As you all know, Cisco has defined collaboration as four key pillars:  Social, Mobile, Visual (Video) and Virtual. We all have been experiencing these pillars – each one of them is critical and is moving into the enterprise. And what is particularly exciting is their convergence and rate of speed. Read More »

Rebecca Jacoby, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, introduces a series of technology responses that Cisco has made to accommodate major market trends, including sustainable productivity, globalization, and the consumerization of IT. The responses involved unifying the business and technology architectures at Cisco to help create strategies around collaboration, widespread virtualization, and mobility. These efforts have resulted in immersive collaboration, Cisco’s cloud, and the connected experience, respectively.

To view the complete interactive, please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ciscoit

For more information on Cisco IT’s Business Transformation Through Architectures: Business Transformation Through Architectures.

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Tags: architectures, business transformation, CIO, Cisco IT, cisco on cisco, cloud, coc-business-of-it, collaboration, connected experience, Consumerization

Early in 2010 Cisco started construction on its greenfield data center in Allen, Texas. From inception, the goal was for this facility to embody our data center vision for consolidation, virtualization, cloud computing, and new approaches to power and cooling, uniquely done all under one roof.

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Tags: Cisco, Cisco IT, cisco on cisco, coc-data-center, data center, DC, high density computing, metro virtual pair, multitenancy, power and cooling, resiliency

Last month, I had the pleasure of visiting my IT team based in Bangalore, India.  I was very impressed with how Cisco’s four pillars of our collaboration strategy (social, mobile, virtual, visual/video) are showcased at the Bangalore campus.  Read More »

Each year Cisco’s Strategic Leadership Experience brings together senior managers, directors, and executives across the company globally,  to engage with each other and align to business priorities through various sessions and other interactions. This multiday event requires a heavy amount of pre-work, communications, and generates a wealth of presentations, video, and other content that needs to be housed for easy access by event attendees as well as those unable to attend.
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Tags: Cisco IT, iwe, leadership, platform, quad

I was delighted to be invited to serve as a Sage (judge) at this year’s DEMO Spring 2012 Conference.  DEMO, as many of you may know, is a series of conferences sponsored by IDG/VentureBeat that identify tomorrow’s cutting-edge technologies. More than 80 start-up companies brought their new products and services to the DEMO stage to sell the audience of venture capitalists, IT professionals, industry analysts and news media on their ideas. Read More »

Ah, moving day.  You’ve spent weeks packing your valuables into boxes and are now fervently hoping your movers treat them like priceless artifacts rather than testing their bounce factor.  Sure, said movers are either complete strangers you’ve hired or friends you’ve enticed with beer and pizza, but what could possibly go wrong?

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Tags: Cisco, coc-data-center, data center, datacenterdeconstructed, hardware, move planning, relocation, Servers

One of the most daunting tasks a Data Center manager can face is a large scale hardware relocation.  While today’s technology often allows you to avoid physical moves – you bring new hardware online at your destination, migrate applications there and then decommission the old gear – sometimes you still have to roll up your sleeves and do some heavy lifting.

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Tags: Cisco, coc-data-center, data center, datacenterdeconstructed, hardware, move planning, relocation, Servers

G’Day from Down Under, coming to you from Cisco Live at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre overlooking the Yarra River.  And what a whirlwind three days it has been – quite active and very busy. And according to customers, it has been “crackin’.” It has been a truly fun experience sharing Cisco’s collaboration story which includes the four pillars (social, mobile, virtual and visual) with Australian customers, executives, analysts and news media. In particular, there has been lots of excitement about BYOD and virtualization – both desktop and content virtualization. Read More »

In my  first blog I described how Cisco IT is interconnecting our outsourced Contact Centers using SIP trunks, replacing the more costly (and less effective) PSTN trunks.  In our first round of SIP trunk deployments we expect to save almost 25% of our current contact center calling costs (or $2M per year).  But there were other, less tangible benefits as well.
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Tags: border element, Call Center, coc-collaboration, contact center, CUBE, extranet, outsourced, PSTN, SIP

How well do the IT and Facilities people get along at your company?  Does they work well together or seem at times to be from different planets?

I’ve been in the Data Center industry for 15 years now, always based in IT but focused on physical infrastructure design and operations.  A key part of my job has been helping IT and Facilities understand one another’s goals, challenges and technologies.  That – as I like to joke – means I have great job security. Read More »

Tags: Cisco, data center, datacenterdeconstructed, Facilities, IT, Technology Convergence Conference, Teladata

Last week, I had the opportunity to travel across country to meet with Cisco customers and co-keynote with our business partner, Xerox, at its annual conference.  I found that our four pillars of collaboration – social, mobile, virtual and visual (video) – are continuing to resonate with customers. 

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Cisco has partnered with several outsourced vendors over the years for initial handling of many front-line calls and general information inquiries.  Connecting these vendor environments into a single Cisco customer contact environment is critical for good customer care, but costly and not always easy.  However, early this year we made a change:  we’re using SIP trunking and Cisco Unified Border Element to bring us much closer together, and save money into the bargain.

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Tags: blind push, border element, Call Center, coc-collaboration, contact center, CUBE, outsourced, PSTN, SIP

Have you ever wondered how Cisco IT overcomes the challenges of deploying products and technologies in a large-scale, global enterprise – the same challenges that your customers face everyday?  Or how Cisco IT is transforming into a sharply competitive, services-centric organization? Cisco on Cisco: Inside Cisco IT shares our journey and lessons learned on these and many other fronts.

We’ve just redesigned our website from the ground up to make it easier and faster to find Cisco IT content relevant to you and your customers.  Head over to the Cisco on Cisco website to benefit from our IT Success Stories that include case studies, best practices, videos, and interactive content.

The new site focuses on content that YOU are looking for:

• How does Cisco build a highly secure network that connects anyone, anywhere, on any device, at any time? Check out our Borderless Networks page.
• How does Cisco enable collaboration, boosting productivity and enhancing myriad business processes?  Visit our Collaboration page.
• Want to know more about the cloud, virtualization, service-oriented infrastructure, and unified computing? Our Data Center page can help.
• How does Cisco IT achieve greater workplace efficiencies and help solve business process problems?  Learn more on our Business of IT page.
• Click on our Events page to see when and where you can engage with the Cisco on Cisco team at industry events.

Take a look Inside Cisco IT today at  http://www.cisco.com/go/ciscoit.

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Tags: aaron, aaron chiles, borderless, Borderless Networks, business of it, center, chiles, Cisco, Cisco IT, cisco on cisco, collaboration, data, data center, information, IT, Networks, technology

Like many large enterprises, Cisco makes a lot of phone calls.  Cisco previously used a lot of TDM trunks from multiple carriers to carry thousands of voice calls from our North American Cisco offices to the PSTN. The problem is, we had over 100 TDM trunks we were paying for every month, to carry our voice calls for these sites.  Four years ago we started looking around for a more cost-effective and manageable way to support all these calls.  After a good deal of searching, screening vendors and testing, we finally found it, using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking technology.

For the Cisco campuses in San Jose and Research Triangle Park (RTP), we will replace over a hundred PRI (23 channel) TDM trunks, used for long-distance voice calls for all of our North American sites, with SIP trunks.  The new San Jose link is a 250 Mbps SIP trunk carved out of a 10 Gigabit Ethernet WAN access line, while the RTP link is a 20 Mbps SIP trunk carved out of a 45 Mbps DS3 WAN access line. Together, these SIP trunks give us the capacity to carry over 2400 concurrent calls and a total voice call volume of 2 million minutes per month.
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Tags: coc-collaboration, long distance, SIP, SIP trunk, voice trunk, voip