By Uwe Lambrette, Director, IBSG Service Provider

Cloud adoption is accelerating at an impressive pace. To gain a deeper understanding of the current rate of change, and the dynamics of cloud’s evolution, the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) engaged with wide-ranging groups of IT executives and decision makers—first in 2010, and then again in 2012. Our in-depth interviews focused on five industry verticals: government, manufacturing, financial services, professional services, and retail.

In our interviews, we encountered many examples of cloud implementation projects, which we call “adoption dynamics,” because they are nearly always part of the enterprise cloud adoption process. While there is no prescribed order, enterprises often begin with smaller, well-defined projects that fall into six categories:

1. Consolidation of IT resources into cloud-based architectures for true cloud transformation
2. Next-generation workspace
3. Simple back-office business processes
4. Software development
5. Agile and scalable web presence
6. Transformation of computer grids and analytics

Today: Different Industry Verticals Share Common Adoption Dynamics

The study Read More »

Tags: adoption, analytics, Cisco, cloud, cloud implementation, cloud transformation, cloud-based architectures, grids, IBSG, Internet Business Solutions Group, next-generation workspace, Service Provider, SP, vertical cloud adoption, vertical cloud providers, web presence

First impressions matter. Whether you’re trying to get a job, make a sale, or go on a second date, you know that the first things you do and say are critical. Studies say you have between 2 seconds and 2 minutes to make a first impression. When you download a new app for your tablet or phone, how much time does it have to make its first impression on you?

When IT departments make technology decisions, the path to end-user adoption is a key concern. The relative ease or difficulty of setting up and maintaining the back-end infrastructure or cloud service is one thing, but the means by which end users first experience the solution and get started using it is perhaps even more important.

IT needs products that are easy to roll out and that provide end users — their customers — with a delightful first impression. That’s why Cisco considers not just the end user experience and the IT administrator experience, but the places where they intersect, such as in the deployment of solutions to a large end-user community.

A tangible example of this attention to experience is Read More »

Tags: adoption, Cisco Jabber, Cisco Jabber for iPad, collaboration, instant messaging, itunes, Presence, user experience

I have often found it a little surprising that while we and customers expend considerable effort planning, building, and managing collaboration solutions, the process of their adoption by end-users can get lost in the proverbial shuffle. Adoption is a really important issue, because adoption is a controlling variable in the collaboration infrastructure investment equation. In other words, a collaboration infrastructure that operates at 80 percent of capacity is going to deliver four times the returns of one that runs at 20 percent of capacity.

The problem of suboptimal adoption goes deeper than the sinking feeling of paying to build and operate infrastructure that sits idle. It gets more serious when one considers that under-adoption means forgoing the positive benefits of collaboration. It’s not so much the money blown on unused equipment and services, but the opportunities missed to Read More »

Tags: adoption, collaboration, ROI, roi of collaboration

Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to spend time in the trenches with a number of customers embarking on efforts to deploy social collaboration platforms.   While the individual challenges differ, the one constant that I have seen is that the “if you build it, they will come” cliché may work well in the movies, but it certainly does not apply to persuading employees to adopt this emerging way of sharing information and collaborating with co-workers.

Read More »

Tags: adoption, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise social software, social collaboration, Social Software

We sat down with Jeanette Gibson (@JeanetteG), Sr. Director, Global Social and Digital Media at Cisco to talk about a brand’s journey through the digital world. In our video interview, she shared with us the 5 stages of transformation to reach Digital Nirvana. Credit goes to Ant’s Eye View for the development of this framework. Check it out and if you like the video, please share this blog. Read More »

Tags: adoption, best practices, digital journey, evolution, how to, integrated social media, strategy