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Mobile security is a top concern for IT and business leaders. This guest authored blog series with Dimension Data explores how organizational leaders can work together to mitigate concern and implement clearly defined policies to achieve mobility goals. We are pleased to introduce our guest author Darryl Wilson, Director, Enterprise Mobility for Dimension Data Americas, as the first in this series – Darryl will address how a balanced approach to security can yield better business results. 

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By Guest Contributor Darryl Wilson

Director, Enterprise Mobility for Dimension Data Americas

Darryl Wilson has more than 15 years of experience overseeing large scale network communications projects both from a technical delivery and pre-sales perspective. Wilson’s areas of expertise include unified communications, network performance, troubleshooting and optimization.

 

The evolution to a mobile-centric workforce has been relatively short, thanks to an explosion of innovation and emerging mobile and cloud technologies. Just a few years ago, BYOD was a hot topic of conversation and mobile device management (MDM) solutions offered a simple way to secure an influx of devices and users.

However, today we are seeing that the tactical implementation of MDM solutions is not enough to control a multi-device, multi-vendor, and multi-OS mobility landscape. In fact, most of the companies I work with are using solutions that have not been optimized or customized for today’s ever-changing mobile world. In addition, security concerns have left many organizations feeling like they need to choose between control and truly reaping the business value mobility offers.

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For example, in a recent Dimension Data Secure Mobility Survey Report, 79% say mobility is a top priority for their organization. However, the report indicates that a much smaller segment of those IT leaders’ actions back it up. Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed believe data is the greatest concern pertaining to mobility, yet only 55% have a mobility roadmap in place. If securing company data and successfully implementing a mobile policy is of such importance, why aren’t more IT leaders taking strategic action?

Continue reading “Mobile Security: Actions Speak Louder than Words”



Authors

Brett Belding

Senior Manager

Cisco IT Mobility Services

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Today is International Girls in ICT Day and Cisco has been celebrating all month long by hosting fun and instructive mentoring events that have been designed to help to educate young women about careers in information and communications technology (ICT).  With over 70 events taking place globally from Belarus to Boxborough, one thing is clear – girls love technology!  Let’s work together to keep it that way.

As the world transforms into a more connected network of people, processes, data and things, there are unprecedented opportunities for countries, businesses and individuals, as well as for society at large. However, for the Internet of Everything to become a reality, we need a highly trained and ICT-skilled workforce of the future. Continue reading “Celebrating Girls in Technology – The Power of Mentorship”



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Blair Christie

Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer

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#CiscoChampion Radio is a podcast series by Cisco Champions as technologists, hosted by Cisco’s Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja). This week we’re talking about Cisco TACOPS (@CiscoTACOPS) which connects the unconnected in the middle of crisis, anywhere in the world.

Listen to the Podcastcisco_champions BADGE_200x200

Cisco Subject Matter Expert: Rakesh Bharania, Network Consulting Engineer on TACOPS Team (@densaer)
Cisco Champion: Jonathan Davis, Network Planning Analyst (@subnetwork)

Continue reading “#CiscoChampion Radio S1|Ep9 Cisco TACOPS”



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Rachel Bakker

Social Media Advocacy Manager

Digital and Social

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claraalvaradoIt is with great pleasure I introduce you to another industry and technology thought-leader from Cisco, Clara Alvarado.

Clara Alvarado is Cisco’s Solutions Marketing Manager for Applications Enablement and Management portfolio for the Internet of Things group, with an industry bias towards Oil and Gas. In that position Clara develops the strategy and requirements for the programs and initiatives needed to successfully execute on the strategy, ensure the alignment of the channels, sales, technical operations and support teams, and serves as a liaison between Cisco’s IoT Business Group, customers, partners and sales teams.

Clara has been in Cisco in various executive roles for 7 years, having joined Cisco in 2007 as Marketing Operations Manager for Latin America. She then moved to lead the Collaboration Solution portfolio in Emerging Markets and recently moved to corporate marketing where she has been responsible for strategy, sales enablement and demand generation projects around cloud and joint marketing activities with strategic ecosystem partners.

Prior to Cisco, Clara Alvarado held several roles in marketing and business development in companies such as Lucent Technology, Avaya and Emerson Electric (Emerson are a strong partner of Cisco, we won’t talk about the other two!). She holds a BS in Electronic Engineer form Universidad Javeriana, a MBA from Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia and a Competitive Strategic Marketing Diploma from Wharton Business School.

Welcome Clara!

 



Authors

Nicolaas Smit

Director

Energy Industry Global Industries Center of Expertise

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In this week’s episode of Engineers Unplugged, Colin Lynch (@UCSGuru) and Giuseppe Paterno (@gpaterno) discuss Nexus 1000V running on OpenStack and the options this creates for the network engineer. It’s all about faster deployment and choice, let’s watch:

Don’t miss the surprise unicorn ending!

