In honor of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs’ memory, the Cisco Channels team wanted to share our Top 21 iPhone apps. But with more than 500,000 apps available in the iTunes App Store, how does one even begin to narrow the list down to 21?

Well, we decided to focus on free iPhone apps that we use all the time. The perfect pairing – free and useful! And for the new iPhone converts who traded in their old devices for the new iPhone 4S, this list would be a great starting point for building your own library of useful iPhone apps.

So, without further ado, our Top 21 iPhone apps are: Read More »

Tags: Cisco, iphone, Mobile Apps, partner, social media spotlight

Which Central European city has more than twenty universities, with the oldest one founded as early as 1364? As a little help, it is also the second largest city of the country which currently holds the European Union Presidency.

Views of Krakow. Source: wikipedia

Cisco continuously evaluates potential sites for support operations around the world and the availability of educated talent and an excellent communications infrastructure were key to the decision to choose Poland, and in particular Krakow, as the site of our next support center, to be opened in early summer 2012. This will be a shared services center supporting customers across the Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia (EMEAR) region. It will complement existing locations and will provide services across multiple functional groups including Cisco Services, Finance, Operations and others. 

 The Krakow support center is an important part of our strategy to enhance the way we serve our customers, partners and internal stakeholders across EMEAR. By establishing a shared services center in Central Europe, our aim is to get closer to our customers, in terms of geography and timezones while offering the convenience of multi-language support. 

Tags: Cisco, Poland

Intel blogger Sandhya Gorman is back this week to talk about Intel and Cisco leadership in innovation and collaboration .

“Two leaders I respect very much were featured at Oracle Open World 2011- Cisco CEO John Chambers and Intel GM Kirk Skaugen.  Both spoke on different days to separate audiences but the themes were strikingly synergistic.

Skaugen spoke about the explosion of data that will be sparked by the 15B connected devices expected to be in the hands of the worldwide population by 2015.  This year, connected devices produced 245 Exabytes (that’s a 10 followed by 18 zero’s) of data alone.  As we get to 15B devices, businesses will need to rely on the Cloud to manage all the data in order for them to focus their efforts on innovation and capturing market transitions.

Chambers expressed Cisco’s vision of collaboration and connectivity to foster innovation.  Businesses and consumers no longer will have to deal with 7 or 8 vendors, standalone devices and architectures to collaborate and realize the relevance of the all the exabytes of data we process.  Read appreciative comments on John’s presentation and watch it here

Interestingly, both Cisco and Intel are in a position of enabling collaboration and innovation from both a push and pull perspective.

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Tags: Cisco, Cius, collaboration, data center, innovation, Intel, john chambers, Kirk Skaugen, UCS

As my niece was snapping away pictures on her digital camera, I told her about the ” back when I was a kid stories”; when you would have to be careful about the sun over exposing your film and having to anxiously wait days to see them.   I then rampaged on about how you would HAVE to go to the library to look up information for book reports, how my tape player always jammed on my favorite part of the song, and the video recorder my dad had was so heavy he’d use his shoulder to leverage the weight.  Amazing how dramatically technology is changing, information being only a click click away.

People are now living in the time of “faster” -- data, video, photos, social media, the demand is growing exponentially higher by the day.  How are networks keeping up with these demands? I’ll tell you one thing, it’s not sitting on the same data center configurations from 5 years ago, heck not even a year ago.   Listening to the requirements of customer’s needs,  data centers need to have scalability, flexibility, and speed to rapidly move across networks.

Today, Cisco has announced several industry leading innovations in the Nexus switching portfolio that spans across the Unified Fabric portfolio.  Please join us on October 25^th at 9:00 a.m., PT to hear from industry analysts, customers and Cisco executives speaking in more detail about our product portfolio enhancements: “Evolutionary Fabric, Revolutionary Scale”.

Please also check out a great blog by Shashi Kiran, Director of DC/V on this topic: http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/re-defining-fabric-scale-thinking-beyond-the-box/

To learn more: http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=500209

Tags: Cisco, data center, Nexus switching, Unified Fabric

Cisco’s contact center business is growing more than twice as quickly as the market, and we are driving aggressively to become the #1 vendor worldwide.  As I talk to customers, press, analysts, consultants, and partners, I continue to see momentum on our side.  Market trends, changes in the competitive landscape, and customer desires are all responsible for this momentum.  Of course, I think that we are creating some of this momentum for ourselves as well.  Let me share some insights.

Contact center has become mainstream within Cisco, a real change from the niche market view of customer care that the company had in the past.  The talented Cisco sales force has embraced our industry-shaping innovations in Customer Collaboration, which combines traditional contact center technology and processes with key innovations in social media, Web 2.0 agent workspaces, video, and network-based recording and analytics to empower businesses to forge deeper, proactive relationships with their customers. Customer collaboration empowers our own customers to succeed, and there is clear focus on this market, starting with key Cisco sales executives, who exhorted the Cisco sales team at the global sales kickoff in August that, “The time is now for Cisco to stand up and claim leadership in Contact Center.”  Needless to say, hearing that from one of the top sales leaders in the company put an extra spring in my step.

Read More »

Tags: Cisco, contact center, Customer Care, customer collaboration