As consumers continued demand more high-quality content over the Internet, service providers are finding it difficult to increase revenues while containing costs. This is due mainly to two trends: (1) over-the-top (OTT) content providers having outsourced delivery of content to pure-play content delivery network (CDN) companies and (2) traffic growth (with no resulting revenue benefit), increasing network build-out and maintenance costs.
In response, many SPs have begun to utilize CDNs within their networks. While this approach has helped, results have been limited. Now, SPs are exploring the potential of CDN federations, which Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) defines as multi-footprint, open CDN capabilities built from resources owned and operated by autonomous members.
This paper provides an overview of the trends and challenges facing SPs today with regard to content delivery, describes a Cisco-led CDN federation pilot and results to date, and lays out the next steps for the pilot in an effort make CDN federations a reality.
In the past five years, consumer monthly Internet usage has grown nearly three-fold, but users spend little more than in 2006. According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Global Forecast 2011, consumption per U.S. user grew 278 percent. In that same time frame, according to published research, the monthly U.S. cable broadband ARPU remained virtually flat.
As consumers increasingly rely on their broadband access for more of the basic everyday needs, broadband has become the most important core service provider service when compared to pay TV, mobile voice, landline phone and mobile data. But these broadband service providers are struggling to get consumers to equate the value of their online experiences with the value of their broadband service. To that end, SPs are actively considering usage-based billing strategies as a tool to align consumer value perceptions with their underlying networks. Anecdotal evidence from non-U.S. SPs that have introduced usage-based billing indicates that it can drive new value creation.
To help explore consumers’ perspectives, Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) conducted a survey of broadband users in the United States, Canada, France, and Italy to determine current views on usage-based billing policies and approaches.
Cisco and Gartner Research recently partnered on a newsletter on how to transform your IT to reap the full benefits of network convergence. It includes the Gartner report on “Recommendations for SAN Fabric Dashboards” by analysts Valdis Filks and Bob Passmore. Also there are additional resources, blog & recent news links, and make sure to check out the TCO calculator!
Since announcing Cisco’s CloudVerse architecture in December, we’re excited to see that this set of solutions is indeed helping our partners and customers in their journey to offer cloud services. On January 30, Light Reading published the Cisco CloudVerse test results found by EANTC, an internationally-recognized, vendor-neutral test center. Among many findings, EANTC revealed that over 70 percent of leading cloud providers are using Cisco CloudVerse on their journey to the cloud
The tests were created by Light Reading and EANTC around real-world customer care abouts including Security, Agility, Economics, and Experience. They completed 25 test segments across the 3 Cisco CloudVerse themes: Unified Data Center, Cloud Intelligent Network, and Cloud Applications and Services.
The full test results can be found here, and for the full Cisco perspective on this test, please see Pat Adamiak’s blog.
We continue to see our service provider partners leverage the economics and agility of cloud services
Today, AT&T announced the availability of its Unified Communications Service, a new way for its business subscribers to offer a complete collaboration suite of features to employees in a secure and cost effective way. AT&T’s enterprise collaboration solution features Cisco’s own Hosted Collaboration Solution, which gives partners, including service providers and integrators, the ability to deploy multiple collaboration applications on one server in a virtualized environment and then host those applications for multiple client organizations.
Cisco’s cloud services ultimately enable our service provider partners to offer a seamless experience for both their enterprise and end-user customers. For further details, check out the full announcement.
This week Cisco announced additional solutions and services to its Connected Grid portfolio that will help utilities modernize the electric grid with built-in flexibility, security and interoperability enabled by the power of the network. Cisco’s new technology architecture, solutions and related services address key utility concerns around cost, reliability and scalability in their communications infrastructures.
For Cisco’s press release on its latest offerings, please click here.
Cisco hosted a webcast on 1/17/12 about Cisco’s efforts to help optimize the connected grid with its new solutions, products and services. For a replay of this webcast, please click here.
For customer perspective on the current state of the smart grid transition and the new set of offerings in Cisco’s Connected Grid portfolio, please click here.
