Cisco Blog > Inside Cisco IT
In my last blog we discussed how on-line tools for desktop sharing, audio and video collaboration, and enterprise social software play an increasingly important role in corporate business. We discussed how the industry is also seeing a trend toward “IT consumerization,” where employees and other users experience new technologies before they are supported by enterprises. The first impact of this trend is producing more employee requests to access their personal social media accounts from their work computers as a way to manage both work and life responsibilities. The even bigger impact is that employees want to use these types of collaboration tools for enterprise business purposes.
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Tags: blogging, collaboration, security, social media, twitter
As you know from my previous blog, Cisco IT has just crossed the 50,000 mobile device deployed milestone – a mix of iPhones, Android and Blackberry devices. We are thrilled with our progress and believe there are two factors that have driven our success: Read More »
As noted in my last blog, Cisco is continuing to see an explosion of personal smart phones and tablets coming into the enterprise, with now more than 50,000 personal devices in use. Additionally, employees want to do more and more on their phones with new applications. That’s not surprising – there is a massive burst of killer apps! Read More »
Tags: coc-collaboration
February 2, 2012 at 9:52 am PST
February 1, 2012 at 10:00 am PST
We recently published a new case study that describes how Cisco IT has evolved its internal collaboration and social sharing site, called the Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE). With IWE and the Cisco® Quad™ platform, Cisco IT provides the types of social networking tools—blogs, microblog messages, and informal videos—that employees use outside of work. In IWE, those tools are optimized for internal use within Cisco and are implemented in a robust, scalable, and secure way. Originally created by Cisco IT on an open-source platform, IWE now runs on the Cisco Quad platform. The platform migration required integrating the social sharing tools with minimal user disruption, preserving user documents, migrating different user data types appropriately, supporting application portals, and educating employees.
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Tags: cisco on cisco, coc-collaboration, collaboration, iwe
Cisco’s data center in Allen, Texas (DC2), was designed to make best use of the high-density Cisco Unified Computing System and Nexus switches. Cisco’s business requirement for high-density computing, supporting up to five Unified Computing System chassis per rack, essentially quadrupled the per-rack power requirements at Texas DC2 compared to target load requirements at our other data centers.
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Tags: Cisco, coc-data-center, cooling, data center, DC, high density computing, overhead cooling
January 18, 2012 at 10:00 am PST
How many ice cubes does it take to cool a server?
This week’s Data Center Deconstructed Q&A item isn’t quite phrased that way, but if you consider the history of refrigeration that’s the riddle we’re pondering. It’s a good one to figure out; Data Center designers and operators face the issue daily as part of their mission to create efficient server environments.
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Tags: Cisco, coc-data-center, cooling, data center, datacenterdeconstructed, hardware density, ice, refrigeration
Cisco kicked off the New Year with a significant milestone: we’ve reached over 50,000 users of personal mobile devices in the enterprise. In fact, while we’ve seen an upward trajectory of personal devices over the past two years, the major growth spurt was in the last calendar year – our total mobile device count grew 52% in 12 months. And no surprise: this was primarily seen in Apple devices. Read More »
Tags: coc-collaboration
Part 1 of this blog series established that community administrators and owners need a way to assess and manage their respective community gardens and prune away communities that are no longer useful; see http://blogs.cisco.com/ciscoit/pruning-your-community-garden-an-approach-to-community-lifecycle-management-part-1/). This blog describes the primary tool that will be leveraged by community administrators and owners within Cisco’s Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE) to view and tend to their respective community gardens. The tool is called the Community Lifecycle Management Portlet (LCMP). The LCMP represents one of several components that have been developed – in a partnership between Cisco IT and the Collaboration Business Technologies organization – as an extension of Cisco’s Enterprise Collaboration Platform (Quad) to maintain the overall health of our community ecosystem.
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Tags: Cisco, coc-collaboration, collaboration, communities, iwe, quad
January 4, 2012 at 10:00 am PST
I spent a recent weekend helping a friend load his belongings into a moving van, in preparation for relocating his family from California to Texas. Sometime between lifting my end of a sofa and carrying boxes that apparently contained his collection of concrete blocks, we talked about his search for a new home.
Although there are certain amenities he would like his new house to have, the biggest influence on his choice of residence is the old real estate axiom location, location, location. He has a child in preschool and a good job, so you can guess his priorities: something near a highly rated school, not too far from work and where property values are apt to rise over time.
Location is a critical consideration for Data Centers, too, although for different reasons. Read More »
Tags: air economizer, carbon footprint, Cisco, coc-data-center, data center, datacenterdeconstructed, electrical mix, energy efficiency, natural disasters, power costs, site selection
How many people does it take to manage the service infrastructure supporting over 150,000 hardware phones, 50,000 soft phones, and 10,000 room and desktop video devices. That’s the size of our UC infrastructure at Cisco, and today we manage all our voice, voicemail, and video services with an integrated voice and video Tier 3 operations team of 25 people, and another 5 people supporting contact center applications and services. We do this by continually finding new efficiencies – learning new ways to support existing services so we can spend more time learning how to support the new technologies.
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Tags: coc-collaboration, endpoint, infrastructure, IPT, operations, organization, support, telephony, TelePresence, UC, unified communications, unity, video, Voice, voicemail, voip
December 14, 2011 at 10:00 am PST
Congratulations on a great first year for your Data Center Deconstructed blog.
I say yours because you choose the subject matter through the questions you submit. Sure, I do the writing and video production but really I’m just the chauffer. My hands are on the steering wheel; you decide where we go.
As we come to the end of the road that is 2011, let’s check the rearview mirror and see the most popular stops along our path. Here are the Data Center Deconstructed topics that garnered the most attention this year: Read More »
Tags: 2011, Cisco, coc-data-center, data center, datacenterdeconstructed, year in review
Cisco IT has deployed voice infrastructure around the world in order to handle our 1+ million voice calls per day with high levels of quality and reliability. We used to manage this infrastructure with four separate regional teams: one managing the Western part of North America, another managing Eastern North America and Latin America, the third Europe/Middle East/Africa, and the fourth Asia/Pacific. But we found that this regional organization led to inconsistent operations because the regional teams had different ideas on how things should be done and they applied our corporate standards in different ways.
Our early lack of global consistency led to inefficiency in our support operations. We would have people from different time zones trying to help troubleshoot problems and be unable to support an unfamiliar configuration. And this meant that our regional teams had to provide around-the-clock support by themselves – which led to sleepless nights and frayed nerves.
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Tags: coc-collaboration, IPT, management, operations, support, telephony, UC, unified communications, unity, video, Voice, voicemail, voip
Roughly one year ago, Cisco was one of the first global companies to launch its own collaboration solution – we deployed our integrated workforce experience (IWE) powered by Cisco Quad across our enterprise to 110,000 employees and contractors worldwide. Today, I’m thrilled to report that IWE Powered by Cisco Quad 2.5 has launched – a significant upgrade that offers new capabilities, making it easier than ever before for our teams to collaborate together. Read More »
Tags: coc-collaboration
