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In my blog, Six “Must-Do”s for Successful Ecosystem Marketing, I talked about the challenge of maintaining harmony in the ecosystem. Ecosystem marketing manages a difficult balance between touting the virtues of the whole ecosystem and showing the value of individual partner relationships. It’s a tightrope and often somebody feels slighted if you are not careful in your approach.

Several different strategies exist when managing the ecosystem.  What works for one company, might not work for another. To stay balanced on that tightrope, have a game plan and make sure expectations are set properly with the partners. Determine which partner will be offered which marketing opportunities and why. The impact of the strategy can be far-reaching.  It will affect not only marketing program execution but can also impact partner relationships. Whether it’s web presence, content development, or even a partner pavilion at a tradeshow, partners will be sensitive to how they are positioned vis-a-vis other partners who are often their competitors.

At Cisco we have great deal of respect for our partner relationships. This is why we put a lot of thought into how to engage and involve our partners in programs. We want to make sure we are optimizing both Cisco’s and the partner’s investment of time, money and resources.

Besides knowing the ecosystem landscape, a key to developing the approach is to know the audience and objectives for the program.  In many cases, determining which partners will be most relevant to the intended audience naturally unfolds. Here are a few approaches: Continue reading “When Partner Ecosystem Marketing Feels A Lot Like Walking a Tightrope”



Authors

Debbie Gililland

Director, Marketing and Operations

Industry Solutions Group – Ecosystems Team

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As we often say at Cisco, every business is a security business. That’s been true ever since widespread online presence led to widespread cyber threats. It became even more applicable as those threats became more sophisticated and less detectable. And now, with the Internet of Everything (IoE), that phrase is more relevant than ever before.

Cisco estimates that by 2020, 50 billion devices will be connected, whether you know it or not. Other advances in technology, such as mobility and cloud computing, will require a new way of thinking about network security. In today’s world of IoE, security must be top of mind as the number and type of attack vectors continues to increase, as does the amount of data that needs to be protected. Take a look at three key considerations for building your security program.

First, it’s essential to understand what kinds of threats are coming at you, as well the motivation behind them. You cannot protect against what you cannot see. Second, you need application visibility and control; a real-time, accurate picture of devices, data, and the relationships among them that helps make sense of billions of devices, applications, and their associated information. And third, you need an adaptable, flexible security posture supported by some of today’s biggest innovations and brightest minds.

The IoE is creating a host of new security challenges. A risk mitigation strategy based on these key tenets is essential to securing your information assets. Please let me know your thoughts, experiences and strategies regarding this complex issue in the comments section.

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Authors

Steve Martino

No Longer with Cisco

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This is the first of a three part series on the Future of the Grid and the transformation of legacy models.

The electric system in the United States is in the initial stages of a major transformation.  This transformation completely changes the legacy model of central generation, transmission and distribution to a highly diverse and distributed model with substantial amounts of renewable energy, customer-owned generation, and smart, price-responsive loads.

The present regulatory framework does not serve the needs of this transformation.  If current regulatory requirements – such as net metering – were carried forward to a world of large numbers of customer-owned generation, the result would be the much written about “death spiral” for the utility industry.  This means utilities would remain responsible for reliability and the supplier of last resort while being deprived of much of their revenue.

Over the past year, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Electricity Deliver and Energy Reliability (DOE OE) and the Gridwise Alliance have undertaken a Grid Visioning Initiative and facilitated a series of four regional workshops across the country to aggregate stakeholder views on ways that grid operations, business models, and regulatory models must evolve.

The regional workshops were held in four locations:

  • Western Workshop, December 11, 2013, Seattle, WA
  • Central Workshop, February 4, 2014, Dallas, TX
  • Southeast Workshop, April 8, 2014, Durham, NC
  • Northeast Workshop, May 13, 2014, New York, NY

Attendees included consumer advocates, public service commissioners, manufacturers, renewables developers, state energy officials, utility executives, and state and federal legislators and staff.

Future of the Grid National Summit

The Future of the Grid Summit held June 26, 2014 in Washington, DC, was the culmination of these workshops.  Panel sessions were held to discuss each of the elements of the framework and engage attendees with questions and discussions. The participants discussed the key themes that emerged from the regional workshops and discussed the framework developed by the Gridwise Alliance based on data gathered from the regional workshops. Cisco provided sponsorship for the National Summit, adding Cisco to the list of those providing support and leadership to the Department of Energy and the Electric utility industry.

