SP360: Service Provider Insight into Service Provider Trends and Technology

Internet Predictions: From Participatory To Interplanetary Internetworking

Having just spent two weeks at the ITU-T NGN - Global Standards Initiative held in Geneva, Switzerland, January 18-29 2010.

I had an opportunity to read the IEEE Internet Computing, January-February 2010 special edition entitled, “Internet Predictions” co-edited by Vint Cerf, Google and Munindar P. Singh, North Carolina State University.

The contributors present various applications, technologies, trends such as participatory sensing, the Internet of Things; networked gameplay and the use of procedural content generation; to new ways of doing business, e.g. the company as a managed network; to the interplanetary internetwork.

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Posted by Monique Morrow at 11:02AM PST

Social Media Marketing for Service Providers - David M. Scott: Tools & Trust. Part 6

David Meerman Scott explains the New Rules of Marketing talks about tools we can use and how trust can be earned. This is the sixth in a series of videos conducted by Stacy Spognardi of Cisco focused on opening up a discussion about social media within the service provider community (and beyond). David focuses on some essential marketing tools for today’s companies.

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Posted by Zoya Fallah at 09:18AM PST

Savvis Symphony VPDC is Music to the Ears

At VMWorld in August, Savvis unveiled its not-so-secret Project Spirit, the company’s platform for enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Service virtual computing services.  In December, they announced Cisco’s UCS (Unified Computing System)  as the platform for Spirit, and introduced Symphony – the range of Cloud offerings including Project Spriit.  Savvis calls the Spirit portion of this portfolio a Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC).  Effectively the service offers infrastructure as a service (compute, storage and more) as a service to a large number of customers through a simple web interface.

Cisco is mentioned as a key strategic partner in helping Savvis create this service.  Savvis uses many elements of Cisco’s Unified Service Delivery (USD) solution, including the UCS for compute nodes, Nexus  and Catalyst switches including Application Control Engine and  Firewall Services Modules for data-center networking, and a Cisco-powered IP NGN network interconnecting their data centers.

Of course, we’re very proud that we’re providing the infrastructure solution.  But that wasn’t what I meant by the title to this post.

What’s exciting to me is the fact that cloud computing is moving from the hobby shop to the production floor, and service providers are beginning to offer world-class cloud offers to their customers.

The Savvis offering is distinct from other IaaS offers in several ways, but in my opinion, the most important is the fact that Savvis Symphony VPDC includes the types of features that enterprises will require if Cloud Computing is to become a staple element of every business.

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Posted by Simon Aspinall at 04:58PM PST

Social Media Marketing for Service Providers - Connecting with Customers with Elyse Tager (Elymedia)

Elyse Tager shares her view on how businesses are using social media as an opportunity to get closer to customers. In this video with Cisco’s Zoya Fallah, Elyse discusses social media marketing techniques that can be used for business to business and business to consumer.

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Posted by Zoya Fallah at 08:24AM PST

NBC Olympics SVP, Digital Media on How Medianet Enables Coverage of 2010 Games

Perkins Miller knows a thing or two (or ten) about the Olympic Games. As Senior VP of Digital Media Olympics for NBC Universal, Miller oversaw the push to deliver the Games on multiple digital platforms, back in 2008.

This year, he says in this video interview, it’s all about capturing the culture of the Games - from fans, journalists, and athletes (except when they’re actually competing, obviously) - while vastly improving the behind-the-scenes editing workflows.

That means putting Cisco Flip cameras in the hands of participants, before the games, as well as NBC talent and producers to gather “the rest of the story.”

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Posted by Murali Nemani at 12:29PM PST

A View from This Year’s “Tech Emmys” in Las Vegas

By Bart Spreister, VP/GM Digital Media Networks, Service Provider Video Technology Group

It’s always gratifying to be part of a winning team, even (and perhaps especially!) as a behind-the-scenes contributor. I’m talking about the 61^st annual Technology & Engineering Emmys, put on by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in Las Vegas, during the recent Consumer Electronics Show.

I had the good fortune to sit with friends and colleagues at Fox Entertainment Group, which won a Tech Emmy for their “pioneering efforts in development and implementation of network distribution workflows for ATSC DTV Development.”

Here’s what that means: Fox, which, with all other U.S. broadcasters, switched to all-digital transmissions in 2009, pioneered a way to maintain a consistent and high-quality look and feel of its video feed, including graphics transitions amongst affiliates. The Fox national feed reaches 294 affiliate stations, so the ability to automate the process was a big deal, internally.

Maybe this sounds obvious - to splice between national and local content and graphics, without degrading picture quality. Turns out it’s not - or it wasn’t, prior to Fox’s work.

Prior to the digital cutover, any national feeds entering a local station often required decoding and manipulation (e.g. to insert a different logo or message), then re-encoding, prior to airing. Each time a piece of video is manipulated, the potential exists to degrade quality - which is why it was and is important to maintain a clean, high-quality feed, between national and local locations.

