As electrical outages plague the East Coast after Hurricane Irene, it’s interesting to think about how technology could transform our energy future. In one example, Cisco is collaborating with Harris Corporation, an international communications and IT company, on a five year contract to provide a Wide Area Network (WAN) for the Western Electric Coordinating Council (WECC), the North American Regional Entity. WECC is responsible for coordinating the bulk electric system reliability for the Western U.S., Canada and part of Mexico, as well as the largest and most diverse North American Electric Reliability Corporation Regional Entity. Read More »
The pace of IT and data is moving exponentially. With a rapidly growing networks across all industries, keeping track of all these connection points will give rise to a new business leader: The Chief Information Officer, or CIO.
Why will a CIO be such a crucial part of future business? Read More »
All good things must come to an end, and luckily enough, “Adventures of an Intern” will not be one of them! This summer at Cisco has been an incredible learning experience for me, inside and outside of the Social Media Communications team. I assisted in the production of a video with the other corp comm. interns (stay tuned!), researched social networks that the team could potentially use, and of course, investigated different corporate newsrooms for our team here at The Network, Cisco’s Technology News Site.
Earlier this week I came across a great bit of history, thanks to All Things Digital. It was a look back at an AT&T campaign from 1993, featuring a remarkable voiceover by Tom Selleck. What made it so remarkable was that Selleck was positing about futuristic capabilities that in the past 18 years have all come to be—thanks to the power of innovation.
If you haven’t seen the spots, here’s a list of the rundowns of “Have you ever?…” that were included in the campaign.
…Borrowed a book from a thousand miles away
…Crossed the country without stopping for directions
…Sent someone a fax from the beach
…Paid a toll, without slowing down
…Bought a concert ticket from a cash machine
…Tucked your baby in from a phone booth
…Opened doors with the sound of your voice
…Carried your medical history in your wallet
…Attended a meeting in your bare feet
…Watched the movie you wanted to, the minute you wanted to
…Learned special things from faraway places
What struck me about these predictions is that Cisco has really been at the forefront of delivering this stuff. And with AT&T as a valued partner, we’ve nailed what began as pure imagination—not a bad track record from 1993 to 2011.
With service providers facing increasing competitive pressures, their technology suppliers must be loyal business partners who provide best-in-class products that deliver sustainable investment protection. Only Cisco delivers this level of value to the service provider industry.
Cisco’s R&D investment – more than five times that of our nearest service provider competitor – continues to pay off. In fact, just in the last week, we’ve seen noteworthy examples of how this long-term, consistent and persistent approach is gaining traction with global service providers, which are deploying Cisco’s flagship core and edge routing platforms, the CRS-3 and ASR families, in record numbers.
Four major service providers today announced that they have selected the Cisco ASR 9000 routing platform to deliver enhanced video, data, voice and mobile backhaul services throughout their converged networks. Charter Communications and Consolidated Communications of the United States; Kabel Deutschland (KDG), the largest cable operator in Germany; and 3 Scandinavia in Denmark and Sweden, are all deploying the ASR 9000.
New analyst reports just out add further evidence of Cisco’s market leadership: I’m pleased to report that Cisco gained market share in service provider routing and switching in the second quarter of 2011, according to key reports issued this week by research firms Synergy and ACG Research. Cisco has gained core routing market share in four straight quarters and edge share two quarters in a row.
Behind every great technology lies a team of dedicated, focused, and talented engineers and developers. I want to thank each and every person who has contributed to the Cisco CRS and ASR platforms. Your effort and talent are making a major positive impact in the broadband service provider industry.
Since 2009, when Cisco formally entered the “smart grid” market, we have made great progress in leveraging Internet Protocol (IP)-based technology to enable the transformation of the global energy industry. Through pilots, industry partnerships, acquisitions, and hiring key leaders from the energy industry, we’ve gained insights and are contributing innovative architectures and solutions to our customers.
As with every new business, we must be vigilant in applying lessons learned and willing to adapt our strategy to evolving conditions, be they economic, technological or policy-related. So after several customer pilots, we are refining our strategy so we can most effectively apply our experience and expertise in IP-based communications to the electric, gas and water networks globally.
Over the past two years the home and building energy management markets have evolved in such a way that we believe we can provide more value to our customers and the industry by enabling interoperability through our core networking products and solutions (for example, EnergyWise) as part of our integrated architecture within the broader smart grid effort.
For building energy management, this means we are actively pursuing several strategic options for Cisco’s Network Building Mediator and Mediator Manager product line, with an emphasis on minimizing the impact on current customers, partners and employees. For energy management in the home, we will transition our focus from creating premise energy management devices to using the network as the platform for supporting innovative applications and architectures that will improve our customers’ value proposition in the consumer energy management market.
By driving the network as the platform, leveraging our broader Cisco product portfolio and partner ecosystem, and by incorporating lessons learned into our Connected Grid Architecture, we can enable active customer participation in markets, grid operations, and service innovations. We can also drive open standards-based solutions and interoperability between existing products. This decision will enable Cisco to best serve its global customers by giving them the flexibility they need to be responsive to market transitions and consumer desires.
Enabling collaboration among public and private stakeholders within the industry is also vital to the success of our customers and partners. Cisco is hosting a Global Energy Summit on Tuesday, September 27th with John Chambers and thought leaders from the Energy industry including: former California Public Utilities Commissioner Dian Grueneich, former Commissioner with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Suedeen Kelly, President and CEO of Digital Energy for GE Bob Gilligan, Secretary General of Elia Group Pierre Bernard, President and COO Global Energy for Itron Philip Mezey, and many more distinguished guests.
Our commitment to the industry remains strong and our vision for energy management and Smart Grid has not changed -- to transform energy production, distribution, consumption and management using an end-to-end IP platform. By learning and adapting to changing market conditions, Cisco can better enable a 21st century model of energy management and the future global energy infrastructure.
Nothing beats a customer raving about the value Cisco technology brings their organization, but the one thing that comes close is when great talent recognizes what Cisco is doing to transform the industry and wants to be part of making it happen.
Today I can share some news that reaffirms how compelling our strategy and product portfolio is.
I’m thrilled to announce that Cisco is making not just one or two, but SIX executive appointments to its service provider sales organization. Read More »
Blog post by Joe Pinto, Senior Vice President of Technical Services at Cisco
Customers have come to expect the same kinds of deep, intimate and on-demand relationships and technologies that they experience every day in their personal lives. These growing customer expectations and demands have been catalysts for Cisco and our partners to find new ways to marry technology innovation with a new, more proactive services model.
Since the early 1990s, Cisco has been setting the standard in delivering an unmatched services experience. This is founded on the intelligence and information that comes with more than 50 million installed devices, and more than six million customer interactions every year happening through our various support channels – phone, mobile applications, machine-to-machine interactions, self-service environments, web-based communities, and social networks. Our partners and customers take advantage of the support touch point that works best for them. For example:
More than 250,000 issues solved online every month (over 80% of all customer technical support issues are solved online);
Over 2.8 million Technical Services web visitors each month;
700,000 Cisco Support Community monthly visitors; and,
Nearly 100,000 social media “fans” and “followers” on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.
In a recent blog, I talked about how recording artists are using the network to create new ways of nurturing customer (or fan) relationships while also building a great marketing base. But as we increasingly move into a world of borderless networks, where traditional, limiting boundaries fall away, we’re seeing a new cultural playground. One that allows us, as users, to connect with what enriches our lives. And that, too, is a powerful force in building relationships and community on the network.
As the explosion of mobile devices continues, and new forms of social media and tools emerge, we are entering an exciting new phase. Because when you start putting these together, along with innovative functionality in the routers and switches that bring those things to life, we have the opportunity to experience things that might have been out of reach in the past.
I’ve really started to settle in at Cisco. I know the best time to hit the salad bar at lunch, and where to sit when I can’t sit in my cubicle any longer. One of the more exciting moments happened to me this week, when a senior vice president started following me on Twitter. The truth is, this is no normal internship, and I love it!
This week, I crossed enemy lines and researched the newsroom of HP. Like the EMC newsroom from my previous post, the HP Newsroom has stuck to a classic format where News Releases take the center of the page. The releases can be shared or tagged through various social media networks, which include Twitter, Facebook and Digg, as well as other content-sharing sites I’ve never heard of before, such as BlinkList and Netvouz. However, when I clicked on BlinkList, I learned that it had been acquired, so the sharing tool did not work. There is a lot of clicking around required to share stories though, and personally, my fingers prefer a sharing button that’s placed directly in front of me.
The home page of HP’s newsroom also includes a Featured News box for press release headlines. This is similar to Intel’s Free Shots, but users must click the headline to read the whole release.
While looking over our data from World IPv6 Day, we found that 2.26% of all users who logged in with a username and password to www.cisco.com on June 8 did so over IPv6. That is nearly an order of magnitude greater than between the less than .2% and .3% averages reported by sites operated by more broadly visited websites such as Yahoo, Facebook, and Google. In contrast to those who logged in with their username and password, the total proportion of unique users who visited our site via IPv6 was estimated at just under 1.5%, which still represents at least a five times greater likelihood that a given cisco.com visitor reached us via IPv6 vs. the broader population of Internet users.
This shouldn’t be surprising at all. The cisco.com user base is made up of networking and IT professionals that are likely more willing to go out of their way to obtain IPv6 connectivity than most users. We hope that you will continue to use IPv6, show others how, and that we’ll have even more IPv6 users the next time we make www.cisco.com AAAA records available (see Fred Baker’s blog on what might be next).
