As technologists we often use the term revolutionary to describe market trends, industry advancements, or new solutions. And on occasion we may have over used the term to emphasize the impact a particular change has or can have on the market.
However, I feel very comfortable describing the opportunities we’re seeing now with mobility as something that could truly be revolutionary. It is no secret the world is becoming more mobile. Every time I walk down the street, I see an increasing number of people interacting with smart phones and tablets. The same is true in the office as our co-workers are using multiple devices to connect, communicate and collaborate – part of the “bring your own device” (BYOD) phenomenon.
While organization leaders recognize cloud’s ability to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), they often have difficulty evaluating the many other business benefits of cloud. Often this process is based on some combination of gut instinct and hard data. But the more quantifiable the data, the easier the decision; and the more the potential benefits can be sized, the clearer the opportunity. Since the process of embracing the cloud may be done in increments or by degrees, decision makers will want to weigh which aspects of their operation should be migrated to the cloud—or clouds—and what return on investment to expect from the decision.
Looking for technology inspiration? Imagining the IT possibilities? Look no further. Interop 2012 is finally here this week! Showcasing the latest innovations in technology in networking, security, cloud computing, virtualization, mobility portfolios plus much more, it is bound spark new ideas for IT initiatives. With several demonstrations, speakers in 12 panel discussions, three products as finalists for Best of Interop, many of us from Cisco will be there, asking you: “what can we help you build?”
To help get the most out of what is happening at Interop, check out, ‘Insiders Guide to Optimization at Interop’ . It gives a great suggestion for an itinerary with the highlights of Interop 2012. Personally, I am especially looking forward to the keynote “Cisco Innovation. In it to Win It.” by Cisco CTO and head of engineering, Padmasree Warrior. With advancements happening so quickly in business technology, there will be many panels and educational sessions that Cisco will have to assist customers in migrating to the cloud, managing and maintaining BYOD policies, and increasing collaboration and productivity and learning about IPv6.
Not able to get to Interop but still have questions? Don’t worry, the fun geeks you can trust of Cisco’s TechWise TV will also be in Las Vegas bringing content to those there and at home:
With so many speakers and panels, don’t forget to stop by booth #1127 to say hi, get answers to questions, get a tour, check out the in-booth theater, and view the many products that will be demonstrated throughout the week. Safe travels and I look forward to seeing you there!
Gordon Feller, director of the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) Public Sector Practice, Urban Innovations
As we approach the Urban Land Institute’s Spring Meeting in Charlotte this week, it is exciting to anticipate the innovative sustainability trends that will be discussed by the industry’s brightest players. Nestled in the heart of North Carolina’s connected community effort, Envision Charlotte, the ULI Spring Meeting will highlight the strides the industry is making in reducing energy in commercial buildings. Specifically, Cisco will represent how an underlying network platform can be a drive economic, social and environmental sustainability in Smart+Connected Communities. While reducing energy and improving efficiency remains top-of-mind, I believe the following key topics will share a portion of the spotlight at the meeting:
• Cost-savings through connected buildings and communities: In these economic times, the mantra of “you must spend in order to save” needs to be addressed to offer a more holistic and realistic approach to a smart investment strategy. This strategy should include looking at both short-term and long-term return on investment.
• Making Charlotte a model of sustainability: In a session moderated by Bob Baldwin, Sustainable Development Council’s vice chair, I will be specifically discussing how Envision Charlotte’s unique public-private collaboration spearheaded by Duke Energy, financial institutions and local government is leading Charlotte to become a global model for environmental sustainability and measurable community results.
• Definition of communities: As we look to Envision Charlotte as an example of a connected urban core, it is important to remember that we can define what a community means. Perhaps a Smart+Connected Community is an air force base or a college campus. Real change can occur when we realize our definition of community to not limited to square miles in an urban city. As the part of Cisco’s role as Technology Advisor and Sponsor of ULI’s Greenprint Foundation, I Iook forward to discussing this key trend and others during Greenprint’s board member meeting. Cisco will also continue this conversation at the ULI Fall Meeting in Denver and at the Meeting of the Minds in San Francisco later this year.
If you are planning to attend the ULI Spring Meeting, don’t forget to attend James E. Rogers’, president and CEO of Duke Energy, keynote address on May 9th at 4:30 p.m. As part of the keynote presentation, Joe O’Connor, senior executive director, Smart+Connected Communities, will be sitting on a panel led by James to discuss the relationship between energy, land use and real estate development. Be sure to visit our blog for a recap of this panel session as well as our other insights from our attendance at the Spring meeting. You can also learn more about Cisco’s participation at the ULI Spring Meeting by visiting: www.ciscouli.com.
