If not pre-empted by a neighbor’s dog, one of the first things I hear each morning is the weather report. This time of year, there’s usually some reference to clouds – partly cloudy, high clouds, low clouds, cloud cover, clouds clearing by mid-morning, clouds arriving in the late afternoon. A world of many clouds indeed.

When it comes to conversations about technology, it’s hard to escape talk of clouds, cloud computing, and cloud this, that, and the other thing. But here’s a question: I’m not an IT person, so why should I care about cloud computing?

Beyond the weather...

How about this? Clouds give you what you need to do collaborate more effectively — when, where, and how you need it. Add in reduced costs, increased profitability, improved efficiency, and support for innovative business models. OK, I’m listening.

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Tags: Cius, cloud, cloud_computing, collaboration, mobility, video, web conferencing, WebEX

It’s clear from our conversations with customers around the world that we’re in the early stages of a fundamental shift in business. It’s the decade of collaboration. A time of flash communities and knowledge accidents. A time when video, virtualization, social media and mobility influence everything we do. And when employees from any remote corner of an organization can provide the spark for your next important innovation.

But only if you set the stage for collaboration.

Building a collaborative organization isn’t easy. It takes a transformative approach to culture, processes and technology—and an unwavering commitment from top to bottom. Do it and you will be rewarded with an energized organization that can adapt quickly to changing markets and deliver tangible results.

That’s why I recently partnered with my colleague, Ron Ricci, Cisco’s VP of Corporate Positioning, to write The Collaboration Imperative, a book that dives into the culture, process and technology dimensions of successful collaboration. It offers practical tips and strategies for making companies more collaborative and looks at how some of the world’s leading companies are sharpening their collaboration edge.

We also introduce some surprising facts. For example, did you know that….

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Tags: Carl Wiese Blog, Collaboration Imperative Blog, Collaborative Imperative, mobility, New Collaboration Experience, social media, video, virtualization

I’ve always worked in creative environments with a lot of interdependent roles and processes – and big, unyielding deadlines. Twenty years ago (did I just type that?!), it was editors, writers, designers, artists, production teams, salespeople, prepress film houses, printers, and all of the rest involved in producing magazines. My role was at the intersection of the creative work and technical production. Sometimes it all happened as a meeting in one room, other aspects involved sneakernet, sending disks and film back and forth via couriers. Missing a print date cost big dollars. You didn’t miss the dates. Ever. 

Being a bit of a geek with a logical streak of an engineer’s daughter, I was always looking for ways to add structure and streamline processes. (This is not unlike trying to put a wet cat in a sweater.) I developed a successful, but perhaps unhealthy relationship with spreadsheets that I used to hold information – deadlines, story details, status, page counts, art files, page ratios. I dutifully maintained my trusty grids and could answer any question about any bit or piece along the way. But hand anyone else a printout and their eyes would cross and roll before they simply restated the question. The spreadsheets held data; I was the mechanism for sharing data – the user interface, so to speak.

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Tags: Cisco Quad, collaboration, web conferencing

In our earlier post, we explored growing interest in a new class of social application that AIIM calls “Enterprise Q&A”. We concluded that design and user experience were critically important. To deliver this type of application effectively, design practices had to accommodate the social dynamics that occur as people participate in various roles within “answer networks”. As organizations invest in social collaboration platforms, many of these systems will have, or will eventually include, an Enterprise Q&A capability. Design practices that prioritize user experience and social participation, not just Q&A automation, will likely deliver the best solution. While it seems to be straightforward design challenge (ask a question, get an answer), the cultural and social networking dynamics can be very nuanced. Those nuances are easily overlooked if solution providers implement Enterprise Q&A from a technological perspective.

