By Shaun Kirby, Director, Innovations Architecture
Internet Business Solutions Group

If anyone still doubts the overwhelming complexity of today’s data deluge, Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, offers some poignant perspective. In a recent book, “The Human Face of Big Data”, he observes that from the dawn of civilization until 2003 humankind generated five exabytes of data. Now, we produce more than five exabytes of data every two days.

Those torrents of information may be intimidating, but they also promise great opportunities. Indeed, Big Data has been touted as an answer to many problems. Looking for customer buying patterns? Retailers have petabytes of purchasing history. Need to test a new drug? There are terabytes of patient data to be analyzed. Launching a new product? A mountain of social media data awaits you. Read More »

Tags: Big Data, collaboration, Complexity, data analytics, data in motion, Enterprise, H2M, Human to Machine, Internet of Everything, internet of things, IoE, IoT, M2M, Machine to Machine, P2M, people to machine

By looking at the sheer amount of Breakouts and technical sessions here at Cisco Live London, it isn’t hard to understand why networks are becoming more and more complex.  Networks are converging onto single infrastructures, more and more business processes are becoming more network centric and this translates into more functionality and more dependencies between functions and network layers, and thus more complexity.  It becomes very hard for a single human being to understand these dependencies and layer interactions in order to do per-box configuration.  Typically this problem is attempted to be ‘solved’ by moving some of these dependencies and layer interactions into a central place, but that just moves the problem.  Wouldn’t it be cool to allow networks to become self-aware, such that they can learn from their neighboring nodes ? Read More »

Tags: Autonomic, Cisco ONE, Cisco onePK, Complexity

Far too often, technology transitions are highlighted by the new bells and whistles. This is great for advertising, where “NEW” is the allure. But it frequently leaves IT organizations wondering how they can transition from their current environments to the added business value that these technology transitions enable. In the 1st Part of this webinar series we explored why companies need to be aware of Cloud Computing and the types of problems it can solve for their business. The 2nd webinar in the series (“Overcoming Rigidity and Complexity“) will look at ways to manage the transition to Cloud Computing.

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Tags: Application Mobility, Cisco UCS, Cloud Computing, Complexity, Simplified Operations, Unified Fabric