Have you ever given what you thought was a compelling speech only to hear crickets instead of wild applause from your audience?

Have you ever given a sales pitch that fell flat?

Are you truly connecting with your audience and taking them on a journey or just talking at them?

Presentations are the currency of business communications. Those who master communicating with audiences--whether social media, sales pitches, lead generation, or traditional marketing--rise faster than their peers, reach more customers than their competitors, and turn causes into a groundswell.

Through Cisco’s Partner Velocity program, partners can learn marketing, social media best practices, and tips for engaging with customers from the industry’s leading experts. In our next Virtual Partner Velocity marketing session, we’ll be holding a live online broadcast featuring best-selling author and persuasion expert Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design.

During the hour-long session on October 11 at 8 a.m. PST, Nancy will demonstrate how to apply the methods in her book Resonate: Presenting Visual Stories That Transform Audiences and build meaningful connections with audiences that compel them to action. She’ll also take your questions live on the air.

What will you learn and how can you participate?

Read More »

Tags: Cisco, marketing, nancy duarte, partner velocity, partners, virtual velocity

 Thinking today about mobility – cell phones, smartphones, tablets – and where and when it’ll be changing the rules of retail.

 Forrester made a solid case this June that it won’t be as a transaction tool.   They – and eMarketer.com – expect M-commerce to be only 7% of total E-commerce revenue by 2016, which means M-com will total only 1% of retail merchandise purchase market.

 Gartner made the case this May (echoed by Forrester) that it won’t be as an electronic wallet – at least not until 2015 and beyond.  Despite the fact that some 40-50 NFC-enabled smart phones will be shipped this year, the complexities of collaboration between service providers, financial institutions, retailers, and standards bodies is rendering progress slow and tortuous. (To see a preview, rewind to the past decade’s EPC-RFID efforts.)

 And yet: The future of the personal communication and computing is increasingly mobile, and that means retailers are looking at a potential opportunity.

Read More »

Tags: Cisco, m-commerce, mobile, mobility, retail, retailer, shopping

Integrated Broadband Services (IBBS) is one of the largest cable operators in North and South America? Company name doesn’t ring a bell? You are not alone. According to company executives, “IBBS is the biggest cable company you’ve never heard of.” Here’s why – they’re behind the scenes, working with small and medium-sized local cable operators. IBBS offers hosted or cloud-based services to over 250 cable operators to help them provide data services and voice services to their subscribers – connecting more than one million cable modems across North and South America.

In the late 1990s, small and medium-sized cable television companies across North and South America recognized that to stay competitive with larger players and upstart “triple-threat” providers, they needed to offer high-speed data services to their customers. They faced a significant challenge, however, when it came to provisioning all the new IP-based devices and services they needed to deploy. Writing their own software was a daunting task, but purchasing new solutions was beyond the constrained budgets that most of these companies faced. Read More »

Tags: cable, cable provider, Cisco, Cisco Network Registrar, DHCP, dns, IBBS, Integrated Broadband Services, Kyle Johnson, Service Provider

________

Do you know the expected size of the audience at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 in San Francisco , October 2-6. ?  Probably at least 41 000 attendees .No doubt that this year again the huge software company will succeed in attracting a very large crowd of IT decision makers and managers anxious to  learn more,  and solve daily problems as well as planning future services for their organizations.

Cisco this year again will be present as a diamond sponsor – And guess what ? John  Chambers , Chairman and CEO of Cisco will on Wednesday October 5 morning the key notes speaker starting at 8:00 am PST . Well ..what does it mean ?  Let me give you my perspective on that

First the partnership  between Oracle and Cisco is getting stronger and deeper over the time- Yes our entrance on the server market with the Unified Computing systems at the time that Oracle was acquiring Sun Microsystems makes the relationhip more complex , but let’s face it – Oracle is first of all a software company, and when a company like Cisco is coming with a very successful server  platform which makes your software shine in terms of performances, you definitely want your applications on this platform. Check out here benchmark reports and some customer testimonials.

Read More »

Tags: Cisco, data center, john chambers, Oracle, UCS

A guest post by:

Appaji Malla, Nexus Product Manager
Arnab Basu, UCS Product Manager

At last week’s Microsoft Build event in Anaheim, CA. we presented & demonstrated our Cisco Nexus 1000V and Cisco UCS VM-FEX technologies running on Windows 8 Server Hyper-V.

Read More »

Tags: Cisco, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Nexus 1000v, virtualization, VM-FEX, Windows 8