The place with the best broadband ecosystem is not Silicon Valley or Route 128, the mainstays of technology companies in the United States. But that’s not surprising, given the popularity of e-commerce and cloud computing – it’s Washington State, home of Microsoft and Amazon.
That’s the determination of the TechNet 2012 State Broadband Index, which ranked all 50 states on various facets of their ICT-related infrastructure.
By Kate Griffin, Principal Consultant, IBSG Service Provider
Big Data has become top of mind among CxOs,but service providers (SPs) and most businesses today are just beginning to explore data analytics. “Big Data” generally refers to the growing scope of data analytics in terms of the variety, velocity, or volume of data involved. When this flood of Big Data is harnessed and refined, it has the power to transform economies, make businesses more efficient, and improve our daily interactions as consumers.
To assess service providers’ interest and readiness to take part in Big Data’s growth, the Cisco® Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) conducted in-depth interviews with executives from 12 global communication service providers. The SPs we interviewed see data analytics as a key opportunity. Some 80 percent of them consider Big Data an important strategic priority for their companies over the next three years. Cisco IBSG also tested key concepts concerning Big Data with 200 senior SP executives at the Telco 2.0 conference in London last summer through in-session polling questions. Eighty-eight percent of these delegates also view Big Data as a “very important” or an “important” strategic priority for the next three years (see Figure 1). Read More »
Recently, the Economist highlighted the shift from government funded models to private funded models for R & D. As we know, R&D serves as the font of new ideas and leads to mass transformation of industries. Concepts such as the internet and satellite communications resulted in part from publicly funded R&D.
This is a real change for leading corporations. This puts more pressure on manufacturing companies to find and leverage key technologies to deliver new products and compete. Most manufacturing companies focus on core capabilities. They typically licensed or purchased technologies that enabled continued operation. But these were not partnerships. This could be very effective for a ‘fast follower’ company. Innovative companies have typically used a range of R & D funding sources, especially internal, to fuel innovation.
But the rules are changing! New industries are emerging that require a new strategic approach to R&D and innovation. Companies that do not adapt will be disrupted. Read More »
An explosion of new technologies is creating new winners and losers in nearly every industry. You only have to look at the changing fortunes of Apple and Hewlett-Packard in the personal computer/tablet arena over the last decade to see how innovation can propel one company into superstar status, while another becomes irrelevant in the same market space.
Technology Strategy: Develop a technology strategy based on internal and external scans of rapidly emerging capabilities. These should include an assessment of each technology’s ability to disrupt, its stage of incubation, differentiating factors, competitive alternatives, and identification of platform choices. Developing a business and technology architecture for how the technology fits into your company’s platform portfolio is a critical step in this analysis.
Ecosystem Management: Arrange and manage ecosystem partners by assessing the need for technologies to perform certain functions that extend beyond your own internal capabilities, such as the ability to connect to a broader environment. You will need to understand existing and future profit pools to validate partner choices. For example, providing “smart services,” such as analytics, can extend a product’s useful life and be the source of long-term profitability, for both you and the ecosystem partners that deliver them.
Market Interactions: Prepare and execute detailed plans for managing market interactions, from initial introduction through full-scale market management. This includes an ongoing analysis of customer reactions, portfolio management, media communications, and potential competitors.
Think about it, when was the last time the business said “thank you” to IT? It’s probably been a while. Unfortunately, all too often we hear complaints that IT is too slow, or that IT is the department of “no”.
Deploying a private cloud is one way to help turn IT into the department of “yes”, with faster and more responsive IT service delivery. The customers of Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud have compressed the cycle time for IT provisioning from weeks to minutes. That means that project managers and application developers no longer have to wait for IT – they can speed up their projects and get business applications up and running more quickly.
And if there’s one golden rule to remember for your private cloud solution, it’s that the business wants apps. They’ll be thankful if you can provision and manage their applications in a cloud environment with consistency, reliability and speed.
So if you’re interested in on-demand application delivery for your private cloud, check out this presentation from Cisco Intelligent Automation and our ecosystem partner rPath:
