By Steven Shepard, Contributing Columnist

What a wonderful thing maps are. As a child I would pore over them, sometimes for hours, looking for the silliest names, the most intriguing locations, the most exciting geographies. I was particularly taken by maps of the Canadian Shield, a place so vast and forbidding that even today large swaths of it remain unexplored.

This is the home of the world’s largest remaining arboreal forest — it is huge. I also like the fact that on the maps of northern Canada, even today, roads meander northward from the reasonably populated cities near the US border, and then, inextricably, end. As a kid I longed to go there, to see what lay beyond the end of the road. I still do.

I still take aimless ambles through maps today when I have time. The nature of my work is such that I have had the pleasure of driving to the end of some of those roads, and in some cases, creating roads of my own. I have visited places with exotic names like Timboctou (we call it Timbuktu), Ouagadougou, and Zanzibar. The joy of map-gazing, however, still burns hot for me.

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Tags: architecture, global networked economy, innovation, inventor, telecommunications

As someone who grew up riding the Boston MBTA, and later the New York City subway system, I have an affection for that gritty form of public transit. So I loved the New York Times article from some weeks ago that detailed the results of the city’s subway survey. My favorite quote:  “Please.  I’ve lived in New York for 20 years — I’ve seen more bizarre things on the trains than I can remember.  That’s why we live here.” 

When you zoom out from that passenger experience, though, there’s a lot that goes into building a subway system to carry all that humanity. Just look at this site dedicated to dreaming up a better MBTA for Boston. Clearly people rely on subway systems for different things and have very subjective needs when it comes to the design of the overall system. And that’s why Cisco’s new Smart Business Architecture (SBA) subway system is so cool. It’s designed to help you navigate easily from Point A to Point B as you move through the modules that help you turn a Borderless Network Architecture into a reality.

Each module—or subway stop—represents a prescriptive, step-by-step guide for a specific aspect of the Borderless Network Architecture. And when you zoom in to explore that guide, you find a clear point of orientation.

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Tags: architecture, Borderless Networks, Network design, SBA, Smart Business Architecture

Recently, we posted a bunch of new material in the Smart Business Architecture of Design Zone. Cisco Smart Business Architecture (SBA) for Midsize Networks and Enterprises offers a blueprint for designing and deploying a full-service, comprehensive network. SBA delivers prescriptive network design and deployment best practices for organizations with 100 to 10,000 connected users.

It’s really worth a look. Here’s a comment one customer posted on the main page:

Really brilliant document, I’ve already asked the … support community for this kind of architecture support document and it was exactly what I was thinking.

For me it’s the best way to have people adopt Cisco technology: help them to master it by  being able to do complex things in simple guided steps.

We’ve supplemented the new content with an interactive “subway map” flash widget that you can launch from that page.  I don’t always like online interactive maps, but this subway map really gives a nice overview of the different guides available and explains when to use what. Cisco’s Linda Beaton has just posted a great backgrounder on the “train” (or “subway stop”) concept. You launch it from the “Getting Started” button on the Smart Business Architecture page.

There’s also a more traditional list of the documents. Let us know what you think.

Tags: architecture, Smart Business Architecture, webexperience

Enterprise IT organizations and IT processes have gone through major waves of changes in the past few years. From a focus on deploying products, technologies and solutions that solved specific technical needs, IT organizations are looking increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their systems and processes by turning their focus towards “Services”

At Cisco IT, we are living this journey towards “everything as a service” and the integration of architectures within the Infrastructure has become a strategic priority to meet that goal. Our focus in the Infrastructure rests on the following architectural plays – Data Center/Virtualization, Borderless Networks, Collaboration and Video.

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Tags: architecture, Borderless Networks, coc-borderless-networks, services, virtualization experience infrastructure, vxi

It’s a well known fact in the IT industry that there is a spending push at the end of the calendar year as companies look to close out their budget. This year-end spending trend represents a great sales opportunity for both Cisco and our partners.

Helping our partners boost profits and provide value to our mutual customers are two core principles of our partner strategy. With that in mind, we recently launched a global sales initiative called “Year-end Sprint” (YES), which will allow us, together with our partners, to capture coveted year-end IT spending.

YES is a collection of several high-value, global architecture product and service offerings for customers that include additional incentives for partners. These offers span our four key architectures: Borderless Networks, Collaboration, Data Center, and Service Provider, including IP NGN and SP Cloud.

The countdown to the New Year has already begun, so  I encourage you to quickly learn more about YES, by visiting the YES Sales Initiative page on Partner Central (CCO login required).

To give you a flavor for YES, let me take a moment to highlight three of our YES architecture offers.

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Tags: architecture, Borderless Networks, Cisco, collaboration, customer, data center, IT, partners, Service Provider