Shaving Cream in Your Enterprise Network
At Cisco, we firmly believe that the network enables collaboration—the type of collaboration that is required in today’s business environment where you need to work with people around the world. It’s the network that enables the people to connect, communicate and collaborate using any device.
We are pleased to see that our view of the network-enabled collaboration is shared by industry experts and our customers. As a proof point, last week Cisco won the Best of Interop 2009 for Collaboration. Interestingly, the award wasn’t for the best selling WebEx web meeting applications or for the highly esteemed TelePresence solution. Cisco won for what used to be called the “plumbing.” The winning product is the Cisco WebEx Node for ASR 1000 Series routers, which is a shared port adapter (SPA) that acts as a Point of Presence for the Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud, consolidating hundreds of on-network meeting connections for web, video and VoIP, to a single connection from the ASR 1000 to the WebEx Collaboration Cloud.
Huh? You might be thinking. Here’s a real life use case. Many enterprises conduct large web events from all-hands meetings to quarterly sales training. Many of these events and training sessions have presenters and attendees outside the company so using a Software as a Service-based WebEx meeting applications is the perfect solution. Yet because so many attendees are joining behind the firewall inside the company, the corporate network is pushed to its limits, especially if the session includes video.
With the WebEx Node for Cisco ASR 1000, you get the benefits of a cloud-based application (fast deployment, lower TCO, accessibility from anywhere, etc.) with the benefits of an on premises network (bandwidth management, added corporate policy control, etc.) It reduces bandwidth requirements, enhancing video and VoIP performance for meeting participants on the enterprise network, while retaining the global load balancing and intelligent routing capabilities of the WebEx Collaboration Cloud.
It’s like bringing a little bit of the cloud securely into your network. Or when I try to draw this, it looks like shaving cream floating around in the corporate network.
by Alex Hadden Boyd, director of marketing, Cisco Collaboration Software Group
Posted by Alex Hadden Boyd at 04:43PM PST
Unibet May 29, 2009
Thank you for sharing, good article