Now that everyone is back from last week’s Mobile World Congress, it is a good time to shift gears to the topic of cloud.

Cloud represents a fundamental shift in how applications and information technology (IT) in general are consumed. It is pretty clear that the market is evolving with many flavors of specialized cloud services coming to market,  providing a wealth of choice for the enterprise, small and medium business (SMB),  and public sector markets and a range of opportunities for cloud providers (CP’s) to provide differentiated cloud services. These services may address industry or country/province specific functionality or compliance requirements. Cisco refers to this trend as A World of Many Clouds.

As predicted in Cisco’s World of Many Clouds vision, organizations are finding themselves with a wealth of cloud services choices from a multitude of cloud vendors. For example, research conducted by Cisco’s IBSG consulting organization found that SMBs are significantly increasing their spend on SaaS services.  Between 2011 and 2013 SMBs between 5 and 249 employees will increase the portion of their IT spend allocated to hosted or subscriptions technology services by 2.6X.Similarly, recent research from Parallels has found that SMB’s used 4 cloud services each on average in 2012 and are predicted to use 7 cloud services each by 2015. Read More »

Tags: cloud, InterCloud, multi-cloud, Service Provider, small media business

If you’re in London this week for the 2013 Cable Congress, and have any interest in the roadmap and economics of cloud-TV, you don’t want to miss the keynote address by Jesper Andersen, SVP/GM of our Service Provider Video Technology Group.

He’s on at 4P on March 5, just after the international CTO panel.

What you’ll learn: Read More »

Tags: jesper andersen, Service Provider, video, videoscape

Service providers are rapidly transitioning their networks to 100 Gbps  in the core and it seems that every week brings a new technology, product, or customer announcement.  With that in mind we encourage you to join us at an upcoming webinar, 100G Optics: Why Operators Are Upgrading Now. It will feature results from surveys by Infonetics Research with top service providers, and explains what is driving upgrades to 100G and how carriers plan to make the transition. We’ll cover not just the core but future metro opportunities as well. Read More »

Tags: 100 Gbps, 100 GE, 100G, Cisco, CRS Elastic Core, DWDM, Infonetics, IP Optical Convergence, Ron Johnson, Service Provider, WDM

By Henky Agusleo, Vertical Manager, and Neeraj Arora, Director, IBSG Service Provider – Singapore

A rapidly expanding, tech-savvy middle class is driving an explosion of connected mobile devices, with close to a billion smartphones and tablets in the world today. These users are looking for new cloud-based “Connected Life” experiences from their mobile devices, creating tremendous opportunities for service providers (SPs). The key is in mobile cloud. The Cisco^® Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) projects a direct worldwide mobile-cloud service opportunity of more than $60 billion by 2016, with an additional cloud pull-through market of $335 billion.

But so far, service providers have not taken the lead in offering cloud-based Connected Life services. That claim belongs to over-the-top (OTT) application developers, content providers, and device manufacturers, such as Google and Apple, who have moved quickly to take the high ground in this market.

OTTs Have First-Mover Advantage

This first-mover advantage has Read More »

Tags: app stores, Big Data, Cisco, cloud ecosystem, Connected Life, Content delivery networks, data center, First-mover, IBSG, innovation, market capitalization, mobile cloud, mobile cloud opportunity, over-the-top (OTT), pricing, Service Provider, Smartphones, Tablets, thin-client devices, virtualization, wi-fi

The so-called “data deluge” shows no signs of abating anytime soon. Facebook, for example, has more than 2.5 billion pieces of content and ingests more than 500 terabytes of new content daily.  Mobile devices are driving this growth of data.  The global proliferation of devices estimated to reach 10 billion by 2017—or 1.4 times the number of people on the planet. As a result mobile-data traffic is exploding. The recently released Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) predicts that global mobile-data traffic will increase 13-fold from 2012 to 2017, reaching 11.2 exabytes per month.

But along with the challenges inherent to this tsunami of data, opportunities abound for monetizing and optimizing information. All of those new mobile consumers—in developed and emerging markets alike—will demand enhanced Connected Life experiences that will be newer, better, and more personalized. Data is the “new oil” that will fuel this opportunity. Networks and the Internet have a critical role to play in the future of Big Data. First, they are the collectors and disseminators of data, gathering it from the millions of Internet-enabled devices, applications, and sensors, then storing it in the right place for analysis and further action. Second, they are creators of critical information on location, presence, device type, application, and more. Read More »

Tags: Big Data, Cisco, cloud, data in motion, mobile world congress, mobility, Personalization, service providers, targeted advertising, virtualization, visual networking index, wi-fi