Year: 2014

July 30, 2014 Leave a Comment
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Cisco Achieves SAP HANA Certifications for Unified Computing Systems Mission-Critical Servers

Cisco Achieves SAP HANA Certifications for Unified Computing Systems Mission-Critical Servers

Cisco has received SAP HANA certification for its Unified Computing Systems (UCS) mission-critical servers with the Intel Ivy Bridge chip set.  All of these products are now listed on the Product Availability Matrix from SAP.  These servers will accommodate memory sizes from 128GB all the way to 2TB on the rack mount C460 M4.  A small 2T Scale OUT configuration can be implemented using 512G B260 servers with an external EMC VNX5400 persistant storage, and  up to 16TB can be achieved using the B460 or C460 models with EMC VNX5400 persistent storage.

C460 M4 B460M4 B260M4
C460 M4                       B460 M4                         B260 M4

Continue reading “Cisco Achieves SAP HANA Certifications for Unified Computing Systems Mission-Critical Servers”



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Rick Speyer

No Longer with Cisco

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The Future of Networking, Available Today

I am Soni Jiandani, SVP of Marketing for Cisco’s Insieme Business Unit. Together with a team of veteran leaders and engineers, we continue to disrupt markets to drive industry transformation. Our latest disruption is focused on leapfrogging Software Defined Networks (SDN) with a holistic approach to the future of networking: Application Centric Infrastructure, or ACI for short.

My blog is timed with announcing the shipment of ACI – namely the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) with ACI mode for the Nexus 9000.  But this is not a corporate sales blog. My intent is to foster an open discussion about the future of the networking industry.

ACI: A key enabler to driving fast IT

We have spent the past few years to gather the best and the brightest engineering minds focused on one simple goal:  to design an infrastructure for our customers that meets the needs of applications today and in the future. These applications require dynamic, agile, fast, secure, scalable, reliable infrastructure that is automated as a native, baseline requirement.

Continue reading “The Future of Networking, Available Today”



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Soni Jiandani

Senior Vice President

Marketing for the Insieme Business Unit at Cisco

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Summary: Decoding UCS Invicta – Part 3

In part one of this series we covered the internals of HDDs, in part two we went over the internals of SSD, In part three we continue reviewing storage concepts to refresh or learn the right lingo.

Lets start by understanding “Redundant Array of Independent Disks” (RAID). There are RAID levels like RAID0 and RAID1 that are easily to understand and others like RAID5 and RAID6, which many sysadmins misunderstand.

Read the full article, Decoding UCS Invicta – Part 3, on the Data Center and Cloud blog.



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William Caban-Babilonia

Senior Cloud Architect

Cisco Champion

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Sports + Social Media = Massive Opportunities

I was at the SEAT Conference in Miami last week, and people are still abuzz about the recent World Cup. Attendees of the conference see engagement with sports fans as a top priority, and they know that Cisco has the most open, tailored and successful solutions to make that possible in venues around the world. The data below from Facebook and Twitter shows just how voraciously fans engaged on social media with regards to the World Cup.

Facebook

 

Twitter

As the world continues to become more “social” than ever before, teams, venues, leagues, and companies are working more feverishly than ever to capture the massive opportunity these sports fans present in the digital world.

Every conversation I had during the SEAT Conference validated that Cisco’s investments in Sports & Entertainment have positioned us to aid our customers to capture these digital fans. Over the past few years we have solved the problem of reliable and efficient high-density Wi-Fi, and live video streaming with minimal delay, and that is why our solutions are in more than 225 venues, and 30 plus countries, and have impacted hundreds of millions of fans. And with a proven platform in place, we are working with our customers to convert these more connected and immersive experiences into deeper levels of insight and engagement that drive impact, both on a personal level with fans and on the business side with sponsors and other associated partners looking to generate a return on their investments.

While many are looking at capturing the opportunities of the here and now, this is only the beginning.  The rapid pace of technology innovation mandates preparing for the future and as we visualize a world where everything is connected (Internet of Everything – IoE). This video series shows how Cisco and the NBA are already deep into this process. Check out the “One Bounce” video here.

