True or false?  You recently were finally able to convince your spouse/partner/significant other that your living room is too big for the 40 inch HDTV that you purchased 4-5 years ago and that you need a 60 inch LED TV.  You reason that the 60in TV is very thin, you can watch 3D movies on it, and it’s ‘SMART’ so you can stream movies or TV shows from the Internet!  It’s an awesome product and you are enjoying every bit of it… but then you realize that if you also had a surround sound system, it would complete your home theatre and you’d get even more use out of your TV.

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Tags: CA, CA Expo, waas

As I talk to customers, sometimes the quest for cloud seems a bit quixotic. You know where you want to get to, other folks say they have been there and have the t-shirts, but the path forward is not all that clear.

Its one of the reasons we launched the Cisco Cloud Partner Program (CPP)— so that Cisco’s cloud-savvy channel partners with expertise in areas like infrastructure, app management and cloud-related professional services can better engage with customers on their own personal cloud journey—think of them as cloud Sherpas.

Under the Cisco Cloud partner Program, channel partners are not only certified for their knowledge of Cisco technologies but also technologies from our broad ecosystem of technology partners to ensure they have a holistic perspective and well-rounded capabilities. Cisco just included CA Technologies as part of that effort and now channel partners with certified knowledge of CA Technologies Automation Suite will meet the Cloud Management competency certification under the Cisco Cloud Partner Program.

Cisco and CA have a solid track record of building solutions that benefit of our joint customers and that are easier to deploy for our mutual channel partners. For example, we have CA-certified stacks on Vblock and FlexPod, and tight integration between CA’s Automation and Infrastructure Management solutions and our Cisco UCS. This latest announcement regarding the CPP provides another benefit for our mutual channel partners and greater choice to our customers.

Tags: CA, cloud, partner

Those of us who are science fiction fans—and even some who aren’t—love to speculate about what the future holds for us in terms of technology. What will our lives be like? What will we be able to do then that we can’t do now? What kinds of things will we be using? It’s this forward-looking imagining that really excites me as we consider the possibilities. And that’s why I’m looking forward to my upcoming keynote at the Computer Associates (CA) Conference. I’ll be talking about the here and now, but also taking a peek into the future.

Today’s technology, when managed from an intelligent network, is incredibly powerful, allowing us to get so much more done than ever before, regardless of location or device. Not only that, we’re able to zip effortlessly between our work selves and our personal-life selves—securely and seamlessly. And as a result, businesses are seeing greater productivity and greater opportunity for innovation.

But imagine what things might look like 10 years out. Already, we’re seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to data deluge and device proliferation. Think about it: increasing number of devices means increasing number of applications, which leads to increasing amounts of data.  In fact, just this past week, the online publication PopSci reported on the military’s challenges with data overload. And by no means is this issue limited to the military or public sector alone.

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Tags: CA, Intelligent Network, keynote

Just the other day, one of our competitors crowed that Cisco customers must be confused about how to manage Cisco equipment when attempting to build a Cloud Computing environment. From their perspective, customers should embrace the mainframe days when a single company delivered all the hardware and software, along with an army of ever-present consultant to make it all work. Don’t worry about complexity Mr.Customer, there isn’t any because you don’t ever see it. And don’t worry about the $bill$ either, because the contract will rollover from one IT administration to the next IT administration.

Based on Cisco’s presence at EMC World last week, I can understand why they would be confused. Not only did live, managed Cisco and VCE Vblock equipment show up in several keynotes (Pat Gelsinger, Paul Maritz, Sanjay Mirchandani), it was also discussed in packed breakout sessions, and in the booths of Cisco, EMC, EMC IT, VCE, newScale, BMC, CA and VMware.

Within the Cisco booth, we highlighted just one of our Cloud Management solutions, Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, in the context of our broader “Cisco Cloud Solutions” strategy.

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Tags: API, automation, BMC, CA, Cloud Computing, CVD, EMC World, management, newScale, private cloud, VMware

At VMworld 2010, we were excited to receive the “Best of VMworld 2010″ award in the Hardware for Virtualization category with our Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) technology. Running on the Cisco Nexus 7000 series, OTV allows Service Providers to bridge LANs between separate data centers in an intelligent, secure, and dynamic fashion. In essence, it brings layer 2 capabilities to layer 3 over a unified IP network and was designed for large networks. This enables SPs to use their scale to provide better services (i.e. resource utilization and optimization), decrease costs (i.e. workload balancing), and ensure service delivery (i.e. business continuity and flexible upgrading options).

We were also glad to meet and interact with customers at the Cisco booth. Our theater sessions were full, our demos were in high demand, and we had some great conversations. A recording of the full presentation of the opportunity for SPs in the Cloud is now available:

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Tags: CA, cloud, newScale, nexus, OTV, Overlay Transport Virtualization, UCS, unified computing system, unified service delivery, usd, virtualization, vmworld