Below are several strategy, design, and user experience considerations you might want to ask yourself if you are looking into this topic:

• Where should the question get published to maximize the change of getting a applicable answer? While industry exuberance for activity streams makes it the likely candidate, is that always the proper mechanism?
• If activity streams are leveraged, is posting a question into a stream cluttered with lots of other items vying for attention the right approach? Should we visually distinguish a question from other types of activity stream entries? What other filtering options should be considered so that questions receive the proper priority?
• If posting a question into a stream is not always the best design decision, what other options should be considered? Should we decipher the meta-data associated with a question and map them to expertise tags of people and communities? If so, we can then define a notification process and ping those individuals and groups through different alerting options? Read More »

Tags: collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Q&A

In October of 2011, AIIM (the Association for Information & Imaging Management, a non-profit research, community and educational association), published a survey-based report that examined social business and Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) trends. I had the good fortune to hear about the results first-hand when I co-presented with AIIM’s President, John Mancini, on a social networking panel at the Gilbane Conference held in Boston last November. John summarized the work and results of the study. One of the more interesting data points and trending analysis I found intriguing was a growing interest in a class of social application AIIM refers to as “Enterprise Q&A”.  Historically, when people ask what the common application use case scenarios are for E2.0, the most frequently cited examples have been: expertise location, online communities, and ideation (innovation).

Why the growing interest in Q&A applications? Perhaps because it’s a pain point all of us – from front-line worker to senior executive – can relate to in our everyday work experience. All of us can recall situations when we’ve had a question about something and have not been able to find an answer through the information and contacts at our disposal. We ask our colleagues. We send out e-mails. We might try discussion forums, knowledge-base applications, and of course – search engines.

“The question acts as a ‘social object’ that can mobilize networks, enable people to take on informal social roles, and help create social capital between participants in these answer networks.”

However, even if we are fortunate enough to find the content, the information may not be presented in a fashion that addresses our need. Sometimes the “question” is not easily resolved by locating content. Often, what people are asking for (indirectly) when they pose a question is to have a conversation with someone to “make sense” out of that issue (in addition to the content if it’s relevant). Read More »

Tags: collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, social networking

It is no secret that alternative communication devices including tablets are taking a big chunk of the market away from what normally would be “PC territory”. Clearly the popularity of tablet form-factor devices is soaring.  The craze started in the consumer space and has definitely made waves in the enterprise market, too. If you do a search for “tablets in the enterprise” you’ll likely see north of 79 million results.

Cisco wanted to know what was top of mind for IT managers when it comes to tablet form-factor devices hitting their networks. So we asked them—1500 of them, from the US, UK, Canada, France, Spain, and Germany.

What were their thoughts on the “bring-your-own-device (BYOD) to work phenomena? Which country has the most security concerns? Which country leads in tablet requests from employees? How do they feel about issues like access to company applications?

This infographic shows some of the results that we found most intriguing; read our press release for more.

be sure to check out the press release for more details like these:

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Tags: Cisco Cius, collaboration, enterprise tablets, global survey, Tablets

If there was ever a doubt that our service provider customers did not see the market opportunity to leverage the cloud and deliver enterprise collaboration services to their business customers, that uncertainty continues to decline.

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 the heart of AT&T’s enterprise collaboration solution is Cisco’s own Hosted Collaboration Solution, the foundation that many other providers such as Verizon and Orange have turned to, in helping them offer the best customized collaboration solution to their enterprise customers. Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution 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. The solution is designed to be run from partner data centers. Read More »

Tags: AT&T, Cisco, Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, Cisco Systems, cloud, cloud collaboration, cloud_computing, collaboration, hosted collaboration, Hosted Collaboration Solution, Orange, Orange Business Services, unified communications, Verizon, Verizon Business

It took me awhile to go through all the random Top 10 of 2011 lists for various topics, so now I’m ready to look ahead to 2012’s preponderance of pundit predictions. Or maybe I’m just fashionably late. I’ve tripped over a few reports here and there – some quite possibly developed by caffeinated squirrels on a treadmill.

Not me, but she looks like she's predicting something...

On the technology front, I found one more interesting than others. Instead of putting a small group of experts in a room and not letting them out until they agree on a list, Baseline Magazine annually surveys business and technology managers at companies with 100+ employees to ask about their organizations’ investments, plans, and strategies. Across several hundred respondents, patterns evolve.

Whoever these people are, coming from the desk I use, I like the way they (and their companies) think. Following – their predictions and my two cents (maybe three or four).

