Year: 2014

March 18, 2014 Leave a Comment
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Shining a New Light on Shadow IT

More people than ever are talking about “shadow IT” nowadays.  As the name implies, it’s mysterious, perhaps even malevolent by some people’s standards.  From a traditional IT vantage point, this negative view may be somewhat justified given the risks it creates around security, compliance, productivity, and technology investment.

But let’s look at it from another perspective. Shadow IT is on the rise because more people outside of IT are gaining awareness and access to technology, and harnessing it as a business differentiator. More importantly, many of these people are business leaders with growing budgets that align to their priorities. Here’s how much technology budget growth business leaders expect in the next year:

(read more)

Over the next year how will your group’s technology budget change 

Source: Cisco Business and IT Priority Survey results Continue reading “Shining a New Light on Shadow IT”



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Marlowe Fenne

No Longer with Cisco

March 17, 2014 Leave a Comment
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Cisco Connected Health Summit at HIMSS14 Highlights Patient Engagement

We hope you were able to join us and several hundred of your peers, for the 7th Annual Connected Health Summit at HIMSS14.  It was a half-day meeting featuring sessions by healthcare thought-leaders who discussed ways to transform the delivery of care through:

  • Cisco Connected Health Summit 2014Continuous patient engagement (pre-, point-of, post-care)
  • Accelerating the movement of clinical data
  • Individualizing the patient experience
  • Entertaining mobile apps
  • Personalizing healthcare for the 21st century

We have had many requests for the presentations so we have included some of the files here for you to view and to share with your colleagues.

A Fresh Look at Patient Engagement
Barbara Casey
Executive Director of Healthcare, Cisco

Barbara discussed her personal perspective on patient engagement, while citing new research illustrating industry trends and directions. 

Connecting Retail Clinics and Pharmacies to the Medical Home 
Dr. Troy Brennan
Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, CVS Caremark

Dr. Brennan described an integrated approach to the medical home explaining how CVS Caremark is evolving into a pharmacy innovation company.

Three Experience Pillars of Personal Health
Eric Dishman
Intel Fellow and General Manager of the Health & Life Sciences Group, Intel

Eric discussed his own personal journey through the health system as well as Intel’s journey to enable a “personal health” model of care for the 21st century.

Plan now to join us for the 8th Annual Connected Health Summit next year at HIMSS15! 



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Mike Haymaker

Healthcare Industry Marketing

No Longer with Cisco

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Mayday for Insurance and Financial Services

According to Wikipedia, “mayday” is an emergency procedure word used internationally as a distress signal in voice procedure radio communications. It derives from the French expression “venez m’aider“, meaning “come to help me.” Most recently, the term has been used to describe a special feature Amazon now offers Kindle Fire HDX users when they need virtual support on their device. The user can simply touch the button on the Kindle screen and a contact center representative appears on the screen, where the customer can see, hear and talk with the Amazon customer service rep. It delivers personal help on-demand and in real-time.

Both uses of the word “mayday” described above apply to insurance and other financial services. It is indeed a “come to help me” signal that should be alerting insurance and financial services providers that the next-generation of customer experience capabilities is now here. We have seen the adoption pattern before—financial services customers now expect financial services firms to deliver similar services that they have access to through other industries.

The wait is over. In fact, retail banks are now rolling out similar “mayday” functionality to their customers through similar solutions that are driven by Cisco technology. As is the case with many technology trends, the “what could be” capabilities of the future are much closer than many realize. Consumers using virtual capabilities like FaceTime for social interaction are becoming much more likely to expect and use similar capabilities to interact with companies they do business with. Many workers today are also using virtual interaction to connect with colleagues to conduct business and perform their job functions. The fact is–virtual interaction has become much more common in our daily lives. Continue reading “Mayday for Insurance and Financial Services”



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Rob Cornwell

Practice Advisor - Insurance

Insurance, Americas Business Transformation

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Best of Interop Awards: Cisco APIC and Nexus 9516 Switch Selected as Finalists

Best of Interop bannerWith Interop less than three weeks away, we were doubly excited to learn that Cisco APIC, the controller for our Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) fabric, and the Cisco Nexus 9516 switch have been selected as Best of Interop 2014 Finalists in the categories of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Data Center Networks respectively. As you may recall, when we announced ACI and our series of Nexus 9000 switches back in October, we announced that APIC would be the software controller for the application-centric policy model, and would be available in Q2, CY 2014.

As we get closer to that general availability date, Interop is a great venue to unveil more aspects of the ACI fabric, the policy model, and key APIC features. If you aren’t going to be in Las Vegas the first week of April, now may be the time to start making plans as we gear up for some exciting ACI news and events, and  hopefully bringing home these Best of Interop awards.

This first video discusses Cisco APIC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctg12_E0uoQ

And this second one highlights our newest Nexus 9000 switch, the Nexus 9516:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEIfxvEpYSs

But wait, there’s more… Continue reading “Best of Interop Awards: Cisco APIC and Nexus 9516 Switch Selected as Finalists”



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Gary Kinghorn

Sr Solution Marketing Manager

Network Virtualization and SDN

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How Can We Encourage Students Of All Backgrounds To Go Into STEM?

Today in the Huffington Post, Blair Christie, Cisco Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, and Eric Schwarz, cofounder and CEO of Citizen Schools wrote about our organizations’ collective commitment to increase the number of students interested in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects and careers.

