I love Olympic Opening Ceremonies because they are so larger-than-life. It’s also fascinating to see which aspects of the host country’s national heritage are selected for display on the world stage. I was surprised and delighted to see the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) prominently featured, along with the UK’s National Health Service which the hospital is a part of.

At first I was wondering why in the world they were wheeling out kids in hospital beds in the middle of such an extravaganza (see video clip at end of my blog), but it soon dawned on me that many in Great Britain see their healthcare system, and the young patients it serves, as a national treasure. It also reminded me of two customer case studies our team produced recently.  Read More »

Tags: Cisco TelePresence, Cisco Unified Communications., collaboration, customer case study, Great Ormond Street Hospital, London 2012 Olympics, National Health System

In my previous blog post, I shared important feedback Cisco has received from our customers (users, IT managers and Cx0s) around their specific needs for collaboration and unified communications solutions.

Influenced by what we’ve been hearing, today Cisco announced Cisco UC Release 9.0.  This release helps address our customers’ needs and reinforces Cisco Unified Communication’s role as the core foundation for communications and collaboration.

Why are we excited?  It delivers! Whether it’s voice, video, messaging, web conferencing, mobility, or security— it’s all about more flexibility, bridging systems together, and protecting our customers’ investments.

Flexibility is about Read More »

Tags: bridge systems, Cisco Jabber, Cisco Unified Communications., collaboration, Flexibility, investment protection, unified communications

It is quite a busy time of year for us over here at Cisco as we just finished up the DoDIIS conference and next week we will be hosting our annual Federal User Forum (April 17 & 18) in Reston, Virginia.  Join government and industry experts for a valuable event that will examine Cisco’s industry-leading solutions designed specifically to help federal organizations collaborate with greater efficiency and success. If you are a federal customer (not open to Cisco partners) and would like to attend, click here to register.

This is a great opportunity to speak one-on-one with leading Cisco executives to learn how Cisco can help your organization.

Our event features an all-star lineup of speakers including: David M. Mihelcic, CTO of Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and Todd Cox, lead computer specialist for Bioinformatics and Information Technology, National Cancer Institute.

Read More »

Tags: byod, Cisco Unified Communications., CTO DISA, David Mihelcic, Federal User Forum, National Cancer Institute, Todd Cox

Over the last several months, Cisco has been espousing the virtues of people-centric collaboration and today we’re thrilled to announce that Virgin Media is deploying Cisco Quad, Cisco WebEx and Cisco Unified Communications as part of its Flexible Working Initiative. By putting people and not text, email or the document at the center of collaboration, Virgin is able to foster a more flexible work environment that allows people to work effectively from a variety of office locations including the home. Thousands of Virgin Media’s employees will now be able to collaborate and work remotely with web-driven conferencing, voice, video calls and shared documents from the device of their choice – be it PC, laptop, tablet or mobile phone, using a social business platform to drive a new way of work.

Cisco Quad, Cisco’s social business platform, will act as a virtual knowledge bank accessible via any browser that helps create virtual business communities where filtered and relevant information “finds you” allowing users to find resources and prioritize work in a manner befitting the generation we live in.  WebEx high-definition video helps engage workers and allows them to meet “face-to-face” no matter where they are.

Collaboration technology lets Virgin Media’s employees enjoy greater work/life balance while also giving them the ability to access information anywhere to make decisions more quickly.

For more details, see the full press release.

Read More »

Tags: Cisco, Cisco Quad, Cisco Unified Communications., customer, quad, virgin media, WebEX

Today, we ‘re featuring a guest post from Brian Blatnik, a senior manager within Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group:

In the month since our CloudVerse announcement the notion of a world of many clouds – public, private, and hybrid – has resonated with our customers, partners, and industry analysts. I’d like to share some perspective on how those types of clouds address different customers in the collaboration cloud services market. Since last month’s announcement highlighted our private cloud model in that market, Hosted Collaboration Solution for Large Enterprises, I’ll focus on that model. As a reminder, the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution gives partners, including service providers and integrators, the ability to deploy multiple collaboration applications on one server in a virtualized environment and then host those applications for multiple client organizations. The solution is designed to be run from partner data centers.

I’m often asked, “Haven’t enterprise voice and other UC services always been delivered from what we now call a private cloud?” It’s true that IP PBXs and other UC servers, like their PBX predecessors, provide services to users from a remote room or facility via a network. But there are two ways in which today’s cloud service delivery differs. First, there is the efficiency of pooling computing, network, and storage resources across multiple locations and services. Second, the services can be delivered in an on-demand fashion with elastic scaling.

The financial and strategic benefits deriving from these two factors are leading many businesses to consider consuming collaboration services in a utility model from Cisco’s partners in the Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS). But the same drivers can result in substantial benefits to businesses that aren’t looking for services from a third party’s public cloud. Read More »

Tags: Cisco Cloud Services, Cisco CloudVerse, Cisco collaboration, Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, Cisco Partners, Cisco Unified Communications., cloud, cloud collaboration, cloud services, cloudverse, cloud_computing, collaboration, data center, Enterprise, enterprise voice, Hosted Collaboration Solution, Hybrid Cloud, infrastructure, Mobile Apps, mobile devices, private cloud, Public Cloud, unified communications