In my previous posts, I discussed with you the importance of unified policy and management as you respond to the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend. The Cisco Unified Access solution brings “One Policy. One Management. One Network” to help you with your BYOD initiatives. Today I’ll take a look at the third pillar of Cisco Unified Access, One Network. I’ll explore with you what it means and why it is a critical factor as you take on BYOD.

The workforce is increasingly going mobile. According to research firm Gartner, tablets will be the key accelerator to workforce mobility. A Gartner 2012 report suggested that annual tablet purchase by businesses totaled 13 million units and this number would more than triple to reach 53 million units by 2016. Such rapid mobile growth calls for major wireless network expansion. Market data from Infonetics showed that global wireless LAN equipment sales in the 3^rd quarter of 2012 passed the $1-billion mark for the first time.   Read More »

Tags: AVC, byod, Gartner, one management, One Network, one policy, unified access, wireless LAN, wireless network

Enabling bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and rich-media collaboration applications can help increase productivity, deliver superior employee collaboration, and improve business agility. The right campus access network can simplify BYOD and collaboration so that you can free up time to focus on strategic projects.

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Tags: Bring your Own Device (BYOD), byod, catalyst switch, Cisco Catalyst 4500E, collaboration applications, management, unified access

I recently hosted a live webcast on measuring business value with Cisco’s Unified Workspace Smart Solutions.  The webcast addressed key challenges many IT architects and managers face when trying to determine the right metrics for evaluation when considering IT projects. It was great to have Jai Valluri who leads the Business Transformation team at Cisco co present with me.  He brought a wealth of knowledge on this topic from consulting with our largest and most strategic customers to help quantify the business value of deploying solutions such as Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) and Cisco BYOD.   Read More »

Tags: byod, unified workspace, vdi, vxi

Network Management is dull.  No excuses.  Monitoring and interacting with the devices that move data from one location to another is a thankless undertaking that most of us building networks leave to an afterthought.  Part of that is the complexity associated with managing networks.  There are at least a dozen common methods for interacting with devices in the network including SNMP, CLI, AAA, Syslog, Netflow, and fancy XML/HTTP interfaces.  So much variety breeds complexity so we tend to set our goals pretty low for interactivity with the network.

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Tags: application performance, AVC, custom security protocols, Dynamic QoS, Moving Packets!, One Platform Kit, onePK, QoS on DSL, router, SDN, Video quality monitoring

As part of my work at Cisco, I get to talk to customers very often. Through these conversations, I learn what works for them and what concerns them. Lately, I’ve been hearing a common theme from a lot of customers: in many organizations IT staff is small and not growing while they are being asked to do more to meet the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) challenge.

BYOD has drastically changed the technology landscape as users bring many different types of personal devices to the networks of schools and colleges, hospitals, financial agencies, enterprises and other organizations. One university IT team, including their chief technology officer and their IT administrators, recently told me that they had 200% network user growth and 300% endpoint device growth over the last several years. As for their network, they used to have less than 100 wireless access points (APs). Guess how many they have today? Over a thousand. And they are planning to deploy several hundred more APs in the coming months. How about their IT headcount growth? As you might have guessed, it’s not grown at all.

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Tags: access points, Borderless Networks, byod, cisco prime, Hospital wifi, management, unified access, University IT, wireless access points