Cisco Live Orlando is a just little over a month away. And at this year’s event, the Cisco Medianet team will be hosting a much anticipated, highly interactive, customer panel that brings together customers from different industries, all of whom have demonstrated success adopting the Cisco Medianet Architecture to better manage their video and collaboration deployments.

As you start planning what sessions you will be attending at Cisco Live Orlando, don’t miss out on this opportunity to participate in an engaging discussion with industry experts and distinguished Cisco SMEs about trending topics of relevance to the video and collaboration space: for example, balancing business policies with the network, providing confidence in video and collaboration deployments, and integrated application and network technologies.

Also, be sure to stay tuned to the Cisco Medianet Blog for future updates on what the team is planning at Cisco Live Orlando.

We look forward to seeing you there!

See below for more details on the customer panel.

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Tags: business video, Cisco Live Orlando, collaboration, medianet, rich media applications, video

This is the first post in a new series from Dimension Data and Cisco Channels looking at user adoption and integration of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) solutions. Findings stem from Dimension Data’s 2013 Global UC&C Survey, developed with ICT researcher Ovum and featuring responses from more than 2,700 participants in 18 countries across 20 vertical industries.

We’ve all heard that selling UC&C solutions has to be less about flashy technology, and more about a comfortable, productive user experience. In other words, are video sessions, presence and other UC&C functions as easy and convenient to use as a traditional voice call? But user adoption of UC&C isn’t by any means the last step in a UC&C implementation. It’s actually a lot closer to the first step, as Neill Hart puts it.

“We don’t have to worry about user adoption with most other areas of IT,” says Hart, converged communications director for Dimension Data Europe. “If you put in a firewall on a Sunday night, for example, it’s at work the next morning and the user probably isn’t even aware it’s there. With most technologies, the user doesn’t even worry about it. But with UC&C, it’s everything. If I’m not entirely comfortably with technology, then I can find a way of not using it.” Read More »

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, dimension data, integration, partner, unified communications, user adoption

Cisco IT’s Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program allows employees to be most productive on whatever device they choose.  Whether it’s an iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac or PC they can connect to the Cisco internal network easily, but that’s not what this blog is about, if you’re interested in that initiative click here and here. This blog is about how adding a social layer, specifically Cisco WebEx Social, resulted in an improved user experience and reduced caseload and therefore avoided cost.  Personally, I’d like to say the easy onboarding of devices has caused me less wrinkles, but I’ve yet to find a quantitative way to prove that hypothesis true, so let’s stick to the facts:

• In November 2010, Cisco IT had 4,566 cases per 33,354 devices or about 0.14 Cases/Device
• In October 2011, Cisco IT had 3,921 cases per 48,530 devices or about 0.08 Cases/Device
• Cisco IT has had a 52% increase in devices and 16% more users

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Tags: aaron chiles, Android, blog, byod, case, caseload, cisco on cisco, Cisco WebEx Social, coc-collaboration, collaboration, community, Help, information technology, iPad, iphone, IT, mac, mobility, onboarding, PC, support, WebEx Social, wxs

This is my second blog in a multi-part series.  In my first blog, I introduced insights from Cisco’s Collaboration Work Practice Study and how people value collaboration in the work environment.  In today’s blog, I discuss how building relationships helps foster collaboration.

At its very core, collaboration is about people. This isn’t a new concept. Humankind has been coming together for centuries to collaboratively solve problems, and in that respect, today is no different. What has changed are the ways in which people collaborate.

One of the things we discovered through the Cisco Collaborative Work Practice Study is that people desire relationships and strong partnerships with the people with whom they work. Building relationships and networks that lead to trust is a fundamental element of successful collaboration.  Nearly every participant in the study Read More »

Tags: Cisco Collaborative Work Practice Study, collaboration, leadership, organizational culture, research

Collaboration is a verb, an action, it is something that we do.  People come together and collaborate to reach a common goal.  Often, people need to collaborate to determine what that goal is, then collaborate more to determine how best to reach that goal.  It is through effective communications that people collaborate. However, there’s more then just communications to collaboration.  In the following article the “Esquire Guy” attempts to answer the question  Read More »

Tags: Cisco TelePresence, collaboration, Esquire, TelePresence