Today, Cisco announced its intent to acquire privately held Truviso. Based in Foster City, Calif., Truviso provides scalable, real-time network data analysis and reporting software. Together, Cisco and Truviso will provide instant access and visibility into network use and services to help increase operational efficiencies and drive new revenue streams for customers.
With the growth of end-user devices and applications and in turn the proliferation of large amounts of network data, service provider and enterprise customers are looking for ways to better understand usage and differentiate their service offerings. Truviso’s continuous query technology allows companies to get detailed information and visibility of network use and services in real-time, with its analyze-first, store-later capability.
The Truviso acquisition reinforces Cisco’s commitment to delivering intelligent networks and supports our five foundational priorities by providing differentiated solutions with streaming real-time analytics for the core, data center, virtualization, collaboration, and video.
As we continue to use all of Cisco’s tools to drive innovation, acquisitions such as Truviso will help bring top talent, new technology, and business models into Cisco. M&A remains a key part of our build, buy, and partner innovation framework and supports our strategy of providing best-in-class solutions for our customers. The Truviso acquisition is well-aligned to our strategic goals of building software platforms and driving business and technology architectures. I am very excited to welcome the world-class team from Truviso to the Cisco family.
Kids get sick, cars malfunction, pipes break, bad-hair days occur, and the list goes on. Life simply happens. But thanks to technology, it no longer means the end of the world for that work day. With a rapidly growing change in workplace ideologies like BYOD (Bring your own device), and technologies like TelePresence, Jabber and WebEx, I have the ability to work almost anywhere at any time, even if things prevent me from getting to the office that day.
Given the explosion of social media technologies in the past few years, it only makes sense that BYOD is taking off like a firestorm—even among small businesses—as covered in two recent blogs, ‘Business Ready: On the Go and in the Clouds’ and ‘Supersizing Your Small Business.’ In fact, the Cisco Connected World Technology Report found that two of five college students and young employees would accept a lower-paying job that had more flexibility with BYOD, social media access, and mobility than a higher-paying job with less flexibility. So what about those at companies with very little flexibility when it comes to devices? Seven out of ten employees knowingly break IT policies on a regular basis, and three out of five believe that it is not their responsibility to keep the company secure. The bottom line: the workplace revolution is happening (and it’s being video streamed on your mobile device).
Inspiration: We all lose it from time to time. Sometimes we find it again in the strangest places, and other times, in the most obvious.
How many times have you gone into a meeting expecting minimal outcome only to have the light bulb go off after someone’s comment? Today, we have access to some of the brightest minds in the world thanks to collaboration technologies and virtual networking. And as a result, the spark can come from anywhere.
Take for example the Bloodhound SCC (Super Sonic Car). The ‘engineering adventure for the 21st century’ aims to not only build a car that can go 1050 mph, but to inspire and teach students about engineering, math, science, and technology. By using Cisco networking and video services, they are able to reach out to schools all over the world and inspire the engineers and scientists of the future. This is much more exciting than local robotic car racing competitions held in the engineering schools during my university days. And when a problem needs to be solved, engineers and scientists can come from anywhere—virtually—to provide different viewpoints to help troubleshoot.
Brand journalism. Depending on what hat you wear in your organization, you’ve likely heard, read or even followed the buzz around this relatively new trend in communications. Maybe, you’ve even tried it.
“At it’s most basic level, brand journalism involves honest brand storytelling that invites audiences to participate” says Kyle Monson, former tech journalist and editor at PC Magazine in a his articleDispelling the Darkness with Brand Journalism.
While brand journalism, or brand content as some prefer to call it, is talked about quite a bit, it is not as easy to find it in practice. I know this, because I lead the content efforts on The Network, Cisco’s technology news site.
Several months ago we started “experimenting” with brand journalism (although, at the time, we really didn’t call it that…we just saw an opportunity and went for it). We began working with a team of seasoned journalists, names you no doubt know and have likely followed for years if you are a true technology enthusiast. Our expectations of the writers were, and still are, very simple: pitch and produce good, solid stories around topics that we, Cisco, are interested in such as collaboration, video, core networking, cloud, mobility and security to name a few. There is no requirement to mention Cisco at all, in fact a vast majority of the stories don’t…and that is just fine. Our goal is to lead the conversation, to spark engagement, to identify trends relevant to our business and the industry.
