The Platform July 2009 Archives

“Connecting Sichuan” Year One Report

It has now been over a year since the devastating 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck China’s Sichuan Province leaving more than 70,000 people dead or missing, more than 300,000 injured, and millions without shelter.  Soon after the disaster, Cisco offered its support to the Sichuan Provincial government and launched “Connecting Sichuan”—a three-year public-private partnership to aid the rebuilding effort, with a focus on improving healthcare and education in earthquake-damaged areas. (Read the Connecting Sichuan year one report) (pdf document)

Consider the experience of Ma Yuanjiang who lost his left hand and suffered other trauma while trapped in earthquake wreckage for 179 hours. He is learning to use an artificial hand and during a trial run of a Cisco HealthPresence environment in the Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital in Chengdu, Mr. Ma conferred with health experts in Hong Kong using a high-resolution video and audio connection.

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Posted by Robyn Jenkins Blum at 01:33PM PST

Wall Street Journal on Cisco CEO: “Silicon Valley Survivor”

ABCNews.com columnist Michael Malone offers a very interesting profile on our Chairman and CEO John Chambers this weekend’s Wall Street Journal.

“Even in this downturn,” says chairman and CEO John Chambers, sitting at the table in his modest, memento-crammed office, “We intend to be the most aggressive we’ve ever been.”

Malone writes about Chambers early career at IBM and Wang Laboratories prior to joining Cisco, as well as his upbringing as an outdoorsman growing up in West Virginia.  As I’ve personally learned from being around Chambers for the past decade and what this article reminded me of: what you see is what you get.  He is truly one of the good guys and no one I know works harder.

My favorite part:

Mr. Chambers credits his parents (both doctors) with giving him a doctor’s approach to business problems. “They taught me to focus on the long-term health of the patient, and not to treat symptoms but the underlying problem.”

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Posted by John Earnhardt at 05:00AM PST

EXCITING Seacom Goes Live - Get Ready Africa - Collaboration and Connectivity are Here

Post by Yvon le Roux, Vice President, Emerging Markets

In my role as vice president of Cisco’s Africa and Levant region, I’m fortunate to meet dynamic people from across the region face-to-face and via TelePresence. I hear inspiring stories of how technology is improving lives, and I feel proud of the role we play in assisting in country transformation, providing the backbone to a human network where technology empowers people to connect, process and share information.

I was honored to address the launch ceremony of the Seacom submarine cable in Tanzania this week. It was a major announcement, as SEACOM will provide the catalyst for African consumers, business and government to realise the benefits of connectivity and collaboration across the globe. 

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Posted by John Earnhardt at 05:50PM PST

IBM and Cisco Continue to Drive Innovation in the Data Center

Today, IBM announced an extended agreement with Cisco to resell the Cisco Nexus 5000 switch with support for Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) as part of its Dynamic Infrastructure solutions for the data center. Although IBM is not the only partner delivering Cisco’s industry-leading Nexus 5000 switch, this announcement does illustrate: 

1. The FCoE standard continues to gain momentum in the data center.  As IBM adds support for this growing standard to respond the many customers that are looking to FCoE as an alternative to fibre channel as they converge their data center infrastructures and implement a more unified networking fabric over Ethernet. 

2. Cisco and IBM are continuing to work closely to drive innovation in many areas of the data center and providing customers more of a choice when selecting among industry-leading networking solutions that best meets their needs.

To hear more about how FCoE and how the Cisco Nexus 5000 is transforming the data center, see this video commentary from Soni Jiandani, vice president of marketing for the Server Access Virtualization Business Group:

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Posted by Pamela Ferrill at 09:01PM PST

Breaking the Culture Code

“People do what you inspect, not what you expect.”
—Lou Gertsner, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?

In my last blog, I shared the first finding from the study, Collaboration: Know Your Enthusiasts and Laggards (.pdf doc), which grouped collaborators into one of four segments based on their habits, attitudes, behaviors and their organization’s policies and practices.

The second finding—and one of the most valuable—reveals that organizational culture influences collaboration success as much as the tools themselves.  Several key factors enable a productive, innovative, collaborative working environment.

First, executive behavior modeling directly influences a collaborative working environment. More than 90 percent of Collaboration Enthusiasts and Comfortable Collaborators agreed that their management team serves as a good role model for using collaboration tools. In contrast, only 65 percent of Reluctant Collaborators and 57 percent of Collaboration Laggards agreed.

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Posted by Alan Cohen at 02:26PM PST

How Can Technology Help Upgrade Skills?

Today, we launch a new jobs training program in Michigan that was cited by President Barack Obama.  The program is designed to upgrade skills and create new job opportunities and will focus on broadband, network security and healthcare IT training.  Press release on this news here.

Technology plays an ever important role in education and the classroom, but how can it be best utilized for job training and retraining?  Visit Cisco WebEx’ PasstheBall.com and help us brainstorm some great ideas on how technology can help train workers or upgrade skills.  Don’t have an idea?  Rate or comment on ideas that are already there: http://passtheball.com/jobtraining.

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Posted by John Earnhardt at 12:10PM PST

Cisco Announces Workforce Retraining Initiative

Today, we launched a new pilot jobs training program in Michigan that was lauded by President Barack Obama in a speech at the Macomb Community College in Warren, Michigan.  The new program, built on the Cisco Networking Academy platform, is designed to upgrade skills and create new job opportunities and will focus on broadband, network security and healthcare IT training – key components of the state’s strategy for re-invigorating its economy and igniting the job market.  Press release on this announcement here.

