You are probably thinking that the title of this blog seems a little bizarre given that I work at one of the largest networking companies in the world.  The truth is I felt compelled to write about the role of the network in today’s collaboration solutions because the importance of the network is not always apparent and well understood.

A good example of how network-enabled collaboration solutions can be used is that of a hospital or healthcare organization.  The hospital is only as good as its network of services, providers and the accompanying medical infrastructure that support the organization —  they all leverage each other in various different ways.  Physicians can take advantage of mind share and resources and have information at hand from different sources to make the right decisions.  This is what enables doctors and nurses to perform their best work and provide top quality care to the people they serve.

Collaboration technologies and solutions make that collaborative work environment a reality and aid in the diagnosis and care of patients — in some cases even being able to remotely provide medical care by a specialist that may be located half way around the world. The importance of the underlying network in this instance is critical to both physicians and patients alike.  How would the network have any effect on the use of interactive video in telemedicine? Well, let’s think of it from the experience point of view. What would the consequences be for a patient if the video stream they were using in a telemedicine consult was choppy or grainy and the doctor couldn’t get just the right view of the patient to make the right diagnosis?  Let’s just say I would not want to be the patient in this scenario.  A sub-par experience would be unacceptable because even minor details can have an enormous impact on a diagnosis or treatment plan. These collaborative exchanges are what ultimately give the patient the best experience and outcome possible for their individual treatment. A strong network foundation is critical to the delivery of the service and experience in this instance.

Collaboration technologies gaining significant traction in the enterprise today include streaming video, web conferencing and other forms of interactive and dynamic communications — known as rich media.  The reason for the uptick in their use is that they offer the most life like, “in-person” collaboration experiences possible today.  That is what people want and what ultimately drives them to be more engaged with one another.  As described above, the network is critical to the delivery of these types of media.   Not just any network architecture will suffice.  A network-based architecture optimized for rich media such as Cisco (medianet) provides the intelligent services needed in order to scale, optimize and enhance the performance of voice, video and data – all critical to the delivery of the collaboration experience.

What does this mean?  Read More »

Tags: Borderless Networks, Bring your Own Device (BYOD), collaboration, medianet, network-enabled collaboration, standards, telemedicine

Today, Cisco announced the latest additions to our Unified Access portfolio to enable One Network for wired and wireless access. I’m personally excited about this because it is finally closing a loop we started a year ago when we introduced Cisco Unified Access with One Policy, One Management, One Network. Now Cisco and partners can offer a truly converged wired and wireless experience.

Let’s take a look at what’s new and how these solutions present an excellent opportunity for you to help meet your customers’ needs.

What is being launched? Read More »

Tags: Borderless Networks, byod, Catalyst 3850, Cisco, Cisco 5760 Wireless LAN Controller, cisco prime, ISE, New Cisco Switch, partner, unified access, WLC

Every day educators and students from more than 400 locations across Washington State have world-class educational resources at their fingertips, and every day they rely on the same network to access it.

In 1996, Washington legislators and educational leaders saw the Internet’s potential to transform learning. To guarantee that students across the state would always have equal access to online courses, resources, programs and degrees, they passed a bill to create a single broadband network that would connect all educational institutions.

The project, dubbed the K-20 Education Network, required a network that was high-performing, cost-effective, secure, scalable and reliable. Six years after the bill was passed, Washington State has a fast and reliable network that connects 99.8 percent of the state’s schools, community colleges, universities and libraries giving 1.5 million students access to the Internet and voice and videoconferencing services.

Read More »

Tags: Borderless Networks, edchat, edtech, TelePresence, VFT, VTC, wireless

As we’ve all seen, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) made its way rather quickly into the public sector, and the challenges of implementing within government agencies has been well documented. In order to help agencies face these challenges, GovLoop recently conducted a survey & released “Exploring Bring Your Own Device in the Public Sector”. The report highlights challenges for implementing a BYOD initiative and best practices, and it also provides insights from industry and government experts related to mobility and BYOD.

Included in the report, David Graziano, Director, Security and Unified Access, U.S. Public Sector, Cisco, recently spoke with Pat Fiorenza of GovLoop on the current state of BYOD in government. David stressed that while challenges still remain for BYOD it’s one of the most important trends impacting government agencies. He advised that agencies must embrace BYOD and act on it along with their other mobility initiatives.

Not only does BYOD optimize business lines to workforce productivity and morale, but it’s becoming a necessity for recruitment, as a new demographic of employees enter the workforce and expect to be mobile and access information on any device, any time anywhere. Read More »

Tags: Borderless Networks, cloud, collaboration, govtech, mobility

As part of my work at Cisco, I get to talk to customers very often. Through these conversations, I learn what works for them and what concerns them. Lately, I’ve been hearing a common theme from a lot of customers: in many organizations IT staff is small and not growing while they are being asked to do more to meet the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) challenge.

BYOD has drastically changed the technology landscape as users bring many different types of personal devices to the networks of schools and colleges, hospitals, financial agencies, enterprises and other organizations. One university IT team, including their chief technology officer and their IT administrators, recently told me that they had 200% network user growth and 300% endpoint device growth over the last several years. As for their network, they used to have less than 100 wireless access points (APs). Guess how many they have today? Over a thousand. And they are planning to deploy several hundred more APs in the coming months. How about their IT headcount growth? As you might have guessed, it’s not grown at all.

Read More »

Tags: access points, Borderless Networks, byod, cisco prime, Hospital wifi, management, unified access, University IT, wireless access points