In terms of overall traffic, our netflow statistics reported that 1.11% of traffic to and from www.cisco.com was served over IPv6. This traffic was delivered via an IPv6 to IPv4 load-balancing proxy function within our Application Control Engine (ACE) 30, allowing us to keep our existing production www.cisco.com virtually untouched while still providing an IPv6 web presence. On June 8, we used a pre-release version of code, alongside other Early Field Trial (EFT) customers. Matthew Laslie, Network Engineer and Architect at Savvis writes:
“Savvis was looking to provide IPv6 reachability to our primary websites without performing major modifications to our backend application/security infrastructure. After evaluating several solutions, Savvis selected the Cisco ACE. In the span of two short days the ACE was fully installed, configured and providing IPv6 reachability for several Savvis corporate websites.”
In addition to the participants that officially signed up for World IPv6 Day, others moved ahead on June 8 without the formalities. Cisco EU IPv6 Deployment Council member and customer Strato let us know after World IPv6 Day that they are now announcing IPv6 AAAA records for over four million domain names. Wilhelm Boeddinghaus, Head of Networks at Strato writes:
“Our customers don’t ask us for IPv6, nor do they ask us for IPv4, they ask us for the Internet, and that’s what we give them. Today the Internet is more than IPv4. The working Internet provides both protocols.”
Those four million domain names represent the ability of the content side of the IPv6 Internet to move very rapidly to IPv6. The fact that they decided to leave IPv6 on after June 8 is testimony to the confidence they have in IPv6, and that it is the right thing for their customers. There were a number of other websites that opted to keep their AAAA IPv6 records active after the 24 hour test on June 8, including our own www.scansafe.com, which moved to IPv6 by announcing AAAA records on World IPv6 Day and continues to today.
Given the relatively high turnout of IPv6-enabled www.cisco.com users vs. the rest of the industry, we have yet another clear data point of the importance of IPv6 to our customers. With all the success around World IPv6 Day, it seems hard to fathom that this will be the only event of its kind and we are eagerly looking forward to participating in and helping our customers with the next “World IPv6″ event. Stay tuned…
When I demonstrated Cisco’s newest network management technologies in my keynote address at Cisco Live last week, there were gasps and applause from the audience as they saw the difference between our next generation technology and the technology our competitors are touting as ‘good enough’.
The technologies I demonstrated (Cisco Prime, UCS Manager and the Cisco Virtual Switching System) are the great results of the more than $5 billion that Cisco invests in R&D on an annual basis. Cisco spends more on R&D than all of our networking industry peers combined and, for the record, we invest five times more (on a percentage of revenue basis) than the next largest networking vendor.
However, what’s more important than the size of our R&D budget is its impact and I’m proud to say that the Patent Board today recognized Cisco as the #1 innovator among 141 companies in its annual Telecom and Communications industry scorecard. Cisco ranked #1 for both the number of patents granted, as well as for the overall strength of the company’s patent portfolio, which is a combined measure of quality and quantity.
That’s a tremendous accomplishment, and I am very proud of our fantastically talented engineers. Credit is particularly due to Cisco Senior Vice President of Research and Advanced Development, Joel Bion, for his tremendous leadership of our R&D efforts. As I often say, great engineers make innovation look easy.
To our customers the message is also clear: whether it’s the 500 patents earned by the recently refreshed Catalyst 6500 (the world’s most popular switching platform) or those awarded in the creation of our ground-breaking Cisco Cius enterprise collaboration tablet, world-beating innovation is something you can always expect from Cisco.
As promised, here are highlights from last week’s Unified Computing System (UCS) customer innovation party at CiscoLive in Las Vegas. It’s safe to say everyone had a blast at the event and we enjoyed spending time with the customers and partners who have helped to make UCS such a success.
The party capped a special “innovation track” created for UCS customers at CiscoLive, including technical sessions on UCS and UCS Manager, roadmap exploration, architecture discussions, and customer presentations on optimizing UCS for operational efficiency.
Check out the video to share in the excitement, including the special cake, a replica of UCS, right down to the cables!
How many customers do you think we’ll have next year? We’re going to need a bigger venue…
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)
At CiscoLive 2011, more than 15,000 customers, partners, and thought leaders have came together to celebrate and explore the evolution and convergence of technology and business. I came away with even greater respect for the innovation taking place in today’s enterprises and excited by the role Cisco is taking in developing and delivering the network vision and solutions helping to drive that innovation. Read More »
When we think of being connected to the Internet, our minds immediately shift to our computers, phones, and most recently tablets. This week at Cisco live, I shared that in 2008, the number of devices connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people on Earth.
That’s right. There are more devices tapping into the Internet than people on Earth to use them. How is this possible?
