Many of us here on the Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) team are excited about upcoming news around Cisco’s virtualization solutions. And the Cisco VXI message gets amplified further at VMworld Copenhagen (Oct 18) and Citrix Synergy Barcelona (Oct 25).
Here is a quick video summary that my wife, Beth Dooley, helped me record a few hours after returning home (Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay Area, California) from my VXI Experience Tour in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. The video was shot from our backyard deck. The original was 10 mins in length but we cut it down to just the first 3 mins:
During this VXI tour in APAC, I delivered our message to 10 sessions, 3 countries (Singapore, Japan, Korea) with hundreds of customers, partners, and internal Cisco teams. Siva Mandalam (Director, Cisco Enterprise Architecture & Systems) delivered our message in India the week before. PJ Barber (Director, Cisco Desktop Virtualization) delivers our message in Australia this week.
Prior to this trip, the Cisco team was expecting the vast majority of its near-term revenue, partner activity and customer interest for VXI to be concentrated in North America and Europe. After this APAC tour, it’s obvious there are some big things happening in Asia. Many could argue that the most mature countries in the APAC region for desktop virtualization adoption would be Australia and India. However, we’re seeing early signs of positive growth in Korea, Japan, and parts of China and SouthEast Asia as well.
In Japan, the attendance and interest exceeded everyone’s expectation with sessions in the hundreds leaving standing room only. In Korea, the teams were not only enthusiastic but they could see beyond just hosted virtual desktops and how this architecture applied to their overall “cloud” initiatives. In recent years, Korea has taken an innovation leadership role in areas such as automobiles, home appliances, consumer electronics, Internet broadband delivery, mobile handsets, and a variety of Post-PC devices from companies like Samsung and LG. Also, Korea’s modern culture is a strikingly unique blend of old tradition and new innovation. You can see this blending of old and new not only in their technology landscape but it extends into their music, fashion, and films. Cisco VXI is in many ways a blending of old (Windows PCs and legacy applications) and new (virtual workspaces using collaborative networking and cloud-based computing).
In my opinion, Korea is a country to watch for the next 12-18 months in this area. I could see at least one or two of Korea’s leading industries emerge as a guiding light for how businesses can move into the Post-PC area, deliver unique collaboration services, and embrace cloud computing in a way that we have not seen before.
Overall: the APAC region leveraging Cisco VXI has all the ingredients to be a significant portion of “first-mover” Enterprises and Service Providers in the Post-PC era. The proliferation of next generation devices are well suited for VXI when combined with rich collaboration services using high-performance networks and clouds. We just need to help convert this beaming enthusiasm into action. Amazing new developments are sure to come out of Asia, yet again.
In David Lawrence’s and Glenn Anderson’s recent Manufacturing.net article on ‘The Fall and Rise of the American Manufacturer’, the authors are rather optimistic about the current state of U.S. manufacturing. Citing the Institute of Supply Management indicators of manufacturing activity expansion for 19+ consecutive months and their own observations from surviving their 125-year old employer, Cincinnati Milacron, filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009 and emerging one year later to thriving profitability and bolder investments in innovation, the authors believe manufacturing is now fueling a sustainable economic recovery from the global recession.
Many economists agree, and in the world of public opinion, a recent survey by Delloitte and The Manufacturing Institute showed that 78% of Americans believe that U.S. manufacturing is vitally important to our economic prosperity and 76% believe it is also important to our standard of living. The survey ranked manufacturing ahead of technology, financial services, health care, communications, and retail. My own optimism is checked by one key consideration required for long term success: Is it SUSTAINABLE?
Last week I had the opportunity to host two groups of visitors: a group of community policing leaders from the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and a delegation of foreign exchange students from Iwata, Japan. I enjoyed meeting all the guests and the conversations we had about the many changes and challenges in our communities.
We discussed the impact of increased diversity and convergence of cultural values, critical budget issues facing government agencies, and the continuing need for citizen services for community safety and emergency response. We brainstormed ideas for how technology can help.
Despite the severe economic and environmental challenges, both groups were optimistic about our future and the potential for technology to play a positive role.
The recent earthquakes and tsunamis have brought wide-spread devastation to Japan, including to the domestic and international telecommunications infrastructure that companies doing business in Japan rely on. (See the article, “In Japan, Many Undersea Cables are Damaged”). This impact extends to Cisco where Japan is home to numerous field offices with Tokyo the site of Cisco’s North Asia network backbone hub. This hub provides an aggregation point for regional WAN and Internet connectivity in North Asia as well as direct connectivity to four other regional CAPNet hub locations in Asia and the US.
