Is your healthcare organization doing everything it can to improve productivity while delivering the best possible patient care?  Join us at the Community for Connected Health Summit at HIMSS12 as we bring together healthcare innovators and Cisco specialists into a single forum of networking, education, and best practice sharing, all focused on the very latest innovations improving healthcare delivery. You’ll be the first to hear about breakthrough solutions available today — and what’s on the horizon for tomorrow.  Read More »

Tags: clinician, connected healthcare, healthcare, healthcare specialist, himss, innovation, Kathy English, networking, patients

Recent articles  indicate that manufacturing activity in the U.S. continues to expand and  global industrial production  is  positive in spite of softness in a few geographies. This is a great rebound from the trough of 2009.  Productivity gains have  fueled much of the recent rebound and leading companies are looking for more. Several years ago a leading manufacturing company, GE, asked Cisco to develop a new collaborative environment for distributed teams.

Leaders have implemented new  working environments, such as the  Cisco Active Collaboration Room.  Now there is a movement to bring  forward the next environment for team productivity, rapid decision making, and distributed collaboration. The development of  new  working environments will accelerate, driven by a need to enable  distributed teams for innovation, business management, and optimization. As mobility and the benefits of  rapid analysis and decision making increase, the work environments will change dramatically as described in the Fortune magazine article,  “What will the future workplace look like?” Read More »

Tags: active collaboration room, Cisco, Future Workplace, IBSG, innovation, Manufacturing

By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist

Pop quiz: How many screens does it take to watch television programming? For a growing number of people, the answer is two — a TV, plus a media tablet or mobile smartphone. That may seem counterintuitive, but for many of us (present company included) a mobile “companion” device has become an essential part of the living room TV experience.

According to a Nielsen survey of 12,000 connected device owners, 70 percent of tablet owners and 68 percent of smartphone owners use their devices while watching TV. Tablet owners in particular seem unable to put down the iPad while flipping channels, with respondents saying that nearly a third of the time they spend using their device is in front of the TV.

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Tags: customer experience, entertainment, innovation, smartphone, tablet, television

In my last blog, I wrote about HP’s disturbing pattern of suing non-California employees under ‘non compete’ clauses, often imposed  years after employment began.  Apparently it’s relatively recently that HP decided to abandon its Silicon Valley roots and tie up its  non-California employees in legal knots.  HP is in fact the only large Silicon Valley-based company to have two classes of employees and try to impose mobility restrictions on those who live outside California.  HP’s efforts have gone so far as to sue an employee who took a buyout after having his salary cut, and one who didn’t even work in an area related to HP’s products that compete with Cisco’s.

Two recent actions since that blog posting are stunning.   First, HP renewed legal action in Texas, where one of the employees used to live, trying to get a judge there to schedule a court date on a day’s notice and to apply Texas law even though the California judge in the case is going to hold a hearing, as is certainly appropriate, to verify that the employee has in fact moved to California. (Yes, he came to work for Cisco after he arrived in California, rented an apartment, got a drivers license, etc.) Once again the Texas court refused to intervene, and in fact effectively “stayed” HP’s legal actions indefinitely. HP also tried in Texas to raise another bar to employee freedom, claiming that the employee would ‘inevitably’ use HP’s trade secrets to do his job at Cisco, and therefore should be barred from continuing his new job. Just as California law bars enforcement of non-compete clauses, California courts won’t recognize this doctrine either, seeing it for what it is — an effort to impose de facto non competition clauses.

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Tags: employee mobility, employment law, general counsel, HP, innovation, legal

Mobility is, and continues to remain a top business priority for service providers around the globe and one of Cisco’s five company priorities.  There is an insatiable desire in the market for connectivity anytime, anywhere and on all the latest devices.

At Cisco, we are uniquely positioned with an architecture that spans from the client -- to the network -- to the cloud to meet these demands.  We are constantly innovating to further define mobility technology and solutions across all of these areas to address service provider challenges of network reach and network intelligence.   This unique position makes us attractive to both customers and prospective employees.
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Tags: Cisco, innovation, juniper, MITG, mobility, Paul Mankiewich, Service Provider