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Posted by John Earnhardt at 11:35AM PST

Cisco 2009 Midyear Security Report

What do you get when you cross in-depth research on trends and happenings across the security community with an interview with an IT-professional-turned-botmaster?  A lot of fascinating insights that shine a light on what’s good and bad in today’s cyber world.  And that’s exactly what we’re serving up in the Cisco 2009 Midyear Security Report, which we’re releasing today.

In a nutshell, we’ve got good news and bad news. I’m always one to get the bad news over with first, so let me start there. You can call cybercriminals a lot of things, but you certainly can’t call them unsophisticated in today’s world. In fact, they’re emulating the best of the best – the top practices that businesses adopt for transforming their organizations. So what does that mean exactly? These guys are collaborating and finding complementary ways to partner. Not only that, they’re also getting smart about search engine optimization techniques—spamdexing, which helps drive unsuspecting traffic to their sites to download malware. They also seem to be honing their opportunism.

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Posted by Marie Hattar at 05:00AM PST

Cisco Battles the Commoditization of Content

Dan Scheinman, SVP/GM of Cisco’s Media Solutions Group, this week addressed reporters on the growing dilemma facing media and entertainment (M&E) companies:  consumer appetite for media has never been greater, but at the same time, this valuable content is commoditizing. 

According to Sheinman, Cisco’s Eos (TM) platform will give M&E companies much more control over their relationships with key audiences.

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Posted by Jim Brady at 01:44PM PST

Q&A with John Chambers Opens McKinsey Quarterly’s New Global Leaders Series

Our Chairman and Chief Executive spoke with James Manyika of McKinsey last month on a diverse array of topics including the economy, the future of Web technology, Cisco’s management model, our corporate social responsibility initiatives and John’s views on leadership. The interview appears online today as McKinsey’s launches its Global Leaders interview series.

One of the questions John addresses in the interview concerns our moves into 30 adjacent markets. “Is 30 too many?” asks James. It is if you don’t combine innovation with operational excellence, or as as John puts it, “If you plant a thousands seeds, and let a thousand seeds bloom…you get a weed field!”

Before you ask…there are no ducks in the weed field.

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Posted by David McCulloch at 10:39AM PST

Cisco Point of View on Cloud Computing

I had the opportunity last week to deliver a keynote at Cisco Live in front of ten thousand people at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and another three thousand who joined virtually. I extend my sincere thanks to all those who participated at the event. If you missed the keynote, you can watch it here.

As part of my keynote, we presented a demo of private cloud computing. We showed how a group of state-government agencies and state universities could use the private cloud model to pool their IT resources into a shared compute platform, thus making their IT environment dramatically more flexible, dynamic and efficient.

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Posted by Padmasree Warrior at 11:01AM PST

Duck Calls at Cisco with our CEO

I was sitting at my desk a few minutes ago when I heard a duck call echoing down the corridor.  Then, that inimitable John Chambers laughter.  With my trusty Flip Mino HD video camera in hand I strolled into Chambers office to capture the duck call for you, our loyal readers.  His lesson was brief, but it is very clear that he is a man of many talents.

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Posted by John Earnhardt at 10:20AM PST

Cisco Live Blogger Meetup

Blogger meetups and tweetups are becoming acceptable forums for people with common interests to come together, share ideas and build meaningful relationships. With this year’s Cisco Live! User Conference located in San Francisco and the massive blogger community based in the Bay Area, we decided to get into the meetup and tweetup mix.

We hosted our first blogger meetup at the W Hotel in San Francisco last night. Aside from the exchange of business cards (and occasional cocktail), it was great to witness the exchange of good conversations and ideas about technology and the power of the social web. 

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Posted by Autumn Truong at 03:32PM PST

Husk Power Systems Wins Cisco-DFJ Global Business Plan Competition

Cisco and leading global venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) announced Husk Power Systems as the winner of our first co-sponsored Global Business Plan Competition for university students this week. 

Husk Power Systems designs and operates miniature power plants that convert rice husks into electricity, serving off-grid rural Indian villages.  The team, whose members are University of Virginia, Darden School of Business 2009 graduates, will receive a $250,000 investment from DFJ and Cisco to help take the company to their next stage.

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Posted by Kristin Carvell at 02:20PM PST

From CiscoLive! 2009 in San Francisco

Going into CiscoLive! in San Francisco, we asked our Cisco Twitter-ers (@CiscoSystems, @padmasree to name a few) to gather questions for Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers to answer from the show.  This was our first Twitter Q&A and we loved hearing what was on your mind.  Thanks to all of our followers for the great questions and feedback.

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Posted by Elizabeth McNichols at 01:32PM PST

Cisco Twitter Follower THROWDOWN!!

First, there was Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) versus CNN (@cnnbrk) to see who would be the first twitter account to have 1,000,000 followers…now the next gauntlet has been thrown down.

In his introduction today of Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior (@Padmasree on twitter), the executive host of CiscoLive!Cisco SVP Carlos Dominguez (@carlosdominguez) challenged her to the NEXT, BIG TWITTER FOLLOWER COMPETITION!!! 

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Posted by John Earnhardt at 10:01AM PST