2014 - Page 192 of 240

March 13, 2014 Leave a Comment

Attending The Automation Conference Should be an Automatic Decision

Last week, I got a great response to a blog on ‘Making Smarter Manufacturing and IoT a Reality Today’, where I illustrated some use-case business scenarios and strategies to leverage the IoT industry trends now. One way savvy manufacturers, industrial companies and supply chain and operations teams stay current with evolving trends like IoT is to send their key players to industry educational and networking opportunities. One such opportunity to learn how to better leverage IoT for improved real-time decision support, amongst many other benefits, is coming up. The Automation Conference is a professional, educational event hosted by the editors of Automation World and Packaging World and is happening at the Chicago O’Hare Marriott from May 20^th to 21^st.

Cisco is proud to be one of the sponsors at this event, which is focused on delivering practical application advice and visionary insights for automation and control engineers, operations and engineering management, manufacturing systems/IT and networking professionals, as well as industrial systems engineers, machinery designers and software development professionals involved with discrete and process industries and production operations. Many of these industry leaders are wrestling with not just how to leverage IoT, but also key manufacturing issues and opportunities around industrial cybersecurity in production operations, reducing costs, improving efficiences, building new business capabilities and revenue streams and addressing skills gaps.

I hope to see you in Chicago on May 21^st.

Chet Namboodri

Senior Director

Global Private Sector Industries Marketing

5 Comments

Introducing This Year’s Cisco Partner Ambassadors

David Durham

Heading into Partner Summit in Las Vegas at the end of the month, we have been bringing you waves of news related to this year’s event. Well it’s time we made the conversation less about Cisco and more about Cisco’s partners.

This marks the third year of the Cisco Partner Ambassador program. It provides partners with the opportunity to share their thoughts and impressions about the news they hear about during Cisco Partner Summit. As we continue to evolve the Partner Ambassador program, we are working hard to shape the mix of global resellers, distributors, and Independent Software Vendors (ISV) to more closely represent the participants at Partner Summit. Just like last year, we even have some partner ambassadors who won’t be onsite in Las Vegas, but will be joining us via Virtual Partner Summit (VPS).

Our partner ambassadors will be blogging and tweeting before, during, and after Partner Summit. As always, we’re excited to hear their perspectives and look forward to sharing their content with you. Be sure to follow our hashtag, #ciscops14, to follow their content and to offer your own feedback. We also created a convenient Cisco Partner Ambassadors twitter list to make it easy for you to subscribe to all handles, including some related twitter handles from the partner ambassadors.

Now let’s meet the ambassadors for Partner Summit 2014. Each partner ambassador was kind enough to provide some information about how they play in the Cisco Ecosystem and where you can track their social media information. Continue reading “Introducing This Year’s Cisco Partner Ambassadors”

David Durham

Content Strategist

Channels

FlexPod at Cisco Live Milan 2014 Recap

Tim Stack

A little over a month ago, I had the pleasure of attending Cisco Live in Milan, Italy. It was a busy week doing FlexPod demos and meeting with our customers and technology partners. This provided me the opportunity to grab some video time with Michael Harding, FlexPod Marketing Manager at NetApp, to discuss our recent announcements to the FlexPod solution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRJJITOKk7w

Michael and I discussed the support of important new products and technologies enabling FlexPod to meet the broadest possible range of IT needs. One such product is the Cisco Nexus 9000, FlexPod now offers validated designs covering the breadth of Nexus Data Center Switches. In addition, FlexPod continues to receive recognition for industry leadership and innovation by winning Best of TechEd 2013 for its Microsoft Private Cloud solution and the Windows IT Pro award.

Cisco Live in San Francisco is coming up in May, so please attend and stop by the Cisco data center or NetApp booth to hear the latest on the FlexPod portfolio. I hope to see you there.

Tim Stack

Product Marketing Manager

Data Center and Virtualization

March 12, 2014 Leave a Comment

Getting started in IT

Kweku Folson

Recently, I researched wireless home internet packages at a local mall and being the IT guy that I am I asked some very technical questions. “Is this running over WiMax?”, “What frequency band is it operating in?”,”Where are your base stations located?”, “Is the signal quality line of sight dependent?”.