Keynote speakers at the summit were:

  • Bob Shapard, Chair of Gridwise Alliance and CEO of Oncor
  • Eric Lightner, Director, Smart Grid Task Force, Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, U.S. Department of Energy
  • Representative Jerry McNerney (D-CA)
  • Dr. Ernest Moniz, Secretary, U.S. Department of Energy
  • Patricia Hoffman, Assistant Secretary, Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, U.S. Department of Energy

As Secretary Moniz conveyed in his remarks, the Department of Energy is engaged in conducting their Quadrennial Energy Review. The collaboration and leadership provided by the Gridwise Alliance is critical to the future of the industry and a sustainable energy future.

Becky Harrison, CEO of Gridwise Alliance, framed the discussion with an overview of the findings from the regional workshops, and the framework developed as a result.

A New Grid Framework

The framework begins with the Evolution of Grid Operations.  Grid modernization is not only updating the grid infrastructure for resilience and reliability, it is also fundamentally changing the operating model of the grid from a focus on central generation and delivery to a highly distributed and dynamic multidirectional flow of power from diverse resources.

The next step is the Evolution of Business Models.  With more and more power coming from renewable resources and distributed generation owned by customers, the business model of the industry must change to one that fairly values and fairly compensates all participants and customers.

The Evolution of Regulatory Models immediately follows as there is very little flexibility in the existing legacy regulatory framework of the industry that is embedded in a mix of Federal and state legislation, regulation, and jurisdiction.  Does the “natural monopoly” of the grid persist when growing amounts of power are produced by customer-owned assets?

The fourth element of the framework is Transitioning to the Future Grid.  The enormity of the grid requires that this transformation take place over time.  It is completely impossible to renovate the grid as we might renovate a building – you can’t shut it down, undertake a huge construction project, and open it with a ribbon cutting ceremony at some point in the future.

The framework is iterative as each portion changes to accommodate changes in the other elements.  This in itself is a dramatic departure from the largely static regulatory and business model that has existed for more than 70 years.

Why is this important for Cisco?

Cisco has been a longtime member of the Gridwise Alliance (GWA) with both Laura Ipsen and now Rick Geiger, serving as board members.  GWA holds a unique voice in the industry as an organization and a forum for discussion and collaboration across the entire ecosystem of stakeholders in this critical industry.  Cisco is able to hear and understand diverse points of view as well as provide input and thought leadership on issues that are shaping the future.

As we engage utility customers in discussions of their strategic objectives and the priorities and business outcomes they seek, the work of Gridwise Alliance and the role of Cisco provide tangible credibility of our commitment to the industry.

If you’d like to know more about Gridwise Alliance, please contact me by commenting on this blog. Also, watch out for parts 2 and 3, where I’ll break down the DOE’s final summary report and the vision of the nation’s future electricity grid.



Authors

Rick Geiger

Executive Director

Utilities and Smart Grid

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In the modern world, terms like “big data”and “open data”are making their way from tech industry forums and into local innovation initiatives across cities.

And Kansas City, MO., is no exception. Earlier this year, Think Big Partners– based in the City of Fountains and aspiring to be one of the most entrepreneurial cities in the United States –began a new collaboration with Cisco to architect a new open data portal that will be complete with some of the city’s public data sets, and eventually data from participants in this broader initiative. The goal of this portal is to help the entrepreneurial community gain easy access to relevant data in order to cull and develop their own creative Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

This new portal is one component of a larger effort for Think Big Partners, Cisco and other innovative companies to work together to manage a Kansas City “living lab” for entrepreneurs and start-ups from all over the country to tap into. The lab is designed to incubate an open ecosystem for these entrepreneurs, innovation partners and other members of the start-up community to develop new applications and technologies to address some of Kansas City’s biggest challenges. The opportunity to deploy these emerging technologies onto a larger scale, industrial platform and test them will accelerate IoT innovation through a unique commercialization model.

During the Global Editors Conference this week, where I virtually participated in a media roundtable hosted at San Jose State University on how the Internet of Everything is impacting public sector, I spoke about how Think Big Partners and Cisco are helping to create a new journey for data and IoT innovation using the new data portal as the vessel for this journey.

This new open data portal will serve as an intersection for entrepreneurs to not only have easy access to the data available, but to help the data continue on its journey to the community through the form of new apps.