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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Over the past year, we saw the idea of software-defined networking (SDN) become an integral part of IT conversations globally. As this technology evolves, the term “network programmability” can be used to capture the idea of opening up the network.

The Cisco Global Cloud Index predicts that two-thirds of all workloads will be processed in the cloud by 2017, and more than two-thirds of all data center traffic will come from the cloud. Companies building enterprise private clouds, public clouds and hybrid clouds will need qualified talent to optimize their cloud deployments for maximum efficiency.

Continue reading “Driving New Network Programmability Talent Needs”



Authors

Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn

Vice President and General Manager

Cisco Services

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Guess what? Convergence is happening again, and it’s happening at a faster pace with more profound implications than I have never seen before.

Those of us who’ve been in the industry a long time have seen convergence happen over the years across various technologies and areas of IT. This time, we’re talking about convergence across the infrastructure—in wired and wireless, in physical and virtual, in collaboration and social, and in on-prem and off-prem resources. Convergence brings together the applications and infrastructure in new and more flexible ways, opening up new opportunities.

Getting this convergence right is a big deal. And it’s a key to becoming an innovative enterprise. It’s clear that if you’re not innovating, you’re going to miss out on opportunities to be strategically valuable to your organization.

http://www.slideshare.net/CiscoBusinessInsights/convergence-are-you-ready-for-the-future-of-it

 

This convergence is called different things by different people and firms. IDC calls it “third platform” while Gartner talks about ‘Nexus of Forces.’ In any case, they’re all talking about technologies, such as cloud, mobility, data and network programmability, which are blurring and blending. And in addition, the combination of these technologies is collectively making the Internet of Everything possible.

Continue reading “The Need for a New IT Model: Fast IT and the Convergence of Mobility and Cloud for IoE”



Authors

Jim Grubb

Chief Technology Evangelist

Cisco Customer Experience Center

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In a previous article I talked about my thermostat and the Internet of Everything [read here] I questioned the true value my smart meter was providing to my home and my wallet. I said what’s missing is a thermostat that helps me understand my energy consumption habits, allows me to stay within budget (and save money!) and eventually take advance of spot prices on energy. Wouldn’t that be cool?!

The good news is that there are products on the market today that are heading in the right direction. Nest, recently acquired by Google for $3.2 billion [read here], offers a “learning thermostat” which Bill MacGowen wrote about earlier in his post: My home thermostat and the Internet of Everything” [read here].

The Nest acquisition is a big deal and there’s already discussions starting to surface on what Google plans to do with the data they will gather from Nest devices. Why is Google getting into the energy management and HVAC market? What will they do with the data? Will there be ads showing up on my Google thermostat? This led me to wonder who else was in this market space? Are there any alternatives to Nest? Of course there are but they’ve been overshadowed by Nest because of the origins of it’s founder (Apple) and Google’s recent purchase.

One of them is ecobee, a Canadian company. While they may not be a household name (yet) they’ve been around since 2007 plugging away and growing their business organically. I reached out to ecobee because I wanted to learn more about the company, it’s founder and his thoughts on where he sees the future heading for IoT/IoE.

Below is part two of my email conversation with the founder and CEO of ecobee, Stuart Lombard. Click here to read part one of the interview.

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In 2013, you opened your API allowing others to integrate with ecobee smart thermostats. Can you explain what this means for advancing IoT and what success looks like so far?
There is a lot of innovation around IoT right now. At ecobee, we want to give our customers the opportunity to experience all of it. But we know we can’t build it all. So we’ve opened our APIs to allow others to integrate with us so we can deliver more value to our customers, and our customers can choose the solutions they want. Currently, we have hundreds of companies – like SmartThings and revolv – building applications around our platform. We’re excited to see where our open API will take our technology. Continue reading “A Day in the Life of the ecobee Smart Thermostat Part 2”



Authors

Chris Herbert

Founder of Mi6 Agency

Mi6 is a B2B (Business to Business) marketing and business development agency

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In the last blog on revenue generation marketing, I took some time to discuss how our operational implementation was working at Cisco. As part of that, I shared the four main best practices we discovered during our revenue generation marketing journey. Of course, if you missed that post, please give it a read. To sum it up, however, I believe your operations team simply has to focus on:

  • Setting a goal
  • Keeping the goal simple
  • Setting key success indicators for individuals
  • Reporting

That is the high-level look at operational implementation that we saw here at Cisco. But in this final blog on our revenue generation marketing journey, I want to dig a little deeper and talk about implementing those best practices within your customer relationship management (CRM) software and combining that with marketing automation. Continue reading “CRM Implementation is Crucial for Revenue-Generation Marketing”



Authors

Sherri Liebo

Vice President

Global Partner Marketing