So that is the “brand storytelling” Monson refers to. As for the stories inviting “audiences to participate,” that is where sitting on the social media team really kicks this effort into high gear. Not only is social woven into everything we produce from commenting to social actions…we encourage our fans to take our content, republish it, share it…all we ask is that we’re credited. I’m telling you…this is the best deal around. We are offering FREE content from award winning, noted journalists on topics you are interested in. It might very well be the best deal of the decade…in my humble opinion.
I don’t think it can be stressed enough, this is a very different way of communicating at the corporate level. It looks and feels different and, to be very honest, we as a team get challenged, at times, on our approach by our own peers as they try to understand this new way of communicating. But, to me, this is where it gets exciting. This is where the real innovation starts to happen. I’m reminded of a conversation I had recently with a senior engineer at Cisco. He told me, if you have an idea and everyone around you supports it right off the bat, then it is not innovative…it is too obvious and likely has already been done, or soon will be. Alternatively, if you have an idea that causes a bit of disruption and you get some push back…you are likely onto something.
I’d say The Network is onto something. We’ve designed a very social site chock-full of solid content that is aligned with the company’s overall communications goals. While still in the experimental stage, we have gained recognition in the industry, most notably 2012 Webby Awards Official Honoree and Best Online Newsroom of the Year (Silver) 2011 Bulldog Digital/Social PR Awards. And, it’s not just Marketing and Communications pros taking note, top journalism schools are asking to learn more about what we are doing as they prepare their students for an industry in flux.
Few scientists know more about the condition of planet Earth than those who work within the American National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA.) There, it’s all about the science of climate – from the surface of the sun, to the bottom of the oceans, and to the clouds in the sky.
For NOAA, every day is Earth Day.
This Sunday, on the official Earth Day, NOAA will host educational events all over the nation. Meanwhile, back in the labs, its scientists and researchers continue to work out what it takes to predict changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coasts.
Why is Cisco talking about a government agency such as NOAA, and its Earth Day intentions? Because there’s a network angle in here, of course. At Cisco we know a lot about clouds, as in Cloud Networks. Cloud networking is more than just storage and compute – you’ve got to have a network in there as well.
One of the newer resources NOAA scientists are tapping into these days is a high performance computing network it calls “n-wave.” Its purpose is to efficiently and cost-effectively link data sources – meaning internal NOAA scientists and researchers, as well as external partners – with data and computing resources.
How much bandwidth do NOAA scientists need? Try 80 to 100 Terabytes, per day – a volume that filled its existing 10 Gbps network, all day long, no downtime, explains Jerry Janssen, Manager of NOAA’s n-wave network, in this video about the agency’s vision for a 100-Gig-capable network.
What are the factors motivating businesses to rise up to the cloud opportunity? One key advantage is business agility: Cloud offers the ability to address unpredictable application events weighing on a company’s data center, meeting the challenge from sharp, sudden usage spikes. At the same time, cloud promises more efficient ways to address new products, customers, and selling situations.
In other words, cloud drives top-line growth and improves the bottom line.
After experiencing my first earthquake on the west coast many years ago, there was nothing anyone could do to convince me that an earthquake could be a good thing. However, there is one group that is doing just that. The Tech Museum in San Jose has introduced a simulated quake that is a life-changing platform for children to learn about science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
Since January, The Tech Challenge has provided 1,400 students with ongoing STEM learning, culminating on Saturday, April 21. The annual team competition introduces the engineering design process to fifth through twelfth graders by solving a real-world problem through hands-on learning. The assignment for this 25th anniversary year – “Shake, Rattle, and Rescue” – asks students to create a solution to help earthquake survivors cross a damaged bridge.
This is the question I continue to ask myself as I look back at my career at various companies in multiple industries. As I look back, I remind myself of the industry changing trends that we’ve gone through in past few decades: the rise (and fall) of the mainframe, the PC, numerous different networking protocols and technologies, and various standards that come and go. On top of all this I recall, dozens of system architectures and hundreds of programming languages. And these days … Open Source Software, Si-photonics, mega/giga/tera-bit interfaces, smart phones and tablets, big data and real time analytics, cloud computing, everything fully virtualized.
Let’s pause here to think about the game changers. The architectures, processes and ideas that once pushed industries forward seemed to eventually disappear into the next big thing. Distributed Object Technology (RFC), Loosely Coupled Technology and Architectures (SOA). Agile, or is it Dev/Ops? As you can see, there are major differences here. Each technology trend brings tremendous value and is of critical importance but, like so many of these examples there is that fundamental difference, that many of these trends evolve and merge into much bigger vision. It’s also present in how we view SDN and how we are including it in what we’re building at Cisco.
