Hopefully everyone is back from the Christmas/New Years Holidays by now and already hit the deck running. I know we in the Manufacturing team are already off, well, most of us. I started the New Year by having cataract surgery. So I am going to combine some Healthcare with some Manufacturing in this blog. Consider yourself forewarned!

First, what to expect from us this coming year: much more on the value of mobility and the ability to collaborate across the global workforce, wherever they are (yes, that is Borderless Networks); then a lot on the vast amount of data presenting itself to the factory and from the factory to the enterprise (you will hear the term “data deluge”); also the impact of “the cloud” on the factory; also the growing prevalence of tablets and other smart devices in manufacturing operations. And we will undoubtedly have new areas of concentration throughout the year as new technologies take hold in manufacturing.

So, that is the preview of the year. But now I want to talk about my personal experience with Healthcare and how it relates to Manufacturing. Read More »

Tags: 2012, Borderless Networks, brain, cataract, cloud, collaboration, data deluge, education, eyes, healthcare, machine builders, Manufacturing, mobility, systems

Cisco Live UK (January 30^th-Feb 2^nd in London)  is right around the corner.  A good number of our attendees hail from the industrial verticals such as Transportation, Oil & Gas, Water/Waste Water Treatment, Automotive, and Food & Beverage and Consumer Packaged Goods.

These industrial companies are wrestling with business challenges such as reducing costs, speeding time to market and improving production uptime. How does Cisco play in the industrial space you ask? Read More »

Tags: 2012, Andy Manuel, Asset tracking, Borderless Networks, cisco live, Cisco Live UK, demonstration, Energy monitoring, Industrial Automation, Industrial Data Management, industrial ethernet, industrial wireless, Machine to Machine, Manufacturing, Remote telemetry, secure remote access, Workforce Enablement

One of Winston Churchill’s most memorable war speeches came on 10 November 1942 at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon at Mansion House in London, in response to the Allied victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein. Churchill stated:

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

My father was always proud that he had taken part in the first battle that changed the tide of World War II. He was 19 years old at time and had been on active duty for only 10 days! He was particularly proud that Churchill had said: “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.”

Well, the point of all this is to blow the trumpet for this Manufacturing Industry Blog from Cisco and your group of Industry Gurus. With only a few bloggers and blogging for only a year or so, we managed to achieve several notable awards:

• I, Peter Granger, was proud to accept the “Best Newcomer Blog Award” on behalf of the team – we managed to get folks to stay on our blog longer than any other Cisco blog! A real achievement for the team!
• Andrew Lach, our Blog Admin Manager managed to top the charts of prolific bloggers two months in a row, and became a featured blogger several times.
• The rest of the team, Mark Wylie, Kevin Davenport and Paul Didier, continued to impress the Industry with their thought Leadership.

So, what of the future? Read More »

Tags: 2011, 2012, award, best newcomer, blogging, blogs, Churcill, cisco blogs, El Alamein, future, Manufacturing, Manufacturing Guru, winner, Winston Churchill

This is the time of year that some of us bloggers decide to pontificate about the New Year that’s to come and what it will hold. Well more of that from me and my colleagues in a few days time.

Edison - courtesy Library of Congress

With just a few days left in 2011, I see that the incandescent light bulb is on its last legs, according to legislation that passed through Congress in 2007, and is being enacted by the Federal government soon. California has already started it’s ban on the old light bulbs ahead of time – no more three-way light bulbs! What are we going to do now?! Poor Edison – one of his key inventions put out to grass as it were!

There are some things difficult to predict – Samoans will go to sleep tonight on Thursday and tomorrow wake up on Saturday, so that they can be more in line with their trading partners in the west, like Australia. That’s a way of localizing your supply chain. Who would have predicted that?

Manufacturing Gurus at work...

Caffeinated beer is on its way out too. Never tried the stuff myself, but I don’t think it will stop folks drinking energy drinks and vodka cocktails. I remember enjoying a couple of those at the Minus5 bar at CiscoLive 2011 in Vegas this year with some colleagues. It was a way for the sponsor to get us to take notice of what they did and work with them in the networking industry. Funny, but after a couple of those special drinks none of us could remember what on earth it was they were trying to sell us! Note to self: don’t use that method in our marketing campaigns!

So, back to Edison’s predictions. Oh yes, he made some in 1911 and predicted what the world would be like in 2011, so let’s see how well he did 100 years on. I predict that Edison’s predictions will be mostly 50/50 by the year end. Here’s why.  He said: Read More »

Tags: 2011, 2012, cisco networking, Cius, edison, gold, kindle, light bulb, Manufacturing, nook, predictions, Tablets

New media and collaboration technologies have the potential to transform higher education in terms of the classroom, the learning process, the relationship between students and instructors, and how institutions conduct academic research. While much of the industry discussion revolves around use of consumer tools and social network sites like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, Cisco’s educational customers also see tremendous opportunity to increase student engagement and drive their own institutional strategies with “enterprise class” social software as well.

Since Cisco first announced Quad, we have had conversations with dozens of colleges and universities regarding the role enterprise social software and Cisco Quad can play in transforming education. Cisco Quad is an enterprise collaboration platform that brings people together to share ideas and content, collaborate on projects, and interact using chat, voice or video, regardless of where people are located.

Below, we’ve outlined four ways in which educational institutions are telling us enterprise social software is helping, or can transform the way learning, research, and academic advisement is crafted, delivered and consumed:

1. The 24/7 interactive classroom: Instructors often struggle to deliver a collaborative environment for their students that is secure and supports multiple access methods such as mobile.  Technology like Quad can enable students to interact in a secure, policy-based manner that extends the classroom conversation beyond physical walls. Courses partially or wholly targeted at off-campus students can similarly benefit from enhancing the class-like experience for remote students. For example, at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, the cross country MBA students based in the US, England, India and other countries are using Quad to create virtual working groups, find people with common interests, share files or videos with other students working on similar projects and instantly start video conferences or chat sessions. Quad provides students with the ability to interact, ask questions and share ideas with professors/faculty/tutorial assistants anytime, as opposed to only during fixed faculty office hours. It can also drive improved accountability on team projects, as content and comments are tracked in activity feeds and in project communities by both participating students and faculty leads.

2. Serendipitous Research: Quad contains several features, such as an activity feed that compiles microblog posts from students and staff and allows a snapshot view of a person’s current activities. These dynamic updating functionalities can facilitate broader cross-departmental collaboration, for students and researchers alike. Security features ensure that research that needs to be confidential is shared in a secure and safe manner.  As researchers update their statuses with exciting discoveries or frustrating problems, or create posts, upload videos or otherwise document their work, this content becomes accessible to hundreds of fellow university researchers through activity feeds and searches, making it possible for providential inter-disciplinary connections to be made and new insights to be generated. Read More »

Tags: 2012, chat, Cisco collaboration, Cisco Education, Cisco Quad, Cisco Unified Communications., collaboration, college, consumer, Duke University, edtech, education, edutech, enterprise collaboration, facebook, Fuqua School of Business, happy holidays, happy new year, higher education, highered, IM, linkedin, MBA, microblog, quad, social, social media, social networking, twitter, video, Voice, voice over IP