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Your NOC Your Way at Interop
Over the last few weeks, we’ve started to unpack some of the focus-group discussions we’ve recently had with hundreds of IT professionals. The goal of these focus groups was to help as Cisco continues to ensure we’re meeting our customers’ needs. We’ve discussed some of the top priorities for network managers including, keeping users happy, reducing the dreaded help desk calls, and improving ROI while reducing overall operational costs.
These and other top concerns for IT professionals were paired up with Cisco and partner technologies to show real solutions. These solutions have been on display at Interop at the Cisco booth in our NOC area and will likewise be at the Borderless Networks booth at CiscoLive Orlando. Jimmy Ray Purser and Rob Boyd caught up with the architect of this NOC, Marlowe Fenne to get an introduction to the Unified Access solution.
In this video you’ll see quick ways to: Read More »
Tags: applications, Cisco, interop, Network Managers, NOC, ROI, security, Techwise
Christopher Cullan, InfoVista
InfoVista recently announced its support for Cisco’s Application Visibility & Control (AVC) as part of its Application Visibility Services solution for communications service providers (CSPs). I took some time out this week to speak with Christopher Cullan, product marketing manager for business services at InfoVista, to discuss the solution and specifically the significance of Cisco’s ISR-AX and AVC to his business.
Bob: Christopher, tell me what’s behind InfoVista’s investment in the Cisco AVC technology as part of your solution?
Christopher: Sure, by the way, you can call me Chris. Cisco AVC and the ISR-AX capability provides an attractive and simple architecture that takes advantage of the Customer Premise Equipment (CPE), and allows CSPs to offer customers a better service experience by enhancing the visibility of the service from an application perspective.
Bob: The application visibility?
Christopher: Yes, exactly—it’s a solution to the problem of the enterprises’ business-IT gap. Enterprise IT is constantly tasked to deliver greater agility to their business stakeholders, and it’s challenging for them to communicate with the business from an infrastructure perspective, including WAN services. The application is better understood and more tangible to the business because they experience it more directly (e.g. the business understands salesforce is slow today, versus the network latency is high). Having insight into not only what applications are traversing the WAN, between which users and systems and how much, but also the application performance itself, empowers enterprise IT to make better decisions and provide a greater experience to their stakeholders. In essence, it helps enterprises better align their IT to the needs of the business. Read More »
Tags: #MWNice, application visibility control, AVC, Customer Premise Equipment (CPE), managed service provider, NBAR2, TM Forum
How well do IT and Business align?
This morning at Interop Las Vegas Cisco SVP/GM Rob Soderbery introduced the crowd to his vision for the Cisco ONE Architecture, played some hoops with NBA All Star @kyrieirving, and introduced the new Cisco Global IT Impact Survey.The Cisco Global IT Impact Survey was taken by more than 1,300 IT decision makers in 13 countries, and was commissioned to measure the impact of IT professionals on the decisions that shape their businesses. It also delved in to how those IT professionals viewed some of the big trends the industry is facing -- SDN, IoT, BYOD, etc. - while also measuring the relevance of the network itself to businesses. Read More »
Tags: Cisco, Cisco Global IT Impact Survey, infographic, interop, Networks
“Art and science have their meeting point in method.”
Earl Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
Tracking IT ROI has always been equal parts art and science, but lately it’s becoming even more complicated as organizations deal with technology transitions such as cloud and mobility. How do we know? Because Cisco recently asked hundreds of IT Managers in companies of all sizes how their businesses track ROI.
More specifically, we asked Network Managers, Data Center Managers, Server and Storage Managers, and other IT professionals how and if ROI was tracked for their groups. Answers varied widely, as you’d expect, but several point did become clear: Read More »
Tags: Cloud ROI, interop, Mobility ROI, Network Manager, NOC
Infographic: The Before and After of Using Optimization Services on a Network [Click to see full]
One of my passions in life is sailing, both cruising and racing. There is nothing quite like the wind in your hair and the sun on your face to paint a perfect day. The difference between a great day on the water and miserable one comes down to preparation. Basic maintenance of the vessel, proactively checking the weather, wind, and tides, and understanding how to optimally operate the vessel for the best performance will enhance the experience. It’s not something that one can fully master, and you will always be learning and striving towards perfection. This is very true of my other passion, which is helping customers get optimal performance out of their networks. Once again, success is all about preparation.
Over my career, I have been through more customers than I can count and have seen widely ranging degrees of success amongst these customers. Why is it that some customers are extremely successful with no outages or performance issues whilst others seem to never be able to keep pace with outages and performance issues are a near daily occurrence? Some deploy a new technology without a glitch while others dread the thought of adding new technologies to their network in fear of the potential impact to their business.
You need a holistic approach that takes into consideration all of the systems involved in a solution. You can design and deploy the best voice/video solution but if the underlying network is not designed and configured to support this business service, it will not likely meet the performance requirements of the business. For example, imagine your business has the requirement to deliver a periodic streaming video broadcast from senior management to the employees of the company. Your company consists of campuses globally along with remote and mobile workers. So, you need to be able to stream across your wired, wireless and VPN network to users both local and remote. This is where the role of architecture comes into play.
The importance of architecture is that it pulls together a complete holistic view of the business services and the requirements to effectively support them. How much bandwidth is required, what is the tolerable round trip delay, tolerance for packet loss are all considerations that will go into building that strong foundation that is required for success. In today’s world of BYOD, the expectation is that these services will be available and perform flawlessly over wired, wireless and VPN.
I set a goal to increase the speed performance of my sailboat and purchased brand new sails to reach this goal. After installing the sails, it was clear that I had gained no additional speed. After doing a bottoms-up assessment of the vessel, I realized that the hull was covered with barnacles. Without a clean hull, adding sails will not deliver the desired result. Trying to deploy a business service, such as a voice or video solution, over a network that is not designed for it will also fail to deliver the desired. Most problems with deploying advanced technologies lie within the foundational network rather than the advanced technologies themselves. Your network, like the hull of my boat, is the foundation of your business services. If this is not solid, the chances are the higher level services that rely on this “foundation” will likely not delivery the desired results. A holistic approach will take into consideration the business services that must run over the network and use this to build out an effective foundation. Read this success story on how Ecobank deployed collaboration solutions based on a solid infrastructure. You can also see how optimization has benefited other companies in this infographic.
Stay tuned for my next posts where I’ll cover proven strategies for optimizing your network.
Tags: infographic, optimization, ROI