I’m currently basking in the afterglow of an intense three days of non-stop inspiration, stimulation and general brain expansion. I’m referring to EG6/EG Everywhere, an amazing conference centered around the exchange of stories and experiences of creative brainiacs that included scientists, musicians, magicians, geographic and oceanographic explorers, artists, and others that tickled my neurotransmitters.
Cisco was not just a sponsor, but the provider of the technology that made this traditionally 300-person-limited-audience event available for people around the world to participate in—as audience members and as speakers. With the interactive platform developed for the event, anyone could watch live stream and see fun things happening online that those at the live event couldn’t because they were “on break.”
However, where the technology really made a splash was when retired Astronaut Mark Kelly and his wife Congresswoman Gabby Giffords were stranded when their flight to the conference got cancelled. A little bit of a problem since they were listed as the closing speakers. NPR’s Scott Simon, slated to host Mark and Gabby on stage, captured the situation brilliantly in a tweet about the airline being “The only force that can ground @ShuttleCDR & family to keep them from EG conference.” Talk about an ironic twist. The email exchange among those on the Cisco team trying to come up with a solution carried the apt subject line: “Houston, We Have a Problem.” The good news is that Cisco TelePresence came to the rescue —and Mark (in Houston) and Scott (on stage in Monterey) had a wonderfully warm conversation that was both interesting and moving.
Yesterday, I had the honor to participate in EMC launch of VSPEX, a new EMC channel program designed to deliver virtualized infrastructure solutions for the private cloud. We are collaborating with EMC to deliver these pre-tested infrastructures that combine EMC storage solutions with Cisco UCS and Nexus networking solutions and our other ecosystem partners, Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware. Cisco solutions are incorporated in 13 of the initial EMC VSPEX configurations.
Our customers have been telling us that they want data center infrastructure solutions that are easier to deploy but offer the best of breed vendors. In 2009, Cisco and EMC launched a joint venture, VCE , that delivered the Vblock converged infrastructure that integrated our technologies to help our customers accelerate their cloud infrastructure deployments based on VMware. We have been very pleased with how our larger enterprise and Service Provider customers and channel partners have responded to the Vblock solutions.
Now EMC is expanding the flexibility of these integrated solutions with EMC VSPEX. EMC VSPEX and Cisco Validated Designs offer our customer more “choice” when it comes to choosing an integrated data center solution that meets their needs – while taking the out the risk for our customers by ensuring the integrated designs have been pre-tested in Cisco and EMC labs.
For our Cisco channel partners, integrated solutions offer more market opportunityinselling complete, highly-flexible solutions to their customers, resulting in a higher attach rate of components, and a bigger sale – which will be good news to our thousands channel partners flying down to San Diego for our Partner Summit conference.
Here I am (Wendy Bahr) with Chris Panzeca at EMC’s VSPEX event on April 12, 2012.
“What they are doing for our fans – on a daily basis, at every one of our games, be it during the day or at night – is truly remarkable. We are able to create a better experience for our fans using this technology. Our only wish is that we had done this a little bit earlier.” Todd Goldstein, President, AEG Global Partnerships
Cisco recently upgraded the digital capabilities at STAPLES Center, one of the premier sports and entertainment venues in the world that hosts four major sports franchises (LA Lakers, LA Clippers, LA Kings, and LA Sparks) and more than 250 events a year (Grammy’s, concerts, etc.), so the venue could better service its fans.
The result? Over the past year AEG (the operator of the facility) has been able to deliver a more engaged fan experience and is seeing a strong return on its investment from the digital and dynamic menu boards at concession stands. For example, AEG saw a 9 percent increase in revenue (year over year) from concessions for Los Angeles Kings games. Even more impressive was the 400 percent increase in revenue (year over year) from select promotions offered this past season (2011).
Cisco delivered a Connected Stadium environment, including Cisco StadiumVision, an innovative digital video and content delivery system that transformed STAPLES Center and provides fans with a more memorable experience. All of this was done over the course of just a few months and AEG never missed a beat in hosting world class events at the venue.
Today more than 30 marquee properties are operating new business and revenue models with Cisco digital sports technologies at the center. From Real Madrid to the Pittsburgh Penguins to Sporting KC to Eden Park, Cisco is transforming the sports and entertainment environment around the world.
I witnessed the transformation earlier this year at the Grammy’s…and I just might have sat next to a couple of celebrities – well, that was where my friends told me I was going to sit!
