One of the delimmas that faces retailers today is the need to control costs and innovate to support new ways to providing a compelling shopping experience across all shopping channels.
In Jon Stine’s recent blog Big Pipes and Lean Stores, Jon talked about the store evolving into a living breathing web site. Just like a highly dynamic web site with rapidly changing content and integration to other channels, stores will need to replicate that functionality to serve the new generation of consumers. Retailers with traditional inflexible store IT infrastructure will find it very difficult to adapt to this dynamic environment in a cost effective manner.
On July 14th, Cisco will be explaining our vision of how retailers can control costs and still innovate in a webcast, hosted by Lindsay Parker, Cisco Global Retail Director.
Guest Brian Kilcourse, Managing Partner Retail Systems Research and Jon Stine will discuss the retailers who retailers must face this dieimma head on.
Michael Heffler, Retail Solutions Manager and Bart McGlothin, Retail Solutions Architect will present how retailers can rely on the network to reduce costs and increase flexibility.
In areas including Lean Store and Lean Data Center, this involves projects such as as simplifying and moving IT equipment from the store to the data center and leveraging virtualization and centralized management of IT services in the stores .
By moving to a network-based architecture with a belt (back-up) and suspenders (survivability) to deliver services, this strategy can help retailers evolve to a private and public cloud services platfom in the future.
Steven Ross, Vice President of Technology, Chico’s FAS, Inc. is our special guest and he will present on his experience with dynamic architecture and working with Cisco data center technologies.
To register for this event please visit http://bit.ly/nHR79R and join us on July 14th at 10:00am PT
It’s 100+ degrees (that’s almost 40 degrees Celcius) in Las Vegas without a cloud in the sky, so you might imagine that lounging in an air-conditioned casino would be ideal for most folks. But for the techies attending Cisco Live this week, the Cloud Partner Pavilion was the coolest place to hang out.
I walked through the Pavilion and chatted with a number of Cisco partners who were showing off cloud solutions, products, a variety of services for customers as well as some B2B and white label services for partners, too.
Many thanks to the many Cisco partners who chatted with us and we look forward to catching up with as many as we can this week.
Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers also dropped by to talk with partners. We’ve got photos from his visit and more about the partners in the Cloud Partner Pavilion.
There was also some cloud-related news that hit the wire this morning.
Cisco Live 2011 officially kicked off today in true Las Vegas style. As conference attendees waited for Cisco SVP Carlos Dominguez to give the welcome address, flash mobbers disguised as event attendees suddenly arose from their seats and began a choreographed dance to the Black Eyed Peas’ hit “I Gotta Feeling.” and the Beatles song “All Together Now.”
Carlos then entered the stage and welcomed the staggering number of attendees: 15,000+ live attendees and 40,000+ virtual attendees across 150+ countries.
Then it was Chairman and CEO John Chambers’ turn to address attendees. Keeping in line with recent announcements, John agreed that there was a need to simplify operations at Cisco to make it easier for customers and partners to do business with us and he promised that changes would be coming soon.
He then dove into Cisco’s five main priorities: Read More »
There was a lot energy yesterday at Cisco Live -- A larger than expected crowd gathered in the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, showing a growing interest for Cisco and Cisco partners. At the end of a series of video interviews I was happy to welcome for a quick panel on desktop virtualization Citrix Natalie Lambert, NetApp Vaughn Stewart and Cisco Doug Dooley
If you want to know more about Cisco Desktop Virtualization, check also this video interview from Doug Dooley at Citrix Synergy.
After the panel, data center bloggers and tweeps gathered for a meet up, happy hour, and raffle on the data center booth at the World of Solutions which just opened at 5:00 pm - A great opportunities to meet physically a lot of Cisco and non Cisco bloggers.
But the end was not over as I join my video crew for the UCS birthday -- Cisco Live was an opportunity to celebrate with numerous customers and with our partner Intel on the last floor on THEhotel the 2 years of Unified Computing System -- A birthday can’t be sweet without a cake -- So we shared a cake made after the UCS design -- Check out the unusual shape of this cake !Sounds familiar ?
At Cisco Live today, we turned our attention away from the slot machines and Elvis impersonators, and sat in on the Healthcare Video Architectures session where we learned that 30% of the brain is visual and 60-90% of communication is non-verbal.
While human architecture hasn’t changed over thousands of years, computer architectures certainly have transformed in just a few years (the equivalent of thousands of years in technology time).
When it comes to healthcare--more so than in a lot of other industries--patients need to see doctors, and doctors need to see patients. And thanks to advances in technology, like Cisco HealthPresence, increases in networking speeds, and overall architectural improvements, doctors’ offices can be outfitted with all sorts of telemedicine apparatuses, allowing patients to be seen by the doctor without leaving home.
When outfitting a customer with a solution, there are four major areas for partners to think about: Quality, ease of use, bandwidth, and cost. While cost is usually the top consideration for a customer, in the session we learned that it shouldn’t drive the solution (that’s because a customer could end up buying something that doesn’t meet their clinical needs).
What’s driving the need for video in healthcare? Read More »
