A number of forces are changing how we work, live, and innovate: pervasive technologies, distributed ways of working, “space rather than place” as a work ethos, new methods and modes of work, access to shared services, open versus closed innovation, a new generation of workers, environmental concerns, and macro socioeconomic shifts.

Given a choice, people will demand freedom to work, live, and innovate in ways that meet their individual lifestyles, unfettered by place. Meanwhile, pressures to reduce costs and seek new approaches to innovation are causing many private and public organizations to rethink how work gets done. Read More »

Tags: Big Data, Cisco, cloud services, device proliferation, future of work, IBSG, infrastructure, network, S+CC, security, smart applications, Smart+Connected Communities, urban services, urban sustainability, work-life

Since announcing Cisco’s CloudVerse architecture in December, we’re excited to see that this set of solutions is indeed helping our partners and customers in their journey to offer cloud services. On January 30, Light Reading published the Cisco CloudVerse test results found by EANTC, an internationally-recognized, vendor-neutral test center. Among many findings, EANTC revealed that over 70 percent of leading cloud providers are using Cisco CloudVerse on their journey to the cloud

The tests were created by Light Reading and EANTC around real-world customer care abouts including Security, Agility, Economics, and Experience. They completed 25 test segments across the 3 Cisco CloudVerse themes: Unified Data Center, Cloud Intelligent Network, and Cloud Applications and Services.

The full test results can be found here, and for the full Cisco perspective on this test, please see Pat Adamiak’s blog.

Tags: Cloud Intelligent Network, cloud services, cloudverse, EANTC, Unified Data Center

I have talked to many enterprises that want a private cloud; also service providers that want to build a public cloud based upon Cisco UCS / Nexus.  They all would like to get to their first generation of cloud very quickly.   We have many conversations on infrastructure to use, the right choice of hypervisor, and what use cases to start with.  Today I talked to a customer of our Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud that wants a differentiating end user portal.  Everyone can spin up a VM, but how to do it in a way that will drive adoption and new business, whether it is for the enterprise or service provider?  How do we do this at a cost and a timeline that meets the needs of the business and the CIO.

These are not lightweight concerns.   I have seen many data center automation projects that focused too much on the provisioning and not enough on the end user experience.    The Intelligent Automation Solutions Business Unit at Cisco has been involved with many customers building private and public clouds with our software stack.  This includes Cisco IT’s very large private cloud deployment based upon our software.  The two services they deployed:  CITEIS (Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services) Express and CITEIS VDC (Virtual Data Center) has received broad acclaim.  Watch the following videos by Jamie MacQuarrie of the Intelligent Automation team on these two CITEIS Services.

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Tags: Cisco CloudVerse, Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, Cisco IT, cloud services, data center, orchestration, private cloud, self-service, server provisioning, UCS, Unified Fabric

We continue to see our service provider partners leverage the economics and agility of cloud services

Today, AT&T announced the availability of its Unified Communications Service, a new way for its business subscribers to offer a complete collaboration suite of features to employees in a secure and cost effective way. AT&T’s enterprise collaboration solution features Cisco’s own Hosted Collaboration Solution, which 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.

Cisco’s cloud services ultimately enable our service provider partners to offer a seamless experience for both their enterprise and end-user customers. For further details, check out the full announcement.

Tags: AT&T, Cloud Computing, cloud services, data center, Service Provider, unified communications

I said in the first post of this series that I’ll start to share more about my productivity lessons-learned. But first, let’s get one thing out of the way — I believe that online collaboration tools really don’t matter. In contrast, how you apply them for purposeful engagement matters a lot, regarding the anticipated productivity gains.

Moreover, the most substantial gains in online productivity will likely come from fully understanding all the people, process and technology issues that define the environment you’re working within. So, situational context is important.

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Tags: cloud services, collaboration, productivity, TelePresence, unified communications, video chat