Applications that have already emerged as near term, high potential candidates include smart parking, using video as a sensor, and sensors that improve delivery of municipal services especially in the area of water.

Think Big has a history of working as an innovation partner for large companies and will use the living lab, along with our Internet of Things Innovation Lab, to short circuit proof of concept challenges for entrepreneurs while testing new technologies using actual use cases. The combination of data, devices and expertise will yield powerful results at a fraction of the historical costs of commercialization technology.

As we approach 2015, I look forward to seeing this data and applications continue on its journey as the Internet of Things entrepreneur community continues to innovate and create new apps that will enhance the lives of Kansas City residents and in turn, transform cities.

Follow the conversation on Twitter with @ThinkBigKC and #CiscoGEC



Authors

Herb Sih

Managing Partner, Think Big Partners

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Given that modern attacks are complex and sophisticated, there is not a single product or tool that will ever be 100% effective at detecting threats. Prevention eventually fails. Therefore, you need protection before, during, and after an attack.

Modern-day networks are large and complicated. It is a nightmare for incident response teams and security investigators because it often takes days and months to identify that their networks were compromised. A wide variety of tools, technologies and platforms are available, like big data platforms, machine learning algorithms, statistical techniques, threat intelligence platforms, reputation feeds etc. It is often confusing for the decision makers to identify what is needed for their environment.
Continue reading “A Model for Evaluating Breach Detection Readiness”



Authors

Sashank Dara

Engineer Technical Lead

Security Technology Group

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We’d be hard-pressed to deny that advances in technology are making an incredible impact on all of our lives. The way we work, the way we live – even the way we sleep – are being changed by technology.

As humans, we are increasingly motivated by our desire to be connected to each other and to the information that matters most to us. And in the budding world of the Internet of Everything (IoE), we are seeing this need satisfied further. Thirty years ago Apple introduced the Macintosh and Internet was a word not known to most. As I reflect back to what IT was like back then, I realize just how far we’ve come today and can envision the possibilities of where we’ll go.

Today at the Cisco 2014 Cisco Global Editors Conference I had the pleasure of sitting down with my Cisco colleagues, Maciej Kranz and Joseph Bradley to discuss the future of innovation, trends affecting the technology industry in 2015 – and we talked about the ultimate impact technology has on everyday society. Securing the Internet of Things (IoT), growth of encrypted traffic, network simplification, real-time analytics and the future of work were just some of the hot topics deliberated during our 45-min conversation, dubbed Cisco’s Technology Forecast.

We chatted about how Google’s acquisition of Nest is just the beginning of a trend we see spreading in the coming years, as products and innovations in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) change the way we connect, communicate and make sense of our world. The convergence of Information Technology, Telecommunications and Data Networking technologies into innovative solutions are shaping our future and, specifically in vertical markets, forcing IT players to expand their horizon and look for business partners well beyond the IT world.

Continue reading “Oh, the Places We’ll Go! Cisco’s Predictions for 2015 and Beyond”



Authors

Padmasree Warrior

Chief Technology & Strategy Officer

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Mark Williams was in the middle of the action when Zynga initially started cranking out megahit games and the company’s IT organization had to find the resources to cope with exponential growth. Hear the experience he and his team had as they moved to Amazon, scaled on Amazon, then moved many of their workloads back to a new private cloud.

In today’s OpenStack Podcast Mark talks about the process, the roadblocks, and the incentives he had to use to make it all happen. He also talks about his new role as CTO at Redapt, about why OpenStack could stand to be a lot more boring than it currently is, and why communication and openness are critical for new IT initiatives to succeed.

To see who we’re interviewing next, or to sign-up for the OpenStack Podcast, check out the show schedule! Interested in participating? Tweet us at @nextcast and @nikiacosta.

 



Authors

Niki Acosta

OpenStack Evangelist

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Improving workforce productivity is about more than telling employees to work harder, do more, and think faster. It’s about giving them the right resources and removing barriers so that they can do more.  One way Cisco is helping organizations improve productivity is by making our technology invisible to users.  We’re designing our products to be so intuitive that the complexity of the technology fades away and simply lets the end-users do what they need to do.  No training, no extra buttons to push, no fancy set ups, and no need to involve IT.   It’s a journey, but we are making progress.  A great example of this progress is Cisco Expressway, our advanced collaboration gateway.  It is the “invisibility cloak” for a variety of use cases including for mobile and remote workers.