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Tags: 2012 predictions, Cisco Jabber, cloud_computing, collaboration, Customer Care, network infrastructure, security, web conferencing, WebEX

Today, we ‘re featuring a guest post from Brian Blatnik, a senior manager within Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group:

In the month since our CloudVerse announcement the notion of a world of many clouds – public, private, and hybrid – has resonated with our customers, partners, and industry analysts. I’d like to share some perspective on how those types of clouds address different customers in the collaboration cloud services market. Since last month’s announcement highlighted our private cloud model in that market, Hosted Collaboration Solution for Large Enterprises, I’ll focus on that model. As a reminder, the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution 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. The solution is designed to be run from partner data centers.

I’m often asked, “Haven’t enterprise voice and other UC services always been delivered from what we now call a private cloud?” It’s true that IP PBXs and other UC servers, like their PBX predecessors, provide services to users from a remote room or facility via a network. But there are two ways in which today’s cloud service delivery differs. First, there is the efficiency of pooling computing, network, and storage resources across multiple locations and services. Second, the services can be delivered in an on-demand fashion with elastic scaling.

The financial and strategic benefits deriving from these two factors are leading many businesses to consider consuming collaboration services in a utility model from Cisco’s partners in the Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS). But the same drivers can result in substantial benefits to businesses that aren’t looking for services from a third party’s public cloud. Read More »

Tags: Cisco Cloud Services, Cisco CloudVerse, Cisco collaboration, Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, Cisco Partners, Cisco Unified Communications., cloud, cloud collaboration, cloud services, cloudverse, cloud_computing, collaboration, data center, Enterprise, enterprise voice, Hosted Collaboration Solution, Hybrid Cloud, infrastructure, Mobile Apps, mobile devices, private cloud, Public Cloud, unified communications

I’ve seen how sport can inspire and bring people together, transcending boundaries and borders. It’s just the same for the organisations delivering to the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Organising London 2012 – the greatest show on Earth -- requires collaboration on a grand scale.

As the official network infrastructure provider, I lead the marketing team who are helping to make the Games happen. We understand the size, complexity and hard work that’s needed – the equivalent of running 46 world championships at the same time, with no second chances.

If spinning plates was an Olympic sport, I’d be tipping the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) for gold. With everyone jostling for position, I’ve been so impressed by the way LOCOG protects sponsorship values and ensures we stay true to the ethos of the Games. Under pressure with only 200 days to go, working with LOCOG, other partners and sponsors continues to be both rewarding and challenging.

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Tags: 2012 olympics, Cisco, collaboration, london, London Olympics, olympics, UK

There’s something exciting happening to teleconferencing. It’s called Cisco TelePresence WebEx OneTouch and it extends Cisco TelePresence meetings to Cisco WebEx users. This is an ideal solution for business customers who want to maximize the power of their video communication.

See the demo.

Scheduling is easy and there additional Read More »

Tags: Cisco, mobile, Online Meeting, TelePresence, video conference, WebEX

In a recent blog post, I highlighted the vital role Cisco’s infrastructure will play in connecting the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Our technologies – including thousands of switches, routers and endpoints – are parts of a complex infrastructure that will be bringing people together before, during and after London 2012.

You could view London 2012 as collaboration on a global scale – so vast in fact, that it’s only possible through teamwork. At the heart of delivering the Games, we are working closely with partners to carry all the data, voice and video. We will be connecting venues to officials – crucial to both the Games schedule and the four billion internet and TV viewers worldwide.

Collaboration Delivers

As a digital marketer, I’m seeing businesses, individuals and communities taking steps to realize the potential of collaboration technologies. What’s really great about collaboration is it makes things happen – with greater efficiency, less bureaucracy and more inclusivity.

For example, Cisco’s Webex solution has led to remarkable changes in the way we do business. Not least, considerable savings in business travel from holding meetings online.

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Tags: Cisco, collaboration, London Olympics

Apparently “outside the box” topped a list of the worst offenders in corporate jargon for 2011. I expected that social would make the list until I realized that people are still struggling to apply it to business. It has yet to become a corporate jargon offender, let alone one of the worst.

Still, we have social media, social networks, social business, social advertising, social cats, social dogs, social goldfish. OK, perhaps I exaggerate. A little. It’s like Y2K all over again when we tacked an e- to the front of everything from mail and business on through the rest of the dictionary to say, “Look, it’s online now!”

