Just a quick note from our Cisco Team as we enter the Holiday Season.
Thank you all for your support this year. The team looks forward to launching more new products in the near future as well as some solid firmware updates. We hope you enjoy this holiday season.
From the Entire Cisco Small Business Team – Happy Thanksgiving.
Marc
Last week, I joined my colleagues from Rockwell Automation and Panduit at the Industrial IP Advantage (IIPA) booth at Automation Fair in Anaheim. This is the largest gathering of Rockwell Automation users where IIPA can do outreach directly to the community of controls engineers, automation managers and industrial IT professionals.
Since IIPA has a vision of putting forth an educational community where best practices, successes and failures can be shared and learned from, I was definitely struck that training will continue to be pivotal. As we work together on thought leadership and the promotion of standard, unmodified Ethernet and Internet Protocol, together with the leading open industrial Ethernet standard, EtherNet/IP™, skill sets need to grow to keep up with the market.
Training is Definitely a Hot Button
The workforce shortage issue for industrial markets is real. Discussing and explaining the training and certification offerings from Cisco and IIPA resonated with the attendees. The IIPA e-learning beta launch got great initial reviews. Customers are looking for a portable and scalable learning option to complement the instructor lead Industrial CCNA offering. Attendees were happy that Cisco and Rockwell Automation were investing in the various IT-OT training initiatives. Take a look at this video that summarizes this:
Business Outcomes are Key
Another thing that struck me this year was the theme of my conversations at this show matured from a technical discussion about why, what and how to deploy a Converged Plantwide Ethernet Architecture to what’s possible with a full Connected Factory. So, the bits/bytes, speeds and feeds around product functionality, for example PoE, NAT, 802.11ad functionality and support, although still important were replaced with business outcome conversations. For example, “I have a mandate around energy sustainability in my plant. How can I leverage a wireless mesh deployment to lower my energy and resource consumption costs” or…. “I have 6 months to provision 5 new packaging lines in my plant with 5 machine cells per line, and over 8 automation vendors to manage. Can your solution provide a scalable path to cost and efficiency improvements.” What are your thoughts on this and what manufacturing challenges is your company facing? Thanks for reading.
The Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS) in the U.K requires more than 7,000 large enterprises to undertake an energy audit at sites that make up the majority of their total energy use. Initiatives like this are now commonplace across the public and private sectors as growth in web-based services, applications and mobile devices add more IT energy costs.
How organizations consume and conserve energy has been a priority since the 1970s. Today, minimizing global carbon footprint and reducing energy costs are even more important. The key is to have visibility into which devices are connected, be able to measure the amount of energy being consumed by each one, and then be able to set policy that reduces each devices’ energy usage.
Our new offer — Cisco Energy Management Cloud – is a “cloud delivered service” subscription that makes IT energy management much easier. With Cisco Energy Management Cloud, any IP end-point device – regardless of vendor or type – connected to networks can be discovered and controlled via the cloud. It lets organizations achieve cost savings, and manage their IT energy consumption without having to install and update any software on premise. Additionally, Cisco offers a free 45-day trial that will enable organizations to manage up to 500 devices. It’s a great opportunity to see immediate value, at zero upfront investment and reduce energy costs by up to 35%.
Cisco Energy Management Cloud also provides detailed reporting, so organizations can see and can set policy for their energy usage of PCs, monitors, IP phones, printers, and any other IP-connected devices. It quickly and conveniently gives them the power to make decisions to help reduce their company’s energy consumption. We encourage organizations to take the trial, and then let us know about their experience with Cisco Energy Management Cloud.
To learn more about:
Connecting Dark Assets: An ongoing series on how the Internet of Everything is transforming the ways in which we live, work, play, and learn.
Racing down the wide, open highway on a beautifully crafted motorcycle is one of life’s most exhilarating rushes. At least I used to think so, before my wife talked me into taking up safer pastimes.
But Internet of Everything (IoE) technologies may be offering me a new lease on motorcycling. A new product called the Skully AR-1 is being billed as “The World’s Smartest Motorcycle Helmet.” And who am I to argue? Continue reading “A Safer Ride, with a Smarter Motorcycle Helmet”
I just returned from Moscow where I had the honor of speaking to more than 3,400 customers and partners attending Cisco Connect Russia and separately addressing 300 eager undergraduates at Kazan Federal University (KFU) in Tatarstan on what we call the Internet of Everything (IoE)
Our studies show that IoE can drive $19 trillion of economic benefit over the next decade, and more than $273 billion in Russia alone. The depth of engineering talent in Russia places them, as a country, with a very strong opportunity to capitalize on this value and quickly.
