At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in early March, I had the opportunity to meet with leading mobile operators from several countries, small and large, and the focus of each discussion was remarkably consistent – how can mobile operators cost-effectively monetize the growing traffic on their networks?

This was music to my ears, because Cisco had many of the answers they sought. 

We had over 900 customer meetings in Barcelona, and I personally heard from many service providers that we are solving their real business problems and that they see great value in Cisco’s broad architectural solution.

 The fact is, Cisco had seen the mobile Internet explosion forming years ago.  With the mobile Internet predicted to grow 13-fold between 2012 and 2017 by the addition of billions of connections between people, devices and objects, we accurately predicted the business opportunities and challenges facing mobile service providers today.   

And so last month, Cisco introduced several major innovations to enable service providers to more effectively monetize those connections.  These Cisco technologies enable service providers to deliver new, better and more personalized connected experiences and to gain more intelligence about those networked connections that they can utilize to deliver new revenue-generating services.

Many of the new business opportunities presented by the growing connectivity of people, data, processes, information and devices (the ‘Internet of Everything’) center on analyzing and monetizing “data in motion,” which basically consists of real-time and near real-time data generated by mobile and fixed connections between people, things and processes. 

To help ensure service providers accommodate exploding network traffic and profit from it, Cisco recently introduced innovative mobile solutions in three key areas: software, access and infrastructure.

Intelligent Software via Cisco Quantum

To better enable service providers to analyze and monetize the data in motion in their networks, Cisco last month introduced Cisco® Quantum™. The result of the integration of more than $1.5 billion in recent acquisitions with in-house innovation, Cisco Quantum delivers unparalleled mobile network intelligence and is a component of Cisco’s ONE programmable networking approach, which is a key building block for the delivery of new network services and is fundamental to Cisco’s cloud, core networking, and data center strategies. The Quantum suite includes:

• Cisco Quantum Network Abstraction Suite: provides a real-time network abstraction layer for network data collection, aggregation and orchestration to augment available information in all network decision processes.
• Cisco Quantum Policy Suite: offers a next-generation policy management solution that enables service providers to scale, control, monetize and personalize any service on any type of network through a flexible, interactive architecture that supports application-centric policy capabilities.
• Cisco Quantum Analytics Suite: provides business and network analytics capabilities that enable both historical and real-time predictive policy decisions. It includes dashboards for data visualization and programmable interfaces to create system alerts in conjunction with policy.
• Cisco Quantum RAN Optimization Suite – Service provider mobile investment is shifting away from macrocell-only networks to heterogeneous networks (e.g., macro and small cells such as Wi-Fi, 3G, or LTE).  The size and complexity of these networks necessitates self-optimizing networks and a transition to live and automatic optimization in the radio access portion of the network. This Quantum suite addresses this pressing need, allowing service providers to effectively manage their networks, with major network investment savings for both operating and capital expenditures.

Mobile World Congress confirmed this strategy, as global service providers, including Vodafone Netherlands, recognized the importance of using Cisco’s intelligent network to deliver new experiences and expand revenue opportunities.

Two other service providers announced that they are using “Cisco smarts” to offer new types of services: Cricket, a U.S. mobile operator selling downloadable songs with its Muve Music service, and Shaw Communications, a Canadian cable operator offering its subscribers mobile service via Cisco Wi-Fi hotspots.

“Never get hard work confused with results.” – John Chambers, Cisco Chairman and CEO

Last night in New York City, the Cisco PR team won three of the most prestigious awards in the Public Relations industry at PRWeek’s PR Awards. We won the corporate branding campaign of the year, the In-House PR team of the year, and the overall PR campaign of the year (this is the overall winner of the other winning campaigns). Thank you PRWeek and all the judges for the recognition.

David McCulloch and I co-lead this great team and we couldn’t be more proud of this team recognition (and, we, of course, have to give much credit and guidance to our great boss, Karen Tillman, VP and Chief Communication Officer at Cisco – PRWeek PR Professional of the Year Honorable Mention). We also entered the corporate campaign of the year with our agency partners Text100 and Brunswick and, clearly, they get their due credit for helping us on our PR journey.

What is the definition of Public Relations? The Cisco PR team took a crack at defining PR and came up with this:

“Public Relations is knowing what to say; when to say it; how to say it; where to say it; whom to say it to, to promote and protect the client’s reputation.”

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Tags: awards, Awesome, David McCulloch, Karen Tillman, PR, PRWeek, Results

The future intrigues us all, especially when every now and then we’re able to catch a glimpse of what’s to come.

At Cisco, one of the ways we build our business and serve our customers is to think about the future and how technology innovation stands to transform the world in which we live. This approach is especially important now as the more than 99 percent of physical objects that are currently unconnected become part of the Internet of Everything (IoE).

And while we know that no one person or company can predict the future with 100 percent accuracy, we put a lot of effort into coming as close as we can. To make this possible, we have a Chief Futurist on staff – Dave Evans – who, in addition to his responsibilities leading the Cisco IBSG Innovations team, spends his time helping Cisco and our customers see what lies ahead.

In an event earlier this month, Evans and the General Manager of Cisco’s Emerging Technology Group, Dr. Guido Jouret, shared their top predictions for the future and the mind-boggling innovations that will start taking off in 2013 and beyond. If you’re up for a little crystal-ball gazing, here’s what they had to say… Read More »

Tags: 3D printers, education, healthcare, Internet of Everything, IoE, M2M, P2M, p2p, retail, rfid, robots

STW Communications Group Limited is Australasia’s largest marketing content and communications services group. Within the STW group there are 75 individual operating companies which focus on advertising, design, digital, public and government relations, and specialist communications.

Being such a large group of companies operating under the same banner, naturally STW Group’s IT department faced the challenge of supporting, running and understanding the different IT needs of each organisation. Coming to grips with the idiosyncrasies of each company was time-consuming and labour intensive.

Enter Cisco and NetApp. STW were able to roll-out the joint FlexPod architecture to virtualise STW’s centralised computing platform.  STW reported that the virtualisation of its computing through FlexPod has led to extraordinary results. The once labour-intensive IT environment became a simple and easy to manage platform.

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Johnson Winter & Slattery (JWS), a 60-partner corporate law firm in Australia, has announced it is rolling out Cisco video and collaboration solutions across its five offices. The law firm has partnered with Cisco to deploy an integrated collaboration suite including Cisco WebEx, Cisco Jabber, Cisco TelePresence and Cisco Show & Share.

The comprehensive collaboration suite delivers benefits externally from a client management point of view, as well as internally in terms of professional development and training.

Corporate law is a complex domain. Clients engage law firms because the matter requires collaboration, time and face-to-face discussions. Given the sheer distance between capital cities in Australia, face-to-face discussions are often substituted for phone calls. Cisco TelePresence allows clients to tap into the experience of multiple lawyers across different cities in a realistic, face-to-face environment. This enables greater mutual understanding and better problem solving for these complex issues.

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