Big Data is the new oil! It has the power to transform economies, make businesses more efficient, and improve our daily interactions as consumers. However, like oil, data is not truly valuable until it has been refined—until it is analyzed and some valuable action is extracted from it. Although it has been the subject of much discussion, Big Data is really in its infancy—which begs the questions, “How will big data evolve? And what are the opportunities for service providers to create value in Big Data?”
Catching the Waves of Big Data Evolution
The term Big Data generally refers to the growing scope of data analytics in terms of the variety, velocity, or volume of data involved. Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) sees Big Data evolving along three waves and across the three dimensions of data, control, and consumer (see Figure 1). Today, most companies find themselves in the first evolution-ary wave, where data and analytics are siloed within specific business processes. In Wave 1, the result of data analytics is Read More »
Today, at the High Performance Computing for Wall Street event, we announced Cisco Algorithm Boost or Algo Boost technology, a groundbreaking networking innovation with numerous patents pending, that offers the highest speed, visibility and monitoring capabilities in the networking industry. A true game changer delivering competitive advantage to our customers!
Ideal for high performance trading, big data and high performance computing environments, this new technology offers network access performance as low as 190 nanoseconds, more than 60% faster than other full featured Ethernet switches. When your business success is determined by nanoseconds, this is a huge gain!
The first switch to integrate the Cisco Algo Boost technology is the new Cisco Nexus 3548 full-featured switch which extends Cisco’s leadership in networking by pairing performance and low latency with innovations in visibility, automation, and time synchronization. And it is tightly integrated with the rich feature set of our Nexus Operating System, a proven operating system used in many of the world’s leading data centers, creating a truly differentiated offering.
As Kevin Sullivan points out in his recent blog, partnerships are an important strategic approach to today’s R&D and innovation. Kevin recommends strategies that industry-winning manufacturers can follow.
Investments in innovation are exciting. They inspire creativity and they fuel our economy.
What an afternoon of innovation looks like at Cisco
I was thrilled to discover that an institute for manufacturing innovation was recently launched in Youngstown, Ohio. This effort embodies a publicly and privately-funded partnership aimed at fueling R&D and innovation. Along with the U.S. federal government, a consortium of impressive manufacturing firms, universities, community colleges and non-profit organizations formed a partnership called the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute (NAMII). They contributed a combined $70M to the Youngstown manufacturing innovation effort.
Motivated resources from a variety of academic, manufacturing and business backgrounds will come together to advance technology and manufacturing. And what will this Youngstown institute focus on first? Additive manufacturing. What is additive manufacturing? It’s the more formal name for 3D printing. And it’s quite cool.
Urban policymakers around the world are striving to answer this question, while positioning their citizens to compete and thrive in a time of accelerated innovation and change. Many are seeking the best possible convergence of technology and infrastructure within the urban environment. But the overall goal is to enhance the success, livability, and overall appeal of their cities. Read More »
Do the technology partners that comprise your data center really make a difference? In the case of SAP HANA and Cloud, the answer is yes. The Application Data Centers of the future look much different than the Application Data Center of the past. CIO’s are looking for ways to reduce costs, floor space, and management of their Data Centers while increasing the intelligence they gather from their existing data in order to get a leg up on their competition.
Thanks to their numerous advanced technologies (i.e UCS..) Cisco and EMC, with the active participation of VMware and VCE have developed over the past years a strong architecture to support the traditional needs of the SAP customers, but also new requirements related to cloud and big data.
With the recent certification of SAP Scale-Out, Cisco and EMC are partnering more closely than ever to provide Application Data Center Managers with the platform and persistent storage needed to solve the issues that keep CIO’s awake at night.
Thanks to SAP HANA, data that previously was unattainable or unstructured, is now reportable to CIO’s in a format that will allow them to make instantaneous decisions to the benefit of their customers and to their bottom line. Since everything with SAP HANA is real-time in memory, reports that used to take days or weeks are now attainable in seconds. Cisco and EMC have provided the perfect platform for these transactions giving Application Data Center managers choices they may not have with other hardware vendors.
By Bill Gerhardt, Director, IBSG Service Provider
