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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.

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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.

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

For those of you who may not be aware, we at Cisco take our commitment to our communities very seriously, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have fun when we volunteer!

Left to right: Andrew Lach, Peter Granger, Kevin Davenport at InnVision

On August 17^th, over 20 volunteers from the Cisco Enterprise and Mid-market Marketing group gave their time to support InnVision, Silicon Valley’s leading provider of housing and services for homeless families and individuals:

InnVision is a primary gateway for homeless families and individuals seeking shelter and resources that lead to self-sufficiency. Our comprehensive system of care promotes self-worth and dignity at multiple facilities throughout Silicon Valley, including shelters, longer- term housing options and service centers, each equipped to meet emergency and transitional needs of diverse, at-risk people. InnVision is…the Way Home!

 

Volunteers spent the day sorting clothing for InnVision’s store, prepping food for daily meals, and reading stories to children.

Kevin, Peter and I were tasked with sorting clothing. Being from the Manufacturing team, we couldn’t resist applying the lessons learned from the Manufacturing industry towards our volunteer duties. Recalling Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations“, we quickly broke into teams for a proper division of labor. Safety is a top priority, so latex gloves were distributed to the sorting teams to follow OSHA guidelines. We carefully optimized our WIP to ensure that Bottlenecks --which threatened to shut down our line via the Bullwhip effect — were not created. Additionally, we applied classical queueing theory using exponential distribution to carefully model our Poisson processes. Read More »

Tags: adam smith, bottleneck, bullwhip effect, Cisco, community, community service, exponential distribution, innvision, osha, philanthropy, poisson process, queueing theory, volunteer, wip

Anyone who gets behind the wheel is painfully aware of the personal costs of driving an automobile, including $4-per-gallon gasoline and expensive maintenance.

But what about the societal costs of personal transportation?

Of the estimated $3 trillion yearly cost of personal transportation in the United States, for example, nearly 40 percent ($1.1 trillion) is “societal,” related to congestion, crashes, parking, roads, traffic services, and pollution.¹ These costs are, in fact, a “hidden tax” amounting to nearly $7,000 per vehicle per year.

The Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) believes that vehicle connectivity can act as a catalyst to help pay for the societal costs of personal transportation, while unlocking additional benefits.

What’s more, governments now have the opportunity to work with other key stakeholders—insurance companies, automotive manufacturers, and service providers—to create a next-generation transportation business model around connected vehicles and a smart, connected traffic infrastructure. Read More »

Tags: Cisco, connected vehicle, government, IBSG, meeting of the minds, mobility, network, personal mobility, personal transportation, smart road pricing, smart traffic infrastructure

I just arrived home from a couple of days visiting customers in Asia and I was a little surprised by all the attention around Cisco’s increased competitive posture. It seems some people are surprised Cisco is calling out its smaller networking competitor by name, although I’ve heard few mentions of their Wall Street Journal cartoon advertisements ridiculing Cisco a while back. I guess that didn’t count.

Here’s the issue. If you’re going to claim innovation leadership in networking, you better be prepared to back it up with facts.

What matters most to customers is whether their networking partner is ready right now to help them adapt to, and benefit from, the massive network-centric changes that are transforming their businesses and their customers’ businesses.

My recent trip to Asia provided some great examples of exactly what I’m talking about:

First, Mobility is red hot. Tablet growth is exploding as the shift from the PC to new consumer based devices accelerates. With our service provider customers, the new Mobile Packet Core is THE number one conversation. The Cisco ASR 5000, combined with our CRS-1 and CRS-3, is the most innovative technology available to handle this explosion of mobile data and develop new services to help service providers monetize mobile content.

Twenty of the world’s top twenty five mobile operators are already deploying the Cisco ASR 5000 and this number is only going to increase. We also hear growing interest in Asia for SP Wi-Fi as an alternate method to address the escalating requirements for mobile bandwidth and data services. For sure, there’s a lot of competition for the mobile packet core and SP Wi-Fi, but our smaller competitor from Sunnyvale just doesn’t seem to be relevant in these conversations.

Cloud is on fire as enterprises accelerate their migration to private cloud to capture the economic, operational and agility benefits. In this area Cisco innovations have rocked the industry. Let’s check the facts. From a decade long position of undisputed leadership in data center switching based on our flagship Catalyst family of Ethernet switches, Cisco led the market with the first purpose built data center core switch and operating system, the Nexus 7000 with Cisco NX-OS software. Then we led the market with the introduction of Unified Fabric on the Nexus 5000, the first to consolidate data center networks over FCoE. We also introduced the first data center fabric extension on the Nexus 2000. And the Nexus 1000 was the industry’s first distributed virtual switch for VMware environments. The Nexus 3000 ultra low-latency switch has achieved immediate success in financial services customers and at massively scalable data centers.

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Tags: Cisco, Cloud Computing, desktop virtualization, hosted collaboration, Juniper Networks, mobility, networking, rob lloyd, unified computing