Working for technology companies, I’ve often had the advantage (or disadvantage) of working with new tools as they came into being. Now, some of the so-called social media tools I started using in my personal time have become valuable business tools: Instant messaging is a good example.

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Tags: collaboration, social media, social networking, web conferencing

You’ve heard about them, maybe you’ve even tried them: online meetings, video conferences, WebEx.

It’s a different (and we think better) way to have a meeting. You have to talk; it’s an important part of business. But you aren’t limited to just the telephone. Try a free online meeting with WebEx and see if it doesn’t make doing business easier, faster and a bit more fun.

Here’s why:

1. WebEx Mobile
It’s free! You can download the app and join someone else’s meeting with just a click. If you get the free trial or your own account, you can host meetings too. Meet on your mobile and you can get work done from anywhere.

2. WebEx Recordings
Sure you can record a teleconference, but there still aren’t any pictures. Record your WebEx and capture the screen sharing so you can see what you were talking about. You don’t have to get lost taking notes during the meeting, you can listen and participate and go back to the recording to capture the ideas. Or give the recording to team members who couldn’t make it and they can see and hear what they missed.

3. WebEx Channels
There’s a wealth of professional -- and interesting -- information at WebEx Channels: our content publishing arm of WebEx where you can publish your public WebEx information too! See Guy Kawasaki talk about social media strategy or Brian Dickenson at Mt Everest. Send us your product demos or compelling sales presos and use the WebEx Network as another part of our marketing strategy.

4. The New Cisco WebEx - coming this spring! Read More »

Tags: Beta, channels, Meeting Spaces, mobile, Recordings, video, WebEX

New media and collaboration technologies have the potential to transform higher education in terms of the classroom, the learning process, the relationship between students and instructors, and how institutions conduct academic research. While much of the industry discussion revolves around use of consumer tools and social network sites like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, Cisco’s educational customers also see tremendous opportunity to increase student engagement and drive their own institutional strategies with “enterprise class” social software as well.

Since Cisco first announced Quad, we have had conversations with dozens of colleges and universities regarding the role enterprise social software and Cisco Quad can play in transforming education. Cisco Quad is an enterprise collaboration platform that brings people together to share ideas and content, collaborate on projects, and interact using chat, voice or video, regardless of where people are located.

Below, we’ve outlined four ways in which educational institutions are telling us enterprise social software is helping, or can transform the way learning, research, and academic advisement is crafted, delivered and consumed:

1. The 24/7 interactive classroom: Instructors often struggle to deliver a collaborative environment for their students that is secure and supports multiple access methods such as mobile.  Technology like Quad can enable students to interact in a secure, policy-based manner that extends the classroom conversation beyond physical walls. Courses partially or wholly targeted at off-campus students can similarly benefit from enhancing the class-like experience for remote students. For example, at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, the cross country MBA students based in the US, England, India and other countries are using Quad to create virtual working groups, find people with common interests, share files or videos with other students working on similar projects and instantly start video conferences or chat sessions. Quad provides students with the ability to interact, ask questions and share ideas with professors/faculty/tutorial assistants anytime, as opposed to only during fixed faculty office hours. It can also drive improved accountability on team projects, as content and comments are tracked in activity feeds and in project communities by both participating students and faculty leads.

2. Serendipitous Research: Quad contains several features, such as an activity feed that compiles microblog posts from students and staff and allows a snapshot view of a person’s current activities. These dynamic updating functionalities can facilitate broader cross-departmental collaboration, for students and researchers alike. Security features ensure that research that needs to be confidential is shared in a secure and safe manner.  As researchers update their statuses with exciting discoveries or frustrating problems, or create posts, upload videos or otherwise document their work, this content becomes accessible to hundreds of fellow university researchers through activity feeds and searches, making it possible for providential inter-disciplinary connections to be made and new insights to be generated. Read More »

Tags: 2012, chat, Cisco collaboration, Cisco Education, Cisco Quad, Cisco Unified Communications., collaboration, college, consumer, Duke University, edtech, education, edutech, enterprise collaboration, facebook, Fuqua School of Business, happy holidays, happy new year, higher education, highered, IM, linkedin, MBA, microblog, quad, social, social media, social networking, twitter, video, Voice, voice over IP