When most people think of their early experiences with the internet, the memory comes with a sound: the scratchy noise of a dial-up modem.

What a long way we’ve come. We have gone from clumsy desktop computing to a world of mobile computing with smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Businesses can interact with customers real-time through video chats and CEOs can talk to shareholders from 20,000 feet in the air. As the capabilities of devices increase, the Internet of Things will quickly evolve into the Internet of Everything (IoE). And Cisco technology is fueling that transition, playing a big role in connecting the unconnected. Read More »

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, education, global, healthcare, Internet of Everything, IoE, Tomorrow Starts Here

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.

So how can companies gain and hold an edge in technology innovation? In an engagement with a major global manufacturer, Cisco IBSG identified three key factors in the product innovation process that companies must clearly understand and be able to orchestrate:

• 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.

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Tags: Cisco, Disruption, disruptive technologies, ecosystem, global, IBSG, innovation, interactions, management, manufacturer, market, partners, process, product, strategy, technology, technology scan

As service providers move to cloud-based services, their IP addressing management system must operate efficiently in the virtualized environment of the cloud.  And within the cloud environment, these systems for DHCP, DNS and IP address management must also be fast. For example, many organizations have expressed a concern that poor DHCP performance could be the weak link when thousands of customers come back online after a failure event.  If DHCP address requests are handled in a slow or scattered manner, servers will not be able to service all requests in a timely fashion.

Another requirement for IP address management systems is support for IPv6, as the depletion of IPv4 addresses has led to many organizations finding themselves facing a rather accelerated and mandatory migration to IPv6 (read: yesterday’s World IPv6 Launch). While one of IPv6’s promises was the elimination of the need for DHCP, the reality is that centralized network management has made DHCPv6 a necessity.  DHCP allows network devices to Read More »

Tags: cisco prime, Cisco Prime Network Registrar, cloud-based services, communications, DHCP, DHCPv6, dns, EANTC, global, independent, IP address management, IPv6, Lightreading, network management, Results, Service Provider, telecom, test, virtualized

“In basketball – as in life – true joy comes from being fully present in each and every moment,” says former LA Lakers coach Phil Jackson, and sports fans couldn’t agree more. Today’s followers of the NBA are more present and informed, every minute of every game, than ever before.

In general, the NBA’s outreach, including its websites, mobile apps, TV, and radio broadcasting, saw dramatic increases in activity over the last year.. In 2011, about 75 petabytes of video was posted. Not surprisingly, NBA.com is now the #3 sports site on the web for video streams. Read More »

Tags: Borderless Networks, Carrie Krinock, CIO, Cisco, customer experience, data center, data deluge, Executive ViewPoints, Fan Experience, Gliedman, global, innovation, Michael, Michael Gliedman, national basketball association, nba, operational excellence, sports, video, virtualization

As Cisco’s Global Threat Analyst, my job is to look for what is changing around the world, and to explain why my colleagues in the Information Communications Technology (ICT) industry should care. Recently, I sat down with brand protection and anti-counterfeiting specialists to hear about what is changing in their line of work. They gave me a lot to think about.

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Tags: analysis, anti-counterfeiting, global, threat