As big data fuels deeper levels of fan insights, the future experience will be richer, and ultimately feed the insatiable hunger for information that these fans have already shown. Being a sports fan will be better than ever before, and Cisco will be right in the middle of making that happen.



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Anabelle Pinto

Worldwide Director, Consumer Market Management

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Using Ongoing Marketing to Nurture Leads: Do You Know What it Takes to Get to “Yes”?

When I started in my sales career many years ago, I didn’t have the luxury of an established client base or a robust CRM package that reminded me who to call. I didn’t have a marketer funneling leads to me or setting up appointments on my behalf. No, each day I came into the office and started “pounding the phones”, making cold calls, and hoped to get a live person on the phone so I could talk to them about whatever I was selling. When I got a “no”, I wrote the opportunity off and went on to the next cold call. It didn’t take long to realize this was an exercise in futility because 80 percent of other sales people were calling these exact same people using the exact same tactic. So, I thought about the way I wanted to be treated and the kind of people I liked to buy from and changed the way I approached prospects.

Although I didn’t know the official concept at the time, I started formalizing a lead nurturing approach. I shifted my mindset so that every prospect that said ”No”, was looked at as a future “Yes”. I set up call reminders on my calendar and started calling these prospects consistently at mutually agreed upon intervals. Overtime, I established relationships with these prospects, and ultimately, I closed business with more than 60 percent of them! More importantly, more than 80 percent of these clients worked exclusively with me and stopped working with other vendors! All because I took the time to nurture the relationships, made a commitment to their success and put in the hard work to make it happen. Although the process was labor intensive, it got the job done. Had I only realized what I could have accomplished by implementing a similar process through marketing campaigns, my sales could have grown exponentially higher.

Fast forward to today’s electronically-connected, ultra-complex business climate and the ”relationship” element is even more rare and impactful than ever before. Although the sales person is still a critical component of the sales process, marketing campaigns have become a much more cost effective way of nurturing prospects and staying in touch with customers. Establishing a schedule of ongoing, targeted marketing activities is an impactful way to nurture leads and keep your company “top of mind” with your prospects. However, the concept of prospecting or lead nurturing through marketing is still not a focus for most companies or sales teams.  But the statistics speak for themselves on the impact that nurturing has on business. Here are some current statistics related to lead nurturing: Continue reading “Using Ongoing Marketing to Nurture Leads: Do You Know What it Takes to Get to “Yes”?”



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Karin Surber

Sr. Global Business Development Manager

Global Partner Strategy and Planning

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SIAM: the next ITIL?

The acronym SIAM stands for Service Integration And Management, and it is a hot topic in the world of IT Service Management…..but why? Service integration models have been around awhile, but are evolving from the challenges of managing a small number of large service partners to a model of managing a larger number of smaller partners. As the services and businesses become more critical or complex, the level of service integration becomes deeper. SIAM builds on the ITIL framework, and expands it.

What is SIAM?

  • According to Wikipedia: “Service integration and management (SIAM) is a framework for managing multiple suppliers of information technology services and integrating them to provide a single business-facing IT organization.”
    More…
  • The UK Government defines it as “Service integration and management lets an organization manage it’s service providers in a consistent and efficient way, making sure that performance across a portfolio of multi-sourced goods and services meets user needs.”
     More…
  • Kevin Holland, ITIL expert is a bit more specific “Service Integration and Management(SIAM) is both a model and a function which provides a single point of accountability for the service management and delivery of all services provided by internal and external service providers, by taking responsibility for and assuring suppliers performance ,  coordinating delivery, integration , and interoperability across multiple providers, and providing the necessary governance on behalf of the users.”
     Details…

Essentially, it is about keeping (or recovering) control – IT organizations use more and more external support providers today, and managing these relationships is getting more complex. SIAM might be the answer to this challenge, because it is all about how IT will deliver the capability to achieve end-to-end service excellence in an increasingly complicated environment by actively managing all aspects of service performance.  Basically, it supports businesses by helping them get the most out of their outsourced and externally managed services.

