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.

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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.

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Tags: Borderless Networks, music, routers, social media, switches

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.

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Tags: blog, HP, intern, Newsroom

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…

Tags: cisco.com, internet, Internet Society, ipv4 exhaustion, IPv6, World IPv6 Day

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.

You can find a comprehensive analysis of the Patent Board’s latest Telecom and Communications industry scorecard in the Wall Street Journal (password required).

Tags: Catalyst 6500, cisco prime, Cisco Virtual Switching System, patent, Research and Development, UCS Manager