Services and Solutions Category Archives
December 05, 2007
Whether it’s dog food or champagne, it still tastes good!
Post by David Hsieh, Director of Solutions Marketing for Cisco's Emerging Technology Group.
One of things I like best about Cisco is that we really use the stuff we sell. Some might call it “eating our own dog food” and the more effete might say “drinking our own Champagne” but either way, we do it and do it a lot. I thought it might be interesting to highlight a couple of examples:
One month ago today, Cisco announced the Cisco I-Prize, a global competition that uses web collaboration and the power of the Human Network to find Cisco’s next Emerging Technology business. This competition is open to anyone with a good idea who is interested in teaming with like minded innovators to grow a huge business leveraging Cisco’s resources. Through 3 rounds of competition, contestants will use collaboration technologies like Wikis, WebEx and TelePresence to exchange ideas, form teams, refine their business plans and present to Cisco judges. The winners will join Cisco as founders of a new Emerging Technology business unit. And everything will take place virtually through the collaborative magic of Cyberspace. So, what’s happened so far?
We have over 800 competitors from 66 countries, including competitors from countries you might not expect like Bangladesh, Guatemala, El Salvador, Zambia, Nigeria, Oman, Moldova, Iran, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Columbia. These innovators have contributed hundreds of interesting business ideas and commented thousands of times on the ideas of others. It’s spawned its own group on FaceBook and a user generated wiki dedicated to the competition. We have over 100,000 views of videos on YouTube. The “TelePresence Magic” video is particularly cool.
If you’re interested in our thoughts on Innovation and the Cisco I-Prize, read our Innovation Blog or better yet, join the contest!
Now that’s an example of using our technology to interact with and between people outside of Cisco but what about inside the company… what’s the dog food taste like there?
You probably know that we’re big believers in TelePresence and the “like being there” quality of experience can transform businesses. So in the spirit of dog food and champagne, we’ve deployed TelePresence across Cisco. Not just a few units for privileged executives – we’ve made TelePresence broadly available to all employees.
Since October 23rd, 2006 when we started our initial deployment of a few systems, we’ve added 2-3 new locations almost every week. To date, we’ve deployed over 160 systems across Cisco offices on 6 continents and we’re not done yet. Each system averages about 4.5 hours of use every day. We’ve held over 40,000 meetings across TelePresence and every function in the company (sales, marketing, manufacturing, finance, HR etc) uses TelePresence at every level of the organization. We use TelePresence for internal meetings, meetings with customers, partners, suppliers, recruits and sometimes enable customers to have their own meetings using our facilities.
In the process we’ve transformed core business processes like sales, supply chain and global decision making to make them faster and more efficient. Travel savings are in the 10s of millions and there’s been a positive environmental benefit too.
Like I mentioned in the beginning, at Cisco we use our own stuff and we really use it a lot. It gives us real insight into how technology can improve collaboration (and where it can’t). If you’re considering collaboration technologies from Cisco, ask about our experience as users…. You’ll find the answers worth listening to.
Posted by Cisco PR at 10:39 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
November 07, 2007
Welcoming Securent to the Cisco Family
Post by Joe Burton, Chief Technology Officer, Unified Communications
As I read my colleague Alan Cohen's excellent Halloween post the other day, I was reminded of the many conversations I've had with our best customers concerning how to manage who has access to what type of information - the notion of policy management across an organization.
Virtually all our customers want the business acceleration of Unified Communications, collaboration, and web 2.0. In fact, we would all like to use these capabilities to give us what we want, how we want it, on any device, RIGHT NOW.
Unfortunately, policy and compliance concerns often prevent widespread deployment of some of the more advanced capabilities that are now available.
For Enterprise 2.0 to take off, we need to bring the web 2.0 capabilities of ad hoc, virtual, shared, flexible, distributed, dynamic collaboration inside the enterprise but without loss of security, privacy, and system integrity.
For some time now, Cisco has been working on ways to express policy in a standard form external to applications. We believe web-based policy management as a strategic tier in the enterprise IT stack and a way to facilitate our customers’ transition to Enterprise 2.0 technologies. By expressing policy in a network service that is external to individual applications, we can uniformly apply it to all applications, communications, and content within an enterprise, and in the future, across enterprise boundaries.
With that in mind, I was delighted that on November 1st we announced our intention to bring Securent into Cisco. Securent's standards-based, distributed architecture allows enterprises to administer, enforce, and audit access to data, communications, and applications in heterogeneous IT application environments based on the context of who is accessing the information.
I've known Rajiv Gupta and Sekhar Sarukkai for a long time. I'm delighted to welcome them and the rest of Securent to Cisco.
Together, I'm confident we will do great things for our customers and the future of Enterprise 2.0.
Posted by Cisco PR at 10:59 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
October 23, 2007
WebEx and Oracle Mashup
Post by Colin Smith, Director, WebEx Corporate Communications
Today WebEx and Oracle announced an alliance to deliver Oracle’s on demand CRM via the WebEx Connect platform. WebEx is now offering Oracle’s Siebel CRM on demand service through the WebEx Connect application ecosystem. In an Infoworld article also published today, Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting said there is a lot more that can be done with WebEx's ability to "get to the desktop." "The fact that WebEx has a platform for SaaS delivery is one of the best kept secrets," said Greenbaum.
Posted by Cisco PR at 01:36 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