He was honest and after two questions admitted he wasn’t technical and referred me to a colleague who happened to be the tech support guy on site. He answered my questions, albeit not too satisfactorily, which prompted me to further ask if they had a setup I could use to experience the service. Once I had access to their workstation I did not even bother to open a webpage. I launched into a sequence of ping tests and tracer routes to all the popular public resources (4.2.2.2 anyone?) as well as to the internet facing VPN concentrator for my remote access. Continue reading “Getting started in IT”

Kweku Folson

Network Engineer

Summary: Announcing The Cisco IoT Security Grand Challenge

Jeff Aboud

Despite its overwhelming business benefits, the Internet of Things (IoT) also significantly increases security risks. That’s why Cisco is pleased to announce the IoT Security Grand Challenge, an industry-wide initiative to bring the global security community together to secure the IoT, and deliver intelligent cybersecurity for the real world – before, during, and after an attack. Winners will be awarded $50,000 in prize money and be publicly announced at the IoT World Forum this Fall!

Read the full Fame and Fortune Awaits: The Cisco IoT Security Grand Challenge blog post to learn more.

Jeff Aboud

IoT Security Manager

Internet of Things Technologies

2 Comments

Fame and Fortune Awaits: The Cisco IoT Security Grand Challenge

Jeff Aboud

Despite its overwhelming business benefits, the Internet of Things (IoT) also significantly increases security risks, via a dramatic increase in attack surface and diversity of potential threats. And since IoT is a significant component of the larger Internet of Everything (IoE) market transition that combines connected devices with people, process, and data, it’s even more imperative that we ensure that the things we connect are secure. To achieve this goal, the security community needs to work together to develop innovative security measures.

That’s why Cisco is pleased to announce the IoT Security Grand Challenge, an industry-wide initiative to bring the global security community together to secure the IoT, and deliver intelligent cybersecurity for the real world – before, during, and after an attack. Companies and individuals are invited to develop solutions for one of three focus areas – Malware Defense, Security Credential Management, and Privacy Protection. Cisco will select up to six winners, each of whom will be awarded $50,000 USD. The winners will be announced at the IoT World Forum this Fall.

Interested in participating? Visit www.CiscoSecurityGrandChallenge.com for full details about the challenge and begin preparing a response. Submissions are due June 17^th, so get started right away. Good luck!

Jeff Aboud

IoT Security Manager

Internet of Things Technologies

1 Comment

Achieving New Wi-Fi Heights

Doug Webster

When it comes to the mobile internet at Cisco, there has been a great deal of coverage lately around the need for and advances in small cells to offer spectrum in places hard to get to from a cell tower, on ways to optimize the macrocell radios with SON capabilities, and even some ground breaking advances we’re doing with some of the world’s leading SPs on Hotspot 2.0 to enable a seamless mobile experience. In fact, this topic of Wi-Fi deserves attention. Not just because, according to Cisco Mobile VNI, by 2017 more traffic will be offloaded from the mobile network than will be on it, but also because it will be the primary way for many to get access to the network in the first place. That was certainly the case a couple of weeks ago for many of the tens of thousands attending Mobile World Congress.

As the world’s mobility industry descended upon Barcelona for a week, a number of people (myself certainly included) wanted to avoid roaming data charges which could quickly add up – so we turned to Wi-Fi. And this year, Cisco was proud to be able to help the staff of the Fira, the convention center which hosts MWC, deliver it free to all attendees, while offering Wi-Fi services to exhibitors. The Fira selected Cisco Wi-Fi equipment last year, and given the anticipated demand, we brought some of our experts to the event to help manage what ended up being one of, if not, the world’s largest single Wi-Fi deployment ever staged in a venue, even surpassing our stadium deployments during championship games. Here are just a few of the stats that attendees and exhibitors generated: Continue reading “Achieving New Wi-Fi Heights”

Doug Webster

Vice President

9 Comments

How the Internet of Everything Will Shape the Next 25 Years of Internet History

Dave Evans

This week marks the 25^th anniversary of the World Wide Web, an important milestone as we look at how far we’ve come and how the Internet of Everything (IoE) is shaping our future.

Developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, the Web was borne from the need to keep track of complex, large-scale projects without the loss of important information. We’ve come a long ways since March 1989, when Berners-Lee published his idea of “linked information systems.”

Today, IoE is driving connections beyond just data. The convergence of connecting people, things, data and processes is transforming organizations, industries and our lives. The growth of mobility and cloud computing is further driving innovation and an increase in the number and kinds of connections.

To illustrate this transformation, let’s take a quick look at life just two decades ago. According to a new national survey to mark the 25^th anniversary of the Web, Pew Research revealed that in 1995, 42 percent of U.S. adults had never heard of the Internet and an additional 21 percent were vague on the concept—they knew it had something to do with computers and that was about it. In addition, 20 years ago, only 14 percent had access to the Internet.

Continue reading “How the Internet of Everything Will Shape the Next 25 Years of Internet History”

Year: 2014

Attending The Automation Conference Should be an Automatic Decision

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