, technology complexity, and spending requirements, security concerns and a lack of sector specific services from service providers.

I recently had the chance to participate in a new Cloud Insights Video Podcast to discuss how CIOs can transform their enterprise IT delivery models and how Cisco is supporting service providers in developing their cloud execution strategies.

User Organizations Are Becoming Cloud Vendors

CIOs have recognized that greater business outcomes can  be delivered for their customers by working together to resolve common challenges and realize common opportunities. It’s also becoming clear to them that using a community cloud model for cloud services is an innovative way to help deliver  on these outcomes.

As we’ve worked with CIOs in governments and universities across various geographies, , we have focused on  building a shared understanding of what can be achieved by moving common services, which are not seen as differentiated to the business, into a community cloud model. For example, all universities offer human resources as a service, and student enrollment services and financial aid services are not considered differentiated. So why not have it as a shared community service that reduces cost outlay and redirects the savings to innovative learning experiences for students?

Continue reading “Emerging Cloud Models: Community Cloud”



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Manjula Talreja

Vice President, Global Cloud Practice

Cisco Consulting Services

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Manufacturing ArmIn a recent article for Manufacturing Digital, “Cisco highlights Internet of Everything potential in 2014,” the manufacturing industry has been touted as a one of the top sectors benefitting from the Internet of Everything (IoE) and Internet of Things (IoT) trends. Along these lines, I recently discussed the transformative power of IoT in manufacturing in a blog on this Cisco IoE blog, Making Smarter Manufacturing and IoT a Reality Today.  It’s becoming apparent to me that the propensity of leading analyst and press coverage around these topics is evolving beyond far-off visioning or thought-provoking industry trend discussions into the practical exchange of ideas and experiences around real-life scenarios and applications for the production environment, supply chain, voice of customer (VoC) and all the critical business interests of a typical manufacturer. Manufacturing is leading a charge to create the next generation of real-time, connected and smart factories, integrated supply chains, in-context collaboration and work flows for global design teams and more, and IoE is a critical building block for the transformation of these business processes to excite greater revenues and profitability. Continue reading “Manufacturing New Business with the Internet of Everything”



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Chet Namboodri

Senior Director

Global Private Sector Industries Marketing

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Ed Paradise, Vice President of Engineering for Cisco’s Threat Response, Intelligence and Development Group

Much has been made of the industry-wide Heartbleed vulnerability and its potential exploitation. Cisco was among the first companies to release a customer Security Advisory when the vulnerability became public, and is now one of many offering mitigation advice.

Those dealing with this issue on a day-to-day basis know it’s not enough to just patch the OpenSSL software library. Organizations also need to revoke and reissue digital certificates for their Heartbleed-vulnerable sites. If your certificates were stored in a Trust Anchor Module (TAM), they are still safe. Otherwise, a few additional steps should be taken to ensure you and your customers are secure:
Continue reading “New Standards May Reduce Heartburn Caused by the Next Heartbleed”



Authors

Ed Paradise

Cisco RTP Site Executive and Vice President of Engineering

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Cisco Live! 2014 will take place in San Francisco from May 19 to 22. Cisco is no stranger when it comes to finding new and innovative ways to support green initiatives such as energy conservation, sustainability and the smarter use of fiscal and natural resources. In fact, it’s been a part of how we have been doing business for years.

In recent years, organizations such as the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) and Greenpeace have ranked Cisco on top amongst other major IT companies.

Cisco Greenpeace
Continue reading “The Cisco Live! Green Plan”



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Anand Jobanputra

Marketing Specialist

Mid-Market Mobility Solutions

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Hi all,

The DevNet team is busy gearing up for DevNet at Cisco Live in San Francisco on May 18-22. It’s just 2 days away… Yikes! I just got off a call with the DevNet team and you can imagine the excitement and nervousness in the air as we’re in the final days of preparation. We’ll have awesome hands-on labs, a 24 hour hackathon, and theater presentations on lots of fun topics. There will be a lot for developers to do with software-defined networking (APIC EM and onePK), location-aware wireless (Connected Mobile Experience CMX), Internet of Things (IOx), Collaboration (Jabber Guest), network topology UI (NeXt), and data center (UCS director). I know that’s a lot of acronyms, so I’ll write more about these next week. But, I wanted to quickly tell you about another innovation that we will be showing publicly for the first time at Cisco Live!

While my DevNet team is working hard, my Innovation team is busy gearing up for Cisco Live too. We’ll be showing an innovation project that we’ve been quietly working on for the last two years which just got some press in eWeek and in Silicon Valley Business Journal.

Our innovation project is on Augmented Collaboration, which is a user experience innovation and technology innovation around next-generation collaboration. You probably know of Cisco’s TelePresence, WebEx, and Unified Communications products and hopefully you’ve used them. I’m a huge fan of immersive video collaboration and I’ve built teams across the oceans using this technology. Augmented Collaboration is an exploration on “what’s next” in collaboration. Continue reading “Augmented Collaboration: A Cisco Tech Fund Innovation”



Authors

Susie Wee

SVP & CTO

Cisco DevNet Ecosystem Success

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In this week’s very first bilingual episode of Engineers Unplugged, shot in Milan, Matteo Pirelli and Luca Relandini (@lucarelandini) talk about the people part of cloud. This episode is NOT lost in translation: organizational support for cloud has to be in place for projects to succeed.

The Italian Unicorn translates!
The Italian Unicorn translates!

This is 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

Join the behind the scenes by liking Engineers Unplugged on Facebook.



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