Last week in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, network engineers helped 50 student robotics teams compete in Aerial Assist, a game in which students program and operate robots to toss as many balls into a goal as possible — in just 150 seconds. Similarly, in San Jose, a group of women engineers at Cisco hosted 70 middle-school girls earlier this year as part of “National Engineering Week” to give them a glimpse into how cutting-edge technologies are developed in R&D labs.

These engagements, part of the US 2020 initiative announced at the White House Science Fair last year, reflect the urgent need to do more to encourage students to go into science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professions.

Three things are true in STEM: There are a lot of job openings. These jobs pay well. And there are not enough qualified people to fill these jobs. Today, the technology industry employs 6 million people. By 2018, the U.S. will face a projected shortfall of 230,000 qualified advanced-degree STEM workers. Meanwhile, the Bureau for Labor Statistics predicts that STEM jobs will grow 55 percent faster than non-STEM jobs over the next 10 years. The flow of talent into the STEM pipeline is limited. Without a dramatic change, the pressure will weaken further, and the flow of talent will slow to a trickle.

Read the complete blog on the Huffington Post.



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Alexis Raymond

Senior Manager

Chief Sustainability Office

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Cisco Mobility Services Engine with Enhanced Wi-Fi Location Accuracy and Analytics: Best of Interop 2014 Finalist

Cisco has been placing a lot of emphasis on delivering solutions that provide insights and understanding on how customers, patients, visitors and communities interact with their physical environments. Mobility and leveraging mobile devices in the environment has revealed itself as a very powerful way to gather critical business intelligence. This business intelligence is highly impacted by the resolution of the location-data and the demand to improve resolution and accuracy is increasing quickly.  Apparently, this has not been missed by UBM. This year Cisco is honored to be selected as a Best of Interop Finalist for the Wireless award category for our innovations in improving location data resolution calculations.

best of interop 2014

It’s an honor to be recognized for our innovation and technological advancements in wireless, and we wanted to share a bit more about our submission with you.

What are Location Data Resolution Calculations?

Many systems acquire location analytics by relying solely on the probing that occurs from a mobile device to an access point. Unfortunately, this approach is delivering diminishing returns. It puts location analytics at the mercy of the mobile device vendors. What I mean by this is that as mobile device manufacturers look to improve mobile devices in regards to OS, drivers and battery life they are reducing the frequency of the probing from the mobile device. In addition, different mobile device manufacturer use different probing intervals. The need to do this makes sense from the mobile device manufacturer perspective, but it has an impact on the accuracy of the data acquired when representing movement of end users in the physical environment. If a user is recognized when they walk in the environment and then is identified a minute later, there is a lot of movement that can occur in that time.  But the analytics only sees two data points and draws a straight line. Not a very accurate representation.

Cisco is leveraging what we know best, the network, to supplement the device probing. Bringing in network data allows us to gather higher data resolution regarding mobile device movement, equating to a more accurate representations of end user movement in the environment.

Why is This Important? Continue reading “Cisco Mobility Services Engine with Enhanced Wi-Fi Location Accuracy and Analytics: Best of Interop 2014 Finalist”



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Brian Robertson

Product Marketing Manager

CMO EMM Mobility Solutions

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Why I Certify

I’m a addicted to certifications. I’ve always been good at taking tests, but I didn’t realize how rewarding it could be until relatively recently. I had been in IT for 15 years as a sysadmin and certification had never seemed valuable to me. In 2009, I made the shift from working primarily as a System Engineer to working primarily as a Network Engineer. In 2010, I had the opportunity to attend my first Cisco Live. Attendees of Cisco Live! have the option to take a certification exam for free, so I figured I would take the CCNA composite exam while I was there. I borrowed the Cisco CCNA Official Certification Library from a coworker (all 1500 pages or so) and proceeded to spend the months before the conference reading them. (I took an earlier version of the exam and read an earlier version of the books, but the links are to the current versions).

Continue reading “Why I Certify”



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Scott McDermott

Network Engineer

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Sales and Marketing in the Age of the Customer

Several members of my team participated in this month’s Forrester Sales Enablement Forum, an annual conference where sales enablement professionals from around the world gather to discuss industry trends and best practices. This year’s theme: Drive growth with a 21st-century selling system, centered on strategies for surviving and thriving in “the age of the customer.”

With information virtually at their fingertips, buyers are more informed, savvy and selective than ever before. And, the old approaches to sales and marketing no longer produce the results we need to grow revenue.

Continue reading “Sales and Marketing in the Age of the Customer”



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Laura Fay

Vice President

Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)

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Building Bridges for the Future of Technology

Technology in the public sector has revolutionized the way government agencies deliver services, conduct operations and secure sensitive information. Last week, I had the pleasure of learning from several prominent government leaders about how smart, visionary leaders have harnessed the power of new technology to transform the way they fulfill their respective missions.

We started by visiting the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) in Rockville, Maryland, which is part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). When complete later in summer 2015 the NCCoE facility will be the epicenter of cybersecurity education, strategy and technology for government, academia and private industry and corporations such as Cisco. Now more than ever, such public-private partnerships are imperative in recognizing and thwarting common enemies who can wreak havoc by compromising sensitive information. This center will allow the top thinkers, practitioners, IT professionals and educators to collaborate and develop strategies to keep our sensitive information protected. Donna Dodson, director of the Center, hopes it will evolve into a hub for cyber solutions derived from government and private-sector tools. Continue reading “Building Bridges for the Future of Technology”



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Patrick Finn

No Longer at Cisco