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Posted by Murali Nemani at 10:32AM PST

Announcing Cisco Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Solution for Service Providers

A very happy new year to you all!

Today, we announced the Cisco Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution for service providers. Service providers are looking for new ways to enter the market for IaaS (providing compute-on-demand, network-on-demand and storage-on-demand for their customers)

Cisco is working with Service Providers to provide them with the tools, design guides and advanced services to be able to “fast-track” the implementation of IaaS offerings. The benefit for our SP customers is that they are able to develop a service with greater confidence and are then able to realize revenues faster than would have otherwise been possible.

Any customer of the SP can now gain access to cost-efficient resources at SP scale. Not having to deploy these services on their own makes your customers more agile and productive.

The benefits for the customer include:

• Access to world-class IT services on-demand
• Highly efficient, low-cost services without up-front investment
• Security and management provided by their service provider

The benefits to Service Providers include:

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Posted by Simon Aspinall at 05:03PM PST

Social Media Marketing for Service Providers - David M. Scott: Is Social Media a Fad? Part 5

David Meerman Scott addresses head-on the topic of social media and whether it’s a fad or here to stay. In this fifth video of a multiple-part series between David and Stacy Spognardi of Cisco, David asserts that social media is, in fact, not new and has been in practice for a long time.

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Posted by Zoya Fallah at 10:28AM PST

Swisscom Selects Cisco ASR 9000 to Prepare for the Zettabyte Era

The Nielsen Company reported that here in the U.S. market, time spent viewing online video is up 13 percent in December 2009. Some observers might be surprised by these results, but if you’ve been reading my prior commentary, then you will know that this is totally in-line with the unmistakable trend that’s been building for some time.

As I’ve shared our VNI perspective here before, the zettabyte era is approaching fast - global IP traffic is increasing at a 40% combined annual growth rate resulting in a five-fold increase between 2008-2013. Clearly, video traffic will be a primary source of that groundswell.

Once again, this trend is truly pervasive and by no means just a North American phenomenon. It will result in an annual bandwidth demand on the world’s IP NGNs of more than of two-thirds of a Zettabyte (aka 667 trillion gigabytes!). Europe is a key part of that growth cycle, consuming nearly the same amount of traffic as North America, and leading European service providers are actively preparing for the inevitable.

In fact, we announced this week that Swisscom is deploying the Cisco ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Router as the edge platform to support the rollout of their high-bandwidth fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) services - to every household in Switzerland. At the end of September 2009, Swisscom had approximately 1.8 million broadband subscribers, so such a goal is by no means an easy one.

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Posted by Doug Webster at 03:57PM PST

PAETEC:  Evolving their Cisco IP NGN to Prepare for the Future of Business Services

As we enter a new decade in 2010, forward-looking communication solutions providers will continue to invest in building and evolving their IP NGN infrastructure. They are preparing for the increased demand from their business customers, as the Enterprise 2.0 phenomenon moves into the next phase of market development.

Many of what were once considered early-adopter collaboration applications are now going mainstream. If you’re like me, then you’ve already embraced many of these next-generation online collaboration services and applied them in your daily routine - after all, why just have a phone call when you can have a webex? Why fly for an hour meeting when you can TelePresence?

Earlier this week, PAETEC announced it will standardize on Cisco IP Next-Generation Network edge and core platforms, and I believe this is an example of how more and more providers are proactively moving beyond providing more traditional data, voice, and Internet business solutions for business customers. Instead, they are using their advanced network platform for delivering a wider array of value-add services, including some of the emerging ones that are entering the market.

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Posted by Doug Webster at 09:03AM PST

CES 2010: On 3DTV, Clouds, and Cable

One unmistakable glimmer underscored this year’s consumer-facing gadget-fest: The unquenchable thirst for high-speed, media optimized IP networks in support of rich media devices and applications - what we here at Cisco call “medianets.”

The big news for us at CES 2010 was a re-establishment of our partnership with NBC for the Winter Olympics by providing them with medianet technologies. NBC will be testing our newly announced Media Data Center solution based on our UCS platform and Nexus product family optimized for a high throughput and lossless production environments to deliver 3x operational efficiencies of traditional systems. Furthermore, Flip cameras will be distributed to key NBC personnel and athletes to capture and share their experiences. It’s a big deal for us, and we’re extremely excited about expanding our relationship with NBC by applying IP based technologies across production, contribution, distribution and consumption networks to drive unparalleled end-user experiences.

You couldn’t walk 10 steps in the Las Vegas Convention Center (especially the Central Hall) without bumping into an example of living room 3DTV. This CES season will go down as the one that was preceded by Avatar, the wildly popular 3D release that introduced the global consumer mainstream to theatrical 3D. On the heels of that came CES 2010, which brimmed with 3DTV sets for the living room. A key ingredient for that transition, from theaters to homes: Bandwidth.

