2014 - Page 17 of 240

November 20, 2014 Leave a Comment

Converged Access Drives Cisco Live Cancun

Cisco Live Cancun took place in the beautiful Moon Palace Golf & Spa Resort from November 3^rd – 6^th 2014. The event provided a great opportunity for customers and partners to discuss Cisco’s Products and Solution’s vision. And what better way to showcase these latest innovative solutions than with running the event itself with its very own innovation. That is exactly what had been done, as Converged Access supported Cisco Live from beginning to end.

Converged Access enables one common set of network capabilities and context-aware intelligence as it brings IOS excellence to wireless by extending wired infrastructure features like, resiliency, granular QoS and scalability to wireless clients. Converged Access was deployed at Cisco Live Cancun with 5 Catalyst 3850 Switches and 34 APs to support a peak of 450 concurrent users and a total of over 2,000 unique wired-wireless users. Continue reading “Converged Access Drives Cisco Live Cancun”

Raj Vashist

Senior Product Manager, Unified Access BU

Where Do Your Teams Work?

Steve Chazin

Lately we’re hearing a lot about the end of traditional workplace hierarchies. Organizations expect employees to do more within smaller teams, and to do it faster. People want the freedom to rapidly move between projects and to collaborate with others inside and outside their organizations with fewer restrictions or privacy concerns. And they want to work from everywhere.

According to the 2014 ZK Research Unified Communications Purchasing Survey, 48% employees now spend at least 30% of their time away from their primary workspace and 71% of organizations regularly collaborate with individuals outside their company.

Today’s collaborators – what I call “agile workers” – are transforming the enterprise. They are creating and sharing ideas and content rapidly, and interacting with colleagues inside and outside their organization from anywhere. They work at their own pace and they want to use the devices of their choice. Gone are the days of being in an office on a 9 to 5 schedule. So even while organizations invest in collaboration tools to improve how people work at work; employees bring their own devices and apps to the workplace to be more productive, individually. What we’re missing is a way to improve productivity for both the individual and the team, using the same, simple solution.

Think about your day. Despite all the new technologies available, do you default to the familiarity of e-mail and audio conferences? Do you feel that you work better with your teams inside your company or with others outside your organization? Do you feel more productive at the coffee shop or at your office? Continue reading “Where Do Your Teams Work?”

Steve Chazin

No Longer with Cisco

1 Comment

Leverage Your Existing Wireless Infra to Manage iBeacons

Pritam Shah

Wikipedia defines iBeacon as the trademark for an indoor positioning system that Apple, Inc. calls “a new class of low-powered, low-cost transmitters that can notify nearby iOS devices of their presence”. The beacons themselves are small, cheap Bluetooth transmitters. Apps installed on your iPhone listen for the signal transmitted by these beacons and respond accordingly when the phone detects them.

Imagine the fans at a stadium with their ticket and seat number automatically pulled up as they walk inside an arena. Imagine the passengers at an airport heading towards the ticket gate with an automatic notification popup that pulls up their mobile boarding pass ticket ready for inspection.

We believe that iBeacon technology is a big step forward towards better, cheaper indoor location services such as real time alerts, context-based rewards, mobile payments, etc.

A couple of months ago, Continue reading “Leverage Your Existing Wireless Infra to Manage iBeacons”

Pritam Shah

Director, Engineering

2 Comments

E-rate Modernization: It Just Goes to Show…

Renee Patton

…what we can do as a nation to solve what appear to be some of the most insurmountable problems in the world, such as access to the Internet for students in schools across the county. Astoundingly, 68% of all school districts (73% of rural districts) say that not a single school in their district can meet high-speed connectivity targets today. And yet, the FCC’s E-rate Modernization Program is making great strides to successful addressing this problem today.

For an additional $1.90 per phone line subscriber per year, up 16 cents from 99 cents per phone line per month, we will be able to deliver Wi-Fi to an additional 10 million students. This is less than the cost of a medium soda, and certainly less than the cost of a latte, and this is per year. As a nation, less than $2 per year can provide what many of us take for granted, access to the Internet.

Yesterday’s announcement of a draft plan by FCC Chairman Thomas Wheeler to increase the E-rate fund by $1.5B annually is welcome news for schools struggling to provide access to students. If approved, this means that the overall E-rate cap will increase from $2.4B to $3.9B, and it will include a series of targeted policy changes to enhance options available for schools and libraries to purchase affordable high-speed broadband.

Our chairman and CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, said in a statement yesterday, “This proposal, if adopted, will breathe new life into the program and will help our children and grandchildren prepare for an ‘Internet of Everything’ future where technology is integrated into all aspects of work, life, and education.”

In total, the program improvements will target an additional $5B for Wi-Fi over the next five years, which is sufficient to expand Wi-Fi networks in all schools and libraries. The effort will potentially provide a 75% increase in Wi-Fi funding for rural schools over the next five years and a 60 percent increase for urban schools, delivering Wi-Fi to an additional 10 million students in 2015 alone.

It just goes to show that, together, we can make a difference. We can provide access, and we can prepare our students for the future.

Renee Patton

Former Global Director of Education and Healthcare

Global Industry Solutions Group

Partner Voices: Cloud, Data Security, and Business Continuity with Cisco Cloud-Powered Solutions from TekLinks

David Durham

Well we’re deep into football season, so I decided what better time to chat with David Powell, TekLinks Vice President of Managed & Cloud Services, than when his beloved Alabama Crimson Tide are fighting for a spot in the College Football Playoffs. (Meanwhile, my Wake Forest Demon Deacons are mired in their sixth straight losing season.)

In short, I thought a little distraction for David would be good for him, and he agreed to give me some insight into how TekLinks is ramping up data protection for their customers using Cisco Cloud-Powered Solutions.

Natural Threats

With all of the malware attacks in the world today, sometimes Mother Nature is still the biggest threat to data security. When a deadly tornado outbreak in April 2011 occurred, Peoples Bank of Cullman, AL, experienced firsthand how important it is to have a backup data center location for their core infrastructure. The TekLinks’ networking team was already watching the tornado’s activity via Skycam when they were alerted that the connectivity at all of the Peoples Banks in Cullman had gone out simultaneously.

The team’s suspicions were confirmed when they received word that the bank’s entire second floor was gone. However, the bank’s primary servers were still intact. Early the next morning, the bank’s CTO and technical staff transported the servers to one of TekLinks’ Birmingham data centers, where an entire team of TekLinks engineers were waiting to get their core servers re-cabled, properly powered up, and reconnected to the network. The TekLinks team worked around the clock with the bank’s IT staff to get the bank’s environment and online customer services back up in less than 36 hours after the incident. Continue reading “Partner Voices: Cloud, Data Security, and Business Continuity with Cisco Cloud-Powered Solutions from TekLinks”

David Durham

Content Strategist

Channels

9 Comments

Now’s the Time to Deploy Wireless in the Factory

Tony Shakib

Since manufacturers around the globe constantly have to adapt to ever shifting market conditions, any technology that lends a competitive advantage can be a game changer. Implementing wireless on the factory floor can be just that. And our announcement with Rockwell Automation this week at Automation Fair, will make this a no-brainer. The announcement covered enhancements to our joint architecture with Rockwell Automation called the Converged Plantwide Ethernet (CPwE). The Cisco branded version, called Connected Factory, is a portfolio of validated, proven architectures, capabilities and market-leading technologies and services for industrial markets. Factory Wireless is the latest solution offering in this portfolio and delivers unified wireless for industrial applications. Continue reading “Now’s the Time to Deploy Wireless in the Factory”