Jesper Andersen, SVP and GM of Cisco’s Service Provider Video Technology Group, sits down at CES 2012 in Las Vegas to offer his insight on the top video trends of the last year, along with the areas of focus for service providers in 2012, including the cloud. He highlights Cisco’s Videoscape news at the show, and how the new Videoscape cloud and client technologies can help service providers with their cloud strategies and deliver on the vision for ‘Any Screen TV’ video experiences. Check out the video and join the discussion: Cisco at CES 2012: Catching up with SVP/GM Jesper Andersen
Marthin De Beer, SVP of Cisco’s Video and Collaboration Group takes time at CES to share his thoughts on the service provider video market. He highlights Cisco’s video experience demos at the show, and discusses how we are helping customers prepare for the effects of consumer cloud traffic on the networks, with strategies to bridge legacy infrastructure to future IP-centric architectures, including the emergence of gateways. Check out the video and let us know what your thoughts are on the impact of video on the network and the consumer experience: Cisco at CES 2012: Chatting with Marthin De Beer About Service Provider Video Industry
Cisco’s comprehensive TV platform, Videoscape, brings new exciting entertainment experiences for consumers and new revenue streams for Service Providers with new ‘video in the cloud’ services. Today at CES, Cisco is launching several new Videoscape products and announcing how major service providers including Rogers Communications of Canada, YES of Israel and Numéricable of France, have selected Videoscape to deliver their next generation video services.
These new Videoscape products power ‘video in the cloud’ experiences by bringing live and on demand video together, offering a consistent look and feel across devices whether its a PC, MAC, iPad, iPhone or Android device. Videoscape is leading Service Providers through the migration, with a unique open software platform, providing a path to an all IP-based video infrastructure. Service Providers can now provide their consumers the ability to move, pause and resume video content on any device, following them whenever they go.
The end-of-year holiday season is traditionally positioned as a chance to slow down and re-charge, but Cisco’s industry-leading products for service providers didn’t get the memo. Their momentum continued unabated.
Just two days before Christmas, Cisco announced that Dutch service provider KPN has chosen the Cisco CRS-3 multi-chassis carrier routing system, which will be deployed at the heart of KPN’s Internet peering network. The CRS-3 solution will transport all of KPN’s IP traffic to the Internet as part of KPN’s Internet Cluster Environment (ICE).
Not long before, Verizonannounced that its IP network, one of the most advanced communications networks in the world, will be upgraded in the first half of 2012 with the Cisco CRS-3 to enable new services and meet growing traffic demands in several key U.S. markets, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle.
As for the ASR 9000 edge routing system, Fibrenoire, a service provider offering Internet and private network services over an optical fiber network in Quebec and Ontario, has completed implementation of an end-to-end Cisco Carrier Ethernet System covering the Quebec City, Montreal and Toronto regions. Fibrenoire’s network is based on the ASR 9000.
Additionally, Next Communications, a Miami-based voice and video provider, has deployed Cisco technology for its IP Next-Generation Network. Integral to this will be deployment of the ASR 9000 and ASR 1000 routers for 100GE port capacity and greater resiliency.
Cisco and US Signal, a leading provider of regional transport, data center and Internet Protocol (IP) services, announced successful completion of the first 100 Gigabit (100G) coherent DWDM trial based on the industry-leading performance of the ONS 15454.
Making Cisco easier to do business with. That is one of the committments the company outlined this year as part of its refinements and evolution. The results in doing so continues, we hope you see it and feel it. That promise shows up in many places across the company including our Services business. Services is one area of any business that is multifaceted, no doubt. At Cisco it’s a differentiated strategy that we bring to the market because of our partner-centric approach. Services provides a huge opporutnity for our partners,we recognize that and it now represents 40-50% of Cisco channel partners business, up from 20 percent just five years ago.
Partners participate in the Services opportunity at every level, from the largest global customers to the local small business. Our partners are the extension our Services arm. And that’s not just “lip Service” --to back it up Cisco is taking the next step forward to further clarify our sales engagement model and drive consistency in the field to continue momentum with absolute clarity. We just published our Services Rules of Engagement to provide our partners with a definitive road map for how to engage with Cisco Services and maximize their Cisco Services investment. Specifically the document does the following:
Defines the partners role in the selling and delivery of Cisco services
Helps partners build a collaborative and predictable field sales and delivery model
Gives partners easy steps to driving accelerated customer adoption of smart services capabilities
Delivers a clear field escalation process should a mishap occur
Describe the sales compensation neutrality strategy
You be the judge as to how this really works, your outside voice and views are a great reality test. Let us know what you hear and how we are doing, we think we are off to a solid start, so let’s engage.
To learn more, click here and check out a blog by Raja Sundaran VP WW Services Partner Organization on the Rules of Engagement that talks more about Cisco’s approach and “tasty” opportunity for our partners.