Why is SIAM important now?

SIAM is in the spotlight of the key analyst groups, Forrester and Gartner.  Spending on external and internal IT services is higher than ever; However, according to Gartner’s 2014 key metrics survey, only 11% of respondents  say that they have mastered their approach to sourcing, and 89% need to improve competencies and significantly raise their maturity levels in order to manage multi-sourcing successfully. (Source)  These metrics show large future potential for SIAM.

If you decide to research SIAM further, keep in mind that SIAM is sometimes referred to as MSI (Multi-sourcing Service Integration)

Are you using or considering a SIAM framework? I would love to hear your thoughts.

References:



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Jim McDonnell

Director, General Manager

ServiceGrid, CMCP, UCSF Alliance

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Scaling NFV – The Performance Challenge

In the second part of my blog series I want to cover one of the main concerns that Services Providers are facing as they explore moving to NFV and that is performance and scalability. Common concerns I hear center around latency, throughput, queuing capabilities and security. These are valid concerns since SP’s have service level agreement (SLA’s) with the their customers which lead to penalties if performance drops below the SLA.  So will a virtualized network function perform at the same level as a purpose built networking device? Continue reading “Scaling NFV – The Performance Challenge”



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Kiran Ghodgaonkar

Senior Manager, Enterprise Marketing

Intent-based Networking Group

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If you bundle it, they will come!

Recently I was speaking to someone (Mike from New Jersey) at Cisco Live and they were raving about their journey to the Flexpod. They were seeking the best compute, networking and storage yet didn’t want to be boggled down with details when it came to the purchasing process. Converged systems like this are relatively new, and honestly Continue reading “If you bundle it, they will come!”



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Rick Vanover

Product Strategy Specialist

Cisco Champion

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India: Transforming Promise into Performance

Seven years ago, many people (including my mother-in-law) thought I had made a career-ending decision to accept a high-risk assignment and relocate to India. My mission:  build from the ground up Cisco’s second headquarters, a Globalization Centre East in Bangalore focused on innovation, talent and partner development that envisioned 10,000 employees in three years, including the top 10% of worldwide talent. My charter included developing a world-class technology campus that also served as a showcase for incubating and advancing Smart City services worldwide, and to become the most relevant ICT company in India.

Was it the right decision?

Wim #1Although half a world away from Cisco’s corporate headquarters in the Silicon Valley, I thought the new job was still full of great promise. India was and still is the world’s largest democracy, had a growing talent pool, a zest for innovation, a co-operative government, aspirational middle class and a potentially huge economy purring along at 8% annual growth.

In four years, we partnered with national and local governments as well as an ecosystem of commercial businesses to architect and develop a fully networked campus.The Smart + Connected Community inBangalore integrated building systems with IT systems and applications onto one IP network, enveloped by artfully designed buildings and collaborative work spaces.

Today, the 1-million-square-foot Globalization Centre East campus employs more than 11,000 people, houses Cisco’s Research and Development, IT and customer support teams with the best talent in industry. The campus also meets my original charter Wim #2as the incubator for validating our industry-leading Smart + Connected Communities, especially Smart Cities, which today has projects on nearly every continent worldwide, encompassing more than 90 engagements.

All that has been extremely rewarding to see, but was it the right decision?

We achieved every critical objective except one: growing ICT technology throughout India itself. In my four years of living in India and after a number of subsequent trips revisiting there, I now realize that the promise and opportunity of India can be unpredictable.  After several years of nearly double digit growth, India’s economy spiraled down, experienced high inflation, a weakening rupee, allegations of government corruption and financial policy decisions that spooked the international investment community.

Continue reading “India: Transforming Promise into Performance”



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Wim Elfrink

Executive Vice President, Industry Solutions & Chief

Globalisation Officer