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In the last few years, technology has proven itself to be a mobilization powerhouse for disasters. Tales from the recent Japanese earthquake and tsunami abound. From the senior project manager who used Google’s People Finder tool to locate his Japanese grandfather, to the young schoolteacher who broadcast pleas for help via Twitter before the nearby nuclear plant exploded, technology has become a pivotal player in guiding relief efforts, making connections and educating people about disasters. Here are a few ways technology has proved its usefulness.
1. A tool in relief efforts
A key to successful disaster relief management is the rapid deployment of information and resources. People are often displaced and don’t know where to go or what to do. Buildings are destroyed. People missing. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Google collaborated with GeoEye to display images of destruction so organizers could identify areas in need of support. Here are some examples of those images.
Using technology to assist in disasters is not new. Cisco Systems was one of the first technology responders to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, providing mobile communication kits and networks to support the massive data infrastructure needed in relief efforts.
2. Generating support
Donations are essential in providing just in time services to those in need. The immediacy of technology makes it easy to appeal to human sentiment with immediate calls to action. Apple first added a page to its iTunes store for Haitian earthquake relief and now continues the practice for Japan. The Red Cross elicits donations through its Twitter feed and via text messages. This fundraising method garnered more than $4 million for Haiti. To amplify the efforts of the Red Cross, Mashable promoted its code snippet for blog and website owners to use in soliciting additional donations.
3. Connecting friends and family
At the time this post was written, more than 5,000 people had died and 9,500 were missing due to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Almost half a million are in shelters. Immediately following the crisis, the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo issued a message to U.S. citizens in Japan encouraging them to contact their family and friends using SMS texting and social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. According to the Poynter Institute, a journalism school and resource, the Twitter hashtags #prayforjapan and #tsunami received thousands of tweets per second and a Facebook page set up for the disaster attracted more than 3000 followers in less than 12 hours.
Website registries have been set up to connect families and friends of those in the affected areas of Japan. In an effort to better consolidate registries and provide a single point of connection, Google has launched an open source multilingual and bilingual people finder tool for Japan to serve as a directory and message board for families and friends, as it did for the earthquakes in Chile, Haiti and New Zealand, Within the first few hours of launching, the tool logged more than 4,000 records.
4. Preparedness
Videogames and simulation software are another way responders are preparing for disasters. Software companies are creating mashups that combine satellite images, maps and spreadsheet data to create disaster scenario planning tools. Depiction is one such simulation application, used to train first responders. The tool combines live data feeds to create a dynamic tool that can be used for scenario planning, resource management, and logistics. Users can create alternative rescue routes, for example, by inputting data streams into the system real-time.
5. Education
Children are one target group that organizers are keen to educate. The International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) argues that children are amongst the most vulnerable to disasters but also the best positioned to be trained as future leaders, architects and urban planners. In response to this need, the ISDR created a multilingual online simulation game, Stop Disasters, to teach children about how to build safer cities and villages. Players can select one of five scenarios including a tsunami, earthquake, wildfire, flood or hurricane. They are given a budget and limited time to safely house residents, build hospitals and schools, retrofit buildings, and equip those buildings with evacuation plans and early warning systems. They learn how the location and construction of housing materials can improve the outcome of a disaster and how evacuation plans can help save lives. After the disaster hits, the user is scored on their success and told how they could have better prepared.
“The Day the Earth Shook” is an earthquake preparedness game for children created by the Illinois Emergency Management Agency. Created by the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Center for Public Safety and Justice, the game gives children the opportunity to explore a virtual world in which they learn how to create a disaster kit, locate safe locations in a home and safety tips.
6. Building and Rebuilding
The Global Innovation Commons is a vast database of over 500,000 energy-saving technologies with expired or abandoned patents. The goal of this organization is to provide access to open source technologies for life saving energy, water and agriculture devices. The patents in the database could save more than $2 trillion in license fees combined. But like most open source models, if you use anything in the database, you are encouraged to share your story with the community. In this video, Dr. David Martin, the founder of the Global Innovation Commons, talks about the organization:
While technology can’t bring back lost lives or repair billions of dollars in destroyed homes and businesses, it has proven itself to be an indispensable resource. And while technology’s role in connecting people through social media is invaluable, I do hope we can harness its powers to diminish the tragic effects of such disasters in the future.
Do you have examples about how technology is being used to assist in disasters or educate the public on preparedness? Share your comments below.