Hit the video below from Keith Goodwin, SVP WW Partner Organization, and Bob Singleton, SVP WW Services Partner Organization on our Services Go-to-Market model and ways partners will benefit.
On December 6th Cisco announced CloudVerse, an integrated set of capabilities that enables customers to deliver cloud applications and services by uniquely combining the unified data center and cloud intelligent network. Key to this is Cisco’s Unified Data Center architecture which is comprised of three technology pillars: Unified Computing, Unified Fabric, and Unified Management.
The following provides a description of CloudVerse, focusing on new cloud management offerings and capabilities that enable customers to build and operate private, public or hybrid clouds… the world of many clouds:
Cisco CloudVerse uniquely combines the unified data center and cloud intelligent network as the platform to deliver cloud services. CloudVerse brings a unique set of advantages:
Assured Cloud Experience by uniquely combining the unified data center and cloud intelligent network
Agile, Dynamic and Efficient Cloud – delivering cost savings and time to market advantages, while simplifying the management and deployment of services
Accelerated Deployment through pre-tested designs like VMDC, through pre-tested ecosystem integrated solutions such as Flexpod and Vblock
Simplified management an operation through integrated management of compute, network and storage – for both the DC and the network
Cisco Unified Data Center provides a complete Data Center infrastructure architecture. It combines compute, storage, network, security and management into a fabric architecture that delivers outstanding performance for physical and virtualized business applications. Created to help companies evolve to cloud computing environments, Unified Data Center embeds automation and simplified operations at the Server, Network and Cloud-Services Layers.
Unified Managementprovides automation and lifecycle management frameworks to manage and simplify the deployment and operations of Network-Layer, Compute-Layer and Application/Cloud-Services-Layer within the Data Center. This includes Cisco UCS Manager, Cisco Network Services Manager, and Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, as well as the integration with Cisco’s application, virtualization and storage ecosystem partners.
Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud features the newScale self-service portal and service catalog, which has been re-branded as Cisco Cloud Portal, and the Tidal automation software, which has been re-branded as the Cisco Process Orchestrator. Together, we’ve combined and integrated these software products into a powerful and intelligent management solution for enabling IT-as-a-Service.
Cisco Network Services Manager automates and provisions network infrastructure services using powerful abstracted models and policies that define and control the characteristics and behavior of the Cloud, and how Cloud services are accessed by end-users.
Cisco UCS Manager Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Manager provides unified, embedded management of all software and hardware components in the Cisco UCS. It controls multiple chassis and manages resources for thousands of virtual machines.
To get more information on CloudVerse and Cisco Unified Data Center, please read the following blogs:
Today we are announcing Cisco CloudVerse, an integrated set of capabilities that enables customers to deliver cloud applications and services by uniquely combining the unified data center and cloud intelligent network. CloudVerse is the culmination of Cisco’s data center and network innovation over the last few years and provides our customer with the platform for their journey to the cloud.
Cisco today announced its inaugural Global Cloud Index (2010-2015)-- research that forecasts, among other topics, that Global Cloud Computing Traffic will Reach 1.6 Zettabytes by 2015 and Global Cloud Traffic Will Exceed One-Third of All Data Center Traffic by 2015. This analysis was undertaken by the same team that presents the Visual Networking Index (VNI).
Or, perhaps more accurately, Canadian mobile operators have been going for Cisco. To wit:
In one example, Shaw Communicationswill deploy an extensive, advanced Wi-Fi network in Western Canada to provide broadband wireless access. The next-generation network will enable Shaw customers to connect Wi-Fi enabled devices like tablets, mobile phones and computers at thousands of Wi-Fi access points.
Shaw Communications also announced that it will conduct a technical trial of HotSpot 2.0 in conjunction with Cisco, Shaw’s Wi-Fi technology partner. HotSpot 2.0 will represent a significant improvement in Wi-Fi accessibility and security.
In addition, Bell Mobilityhas selected the Cisco ASR 5000 platform for delivering 4G and LTE mobile services in its next-generation wireless network. The ASR 5000 will form the foundation of the packet core for Bell Mobility’s LTE network, delivering higher bandwidth and greater intelligence for faster mobile Internet services and improved user experiences.
Designated as a 4G mobile specification, LTE is designed to provide multi-megabit bandwidth, more efficient use of radio networks, latency reduction and improved mobility. LTE aims to enhance user interaction with the network and further drive demand for mobile multimedia services.