The Government of Tatarstan under President Rustam Minnikhnaov are true thought leaders in this respect. The President has the desire to make Kazan, the Capital of Tatarstan, the smartest city in Russia and one of the top five smartest cities in the world, and he is moving rapidly to do this. His goal is to create a city platform to enhance the interaction between Government and Citizens and throw open the opportunities to the talent in the city to develop solutions by citizens…for citizens.
Cisco has partnered with President Minnikhnaov, the Mayor of Kazan and Kazan Federal University in recently opening an Innovation Hub at the University to turn this goal into a reality. Continue reading “The Internet of Everything: Catalyst for Change”
This Thanksgiving, many of us will celebrate with our friends and family. We’ll gather and enjoy roasted turkey, creamy mashed potatoes, and a slice of grandma’s pumpkin pie for dessert. Unfortunately, 805 million around the world don’t have enough to eat. Last week, I learned that we can change that. I participated in the StopHungerNow Volunteer Food Sort on Cisco’s San Jose campus and joined 200 employees in the fight against hunger.
As part of Cisco’s 12th Annual Global Hunger Relief Campaign, we packaged rice, soy, and vitamins into small plastic bags for distribution. Together, we boxed up 50,000 meals, which will be shipped to hungry children in more than 27 countries this year.
Continue reading “Cisco Volunteers Help Stop Hunger before the Holidays”
As the U.S. approaches the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, there are likely more than a few IT folks who are saying thanks for the ISR 4000 Series, and the challenges it has addressed. Over the past year, we’ve had over 1,000 customers deploy the ISR 4000 Series, and the industry has repeatedly validated the positive impact of the platform on the IT and networking community:
• “Best of Networking” Award, Best of Interop in Las Vegas (April 2014)
• “Best of Networking” Award, Best of Interop in Tokyo (June 2014)
• And most recently: “Networking Product of the Year” Award, Tech World (November 2014)
Continue reading “Three-time winner! ISR 4000 Wins Tech Industry Award…Again”
Landing the first deal is just the beginning of the customer journey. Many sales professionals make the mistake of closing and immediately moving on to the next opportunity. But once you’ve got your foot in the door of a new account, why abandon your newly found customer credibility when it can be leveraged to uncover additional business there?
Expanding your reach within an account by asking to be introduced to managers of additional lines of business is an excellent way to cultivate new opportunities and build a protective barrier against the competition, in effect “thermalizing yourself.” Thermalizing entails asking your new customer to sponsor your introduction to other lines of business, fostering relationships with those contacts and developing opportunities for additional sales. The more entrenched you are in the customer account, the more credibility you build and less likely the competition will get their foot in the door.
Thermalizing is much more effective than cold calling net new accounts. With new accounts, you are always starting at “Square One” from a credibility perspective. In contrast, referrals from existing customers have much higher close rates, shorter sales cycles and tend to be more profitable. You add significant value to a customer when you have successful experience working with them and understand the way they do business. Customers know there will be a learning curve if they work with another vendor. So you automatically have an advantage. Learning to perfect the art of Thermalizing is key to maximizing your effectiveness as a Sales Professional. Continue reading “Thermalizing and Dollarizing: Building Your Protective Sales Bubble”
My colleague Bill Skeet published an interesting blog a few weeks ago about “Invisible Change” — the improvement and innovation that happens quietly in digital experiences such as web sites and mobile apps. You may have noticed — or not noticed — this phenomenon on web sites you visit frequently. For instance, you may have noticed the shopping site Amazon.com updated its web design very recently, and that the new design feels newer and fresher but still retains all of the key functions that you’re familiar with as an Amazon customer. But, if you think back, you’ll realize Amazon.com has been continually changing for years, in thousands and thousands of microsteps.
Cisco.com isn’t Amazon.com, but we also practice this continuual improvement regimen. In his post, Bill lists a number of improvements on Cisco.com that have happened quietly in the last year or so. These range from improved site search, to product search boxes in the support and downloads area, to 7,000 product model pages for support that were added to Cisco.com streamlined tools, and tweaked link labels and terminology to be more understandable. There have also been some significant updates in our online commerce areas for customers and partners.
Because improvements are rolled out incrementally, we have often found that even regular Cisco.com visitors had no idea about all of these changes. But, they were absolutely delighted as they interacted with some of the new features.
If you have a little time over this holiday-laden period of the next few weeks, feel free to spend some time interacting with Cisco.com, and I’ll bet you find at least a half-dozen things you didn’t notice before.
Enjoy!
P.S. If you’re interested in how we drive continual improvements in our web and mobile experiences, one excellent process that we have developed at Cisco is something called our 5-Star Experience program. I’ll be writing about this in the near future, but here’s a sneak preview encapsulated into one graphic:
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