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Posted by Murali Nemani at 10:53AM PST

Portugal Telecom Selects Cisco as Video/Telecoms Solutions Provider

Portugal Telecom’s work to offer its customers an economical triple-play service, without having to worry about technological choices, and with the convenience of a single bill, has catapulted the provider toward significant subscriber and services growth over the past 18 months. Specifically, it now reaches 20% of all pay TV subscribers in the country; 50% of all ADSL consumers take TV services from Portugal Telecom.

In this video, Cisco SVP European Markets, Chris Dedicoat, and Portugal Telecom CEO, Zeinal Bava, discuss the growth of telecom and video in Portugal, including the importance of “structural competition” and network architectures that transcend commoditization.

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Posted by Murali Nemani at 12:47PM PST

Prep the Net: Get Creative and Win a Flip Camcorder

Are you ready for the IP Video traffic groundswell? Ready or not, it’s coming. The Cisco Visual Networking Index forecasts that video traffic is growing exponentially, creating unprecedented demand for increased broadband capacity.

As online video consumption becomes more voracious and increasingly mobile, forward-looking service providers around-the-world are investing in new infrastructure to prepare for the inevitable. The Cisco ASR 9000 router was engineered in anticipation of this huge demand.

The ASR 9000 is so beautifully designed, it’s actually our most photogenic router - it just loves to be included in photographs and video clips. And no, we’re not kidding.

In fact, now we’re giving everyone the opportunity to use their creativity to entice an ASR 9000 to strike a pose, and capture that very special moment in your camera viewfinder.

You can share your G-rated image or video with us, and if yours is the most popular, then you can win your very own limited-edition ASR 9000 Flip Video Camcorder. What are you waiting for? Here’s how you can participate.

Prep the Net with the Edge Router that’s Built to Handle the Demand

• Learn more, visit http://prepthenet.com, for examples.
• Download a version of the ASR 9000 paperware model.
• Assemble the model, and choose a creative background.
• Capture the moment, then upload your photo or video today.

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Posted by Zoya Fallah at 07:48AM PST

Time Travel for an Industry

Flashback: It’s 20 years ago. If you have video and voice plans, you likely subscribe to different service providers. If you have a cell phone (you big shot, you), it weighs 5 or more pounds and you subscribe to an even different provider (not to mention building muscle toting around the briefcase sized device). For some of us, home security features are becoming increasingly available (though were much too expensive for me to consider). The networks are silo’d, with each supporting a different service, the fates of each respective provider tied solely to that service’s well being.

This is how the game myPlanNet begins, and it’s your task as a service provider CEO to evolve your company’s network from one that’s oriented around point solutions to a platform that changes the way we live, learn, work and play.

Fast forward 20 years to today. If you still have a cell phone that weighs 5 pounds, you’re at a Saved by the Bell museum. If you don’t have Internet access for 5 minutes, you develop a case of the shakes (“hyperconnectivitis” my doctor calls it…). In this world (and if you’ve mastered the myPlanNet game), your service provider’s network has become an IP Next Generation Network - a single platform that enables all of us, at work, at home, or on the move, to have the “anys” - any device, any content, anytime, anywhere – enabling us to connect and share our lives like never before.

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Posted by Doug Webster at 11:04AM PST

T-Systems Creates Innovative Managed Service Based on Cisco WAAS and NetQoS

With the proliferation of applications across the enterprise - LAN, WAN, and data center – the need to optimize applications across wide area networks is greater than ever, and performance becomes the new vanguard in network and service management. As the borderless enterprise takes hold, with distributed workers and branches collaborating over video, mobile, and other multimedia applications, enterprises are looking for service providers that can help improve the user experience with quality of service (QoS) guarantees. This means service providers need to have the ability to deliver end-to-end performance assurance and management of applications using application performance management (APM), optimization and acceleration solutions like Cisco Wide Area Application Service (WAAS).

Enterprises today are grappling with increasing complexity in their applications environment, and with server sprawl in their data centers. Let’s consider a global pharmaceutical company. It has numerous IT applications, such as the corporate ERP system, R&D, supply chain management, and FDA-related compliance applications. The corporate HQ is in Bonn, Germany; the R&D center is in Bern, Switzerland; and the distribution centers are in Salt Lake City, USA, and Sydney, Australia; while the compliance center is in Portsmouth, England. The problem is that with users and applications spread across the globe, round-trip latency and sub-optimization are constant headaches. What the enterprise needs is the capability to assure performance across the WAN, from end to end. This is the gap that legacy service providers, who currently focus only on fault and availability metrics, fail to bridge, thereby losing customers.

The answer to this problem is twofold. First, it lies in building a system that provides enterprises with end-to-end visibility of applications across the LAN, WAN, and data center (APM); and second, it requires implementing a set of capabilities the service provider can invoke to assess, deploy, right-size, and proactively operate customer networks. T-Systems has achieved just that by pioneering a complete suite of innovative service offerings built on the Cisco WAAS solution and the monitoring suite of NetQoS, a Cisco APM partner. This leading-edge offering helps customers benefit from enhanced WAN performance end-to-end and acceptable levels of application delivery.

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Posted by Jeff Spagnola at 12:05PM PST