This question was posed by the Manufacturing IT Director for a major Pharma producer, as part of an annual customer advisory board hosted jointly by Cisco and Rockwell Automation. One answer: Good luck! …And why would you want to?
Chet Namboodri talks about how consumer products are entering production and maintenance workflows and how “Rockwell and Cisco are in the forefront of enabling those solutions” during a recent customer innovation council session.
The migration of technology and applications from Consumer to Business to Industrial has become a well worn path, and the use of Smart Phones, Tablets, Mobile Video and other Operator Interfaces powering work flows and industrial intelligence has become a mainstay for Manufacturers. Read More »
While there is more and more talk of cloud computing lately, it’s not clear how data center managers can integrate this into their capacity planning in a standardized way. Most of the various approaches to both internal and external cloud computing offered today work differently from vendor to vendor, and vary by the type of application problem being solved or cloud service required. For example a business may choose to access an application in the cloud such as Salesforce.com, or choose to move a particular infrastructure or platform stack to an internal cloud technology or external cloud provider. And for cloud computing to be truly valuable, it needs to offer the data center manager a range of technologies that work seamlessly together, deploying services as required to meet business needs.
Today Cisco announced a new strategic alliance with BMC and introduced the Integrated Cloud Delivery Platform (ICDP) solution to give customers an option to easily deploy end-to-end Cloud services on a large-scale multi-tenant Cloud computing infrastructure that spans networks, computing systems, storage, and applications. ICDP increases the scalability of Cloud computing environments for our Service Provider and other large-scale multi-tenant clouds by automating and simplifying the service orchestration and management of their service portfolios.
This alliance extends Cisco’s ecosystem of partners in the Cloud space. This move builds on the relationship between our two companies: Cisco and BMC have worked together on 140+ customer engagements, combining BMC’s BladeLogic and our Unified Computing System (UCS). ICDP integrates BMC’s Cloud Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution with Cisco’s Unified Service Delivery (USD) solution to simplify the management of delivering high-scale, secure, and multi-tenant Cloud services. Combining CLM with Unified Service Delivery infrastructure allows the support for end-to-end lifecycle management of Cloud computing-related initiatives with seamless integration of the planning, provisioning, assurance, compliance, and governance while increasing the quality of ongoing Cloud service delivery.
As I’m focusing more on Collaboration and Innovationand less on Supply Chainthese days, I thought I’d share a story of ‘Ideation’ with you for my opening blog. That’s because it’s usually one of the first steps in the product development lifecycle, and makes chronological sense when discussing innovation. In later blogs I’ll share some of the subsequent steps – you know: Selection, Prototyping, Validation, Development and finally, Launch. Different companies use different terms and different processes, but all good products start out with a good idea.
Let me take you back in time for a moment. When I was eight years old I noticed that the local UK comic magazine that I bought on a weekly basis was running competitions for readers to submit puzzles for other readers to solve. I was attracted to the Secret Service game that was one of the prize options, but what was my idea? How was I going to win if I didn’t have a good idea? Well, I decided that I’d submit a match puzzle -- you know we actually had lots of matches in the 60’s! This puzzle isn’t hard (please remember I was eight years old) and looked something like the picture above. The question was “How do you make a square by adding just one more match and not moving the others?”
Anyway, fairly obvious that you make a square by placing a forth match adjoining the other three to make a square with the bases as in the next picture (click ‘read more’ when finished with this page to see how). Well, I had the pride of seeing my puzzle published and, more importantly for me, I actually won the Secret Service game! But that’s not the point… Read More »
3) Growing adoption of virtualization/cloud technologies
And each of these deserves a bit more exploration. Today, I will focus on offshoring and leave the other two for future blogs.
Moving IT operations to low-cost parts of the world has been a very lucrative exercise for the past two decades. However, the financial benefits that were obvious 10 years ago are mostly gone thanks to increasing salaries in India, China, and other emerging countries combined with rising hassle costs (compliance, regulations, security, communications, language, and management) associated with off-shoring. Here is a quote from Sramana Mitra who wrote a very well publicized and much debated article in 2008 titled “The death of Indian outsourcing” (http://www.sramanamitra.com/2008/01/22/death-of-indian-outsourcing/). She writes “Rising wages in the most popular offshore centers (especially Bangalore), are eroding the cost advantage that drove this business to India in the first place. When the practice began, there was a 1:10 cost advantage. Today, this has dropped to 1:3. Over the next 5 years, perhaps, it won’t make sense to send work to India anymore.” Further complicating the offshoring play is the 20-40% attrition rates seen in many of these low-cost countries.