Unknown to remote and mobile Cisco Jabber users, Cisco Expressway is behind the scenes doing the work to make their experiences secure and easy.  Employees simply log into Jabber and begin collaborating on their device of choice no matter where they are.  It’s Expressway’s firewall traversal technology working in the background that hides (eliminates) the need for the user to fire up a VPN. And with Expressway x8.5’s new single sign-on capabilities, employees do not need their user name and password every time they want to access a different application on Jabber.  It just works.

Similarly, Expressway is helping teleworkers by enabling VPN-less access for Cisco endpoints including Continue reading “Expressway: The Invisibility Cloak for Mobile & Remote Users”



Authors

Patty Medberry

Senior Manager, Product Marketing

Cisco IoT

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve shared how we are helping our customers address one of their toughest challenges brought on by the Internet of Everything (IoE), Big Data and hybrid IT environments: effective management of the massive amounts of data, types of data and in various locations. With solutions like Data Virtualization , Big Data Warehouse Expansion and Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, we give our customers the tools to address this challenge head on.

Once you have access to all of your data…what next? The second challenge is to extract real-time valuable information from data in order to make better business decisions. As I’ve said before, more data is only a good thing if you use that data to better respond to opportunities and potential threats. Our customers certainly understand this and, in a recent Cisco study, 40% of surveyed companies identified effectively capturing, storing and analyzing data generated by connected “things” (e.g., machines, devices, equipment) as the biggest challenge to realizing the value of IoT.

The majority of data analysis has historically been performed after moving all data into a centralized repository, but digital enterprises will have so many connections creating so much widely distributed data that moving it all to a central place for analysis will no longer be the optimal approach. For insights needed in real-time, or data sets that are too large to move, the ability to perform analytics at the edge will be a new capability that must be incorporated into any comprehensive analytics strategy.

Analytics 1.0 was all about structured data, in centralized data repositories.  Analytics 2.0 added unstructured data and gave rise to Big Data. Analytics 3.0 will require all of those existing capabilities but will also require data management and analytics capabilities closer to where the data is created…at the edge of the network.

With this new approach in mind, today we announced Connected Analytics for IoE, packaged, network-enriched analytics that leverage Cisco technologies and data to extract real-time valuable information called:

  • Optimize the fan experienceConnected Analytics for Events monitors Wi-Fi, device and application usage along with social media to deliver insights on fan engagement and business operations.
  • Improve store operations and customer service – Connected Analytics for Retail supports analysis of metrics, including customer and operational data in retail environments, to help stores take new steps to assure customer satisfaction and store performance.
  • Enhance service quality, customer experience and unveil opportunities for new business – Connected Analytics for Service Providers provides near real-time operational and customer intelligence from patterns in networks, operations, and customer system data.
  • Understand how to get the most out of your IT assets – Connected Analytics for IT provides advanced data management, data governance, business intelligence and insights to help align and get the most out of IT capabilities and services.
  • Reveal hidden patterns impacting network deployment and optimizationConnected Analytics for Network Deployment analyzes devices, software, and features for inconsistencies that disrupt network operations and provides visualizations and actionable recommendations to prioritize network planning and optimization activities.
  • Understand customer patterns in order to meet quality expectations and uncover monetization strategiesConnected Analytics for Mobility analyzes mobile networks to provide network, operations and business insights for pro-active governance to Wi-Fi solution customers.
  • Gain a holistic view of customers across data silosCisco Connected Analytics for Contact Center delivers actionable customer intelligence to impact behaviors and outcomes during the critical window of customer decision making. Having the right offer at the right time will drive market leadership.
  • Measure the impact of collaboration in comparison with best practicesCisco Connected Analytics for Collaboration measures the adoption of collaboration technologies internally. It leverages data collection using the Unified Communications Audit Tool, from sources such as WebEx, IP Phones, Video, Email and Jabber.

The portfolio also includes Cisco Connected Streaming Analytics, a scalable, real-time platform that combines quick and easy network data collection from a variety of sources with one of the fastest streaming analytics engines in the industry.

In the world of IoE, data is massive, messy, and everywhere, spanning many sources – cloud, data warehouses, devices – and formats – video, voice, text, and images. The power of an intelligent infrastructure is what brings all of this data together, regardless of its location or type. That is the Cisco difference.

 

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Learn More from My Colleagues

Check out the blogs of Mala Anand, Bob Eve and Nicola Villa to learn more.



Authors

Mike Flannagan

No Longer with Cisco