Mobility and cloud computing are colliding. So, what does this mean for the future of mobile devices? How soon will video-conference calls on our mobile devices become commonplace? How can service providers (SPs) enhance their competitive position by delivering cloud and managed services?

While research has been conducted on mobile and cloud computing as separate trends, to date very little data has existed on the impact of mobility and cloud together. To understand this dynamic market better, the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) surveyed more than 1,000 business users to understand their current and future needs with regard to the mobile cloud.

The top findings may surprise you:

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Tags: Cisco, cloud, Cloud Computing, cloud services, collaboration, fixed mobile convergence, IBSG, internet business, mobile, mobile devices, mobility, research, Service Provider, solutions group, vdi

Cisco just released the 2012 edition of its mobile VNI* report, entitled “Cisco VNI Mobile Data Traffic Forecast, 2011-2016.”

The report’s conclusion: a tsunami of mobile data traffic is headed our way, growing in size and speed through 2016 and likely beyond.  Over the next five years, mobile data traffic worldwide will grow 18-fold!

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Tags: 2011-2016, Cisco, forecast, ip, ip traffic, mobile devices, mobile vni, mobility, visual networking index, vni

In October, we wrote about the federal government’s move toward installing video and telepresence capabilities on mobile devices to improve communication, especially for law enforcement and defense purposes. With mobile telepresence, the government can enhance collaboration and response time during critical events.

A recent New York Times article reminds us, however, that to safely realize all of the benefits of telepresence, the government—or any organization—needs to ensure proper implementation of the video technology. Obviously, security concerns multiply when numerous mobile devices attach to a telepresence network.

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Tags: mobile devices, new york times, security, TelePresence, video, video traffice

Today, we ‘re featuring a guest post from Brian Blatnik, a senior manager within Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group:

In the month since our CloudVerse announcement the notion of a world of many clouds – public, private, and hybrid – has resonated with our customers, partners, and industry analysts. I’d like to share some perspective on how those types of clouds address different customers in the collaboration cloud services market. Since last month’s announcement highlighted our private cloud model in that market, Hosted Collaboration Solution for Large Enterprises, I’ll focus on that model. As a reminder, the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution gives partners, including service providers and integrators, the ability to deploy multiple collaboration applications on one server in a virtualized environment and then host those applications for multiple client organizations. The solution is designed to be run from partner data centers.

I’m often asked, “Haven’t enterprise voice and other UC services always been delivered from what we now call a private cloud?” It’s true that IP PBXs and other UC servers, like their PBX predecessors, provide services to users from a remote room or facility via a network. But there are two ways in which today’s cloud service delivery differs. First, there is the efficiency of pooling computing, network, and storage resources across multiple locations and services. Second, the services can be delivered in an on-demand fashion with elastic scaling.

The financial and strategic benefits deriving from these two factors are leading many businesses to consider consuming collaboration services in a utility model from Cisco’s partners in the Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS). But the same drivers can result in substantial benefits to businesses that aren’t looking for services from a third party’s public cloud. Read More »

Tags: Cisco Cloud Services, Cisco CloudVerse, Cisco collaboration, Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, Cisco Partners, Cisco Unified Communications., cloud, cloud collaboration, cloud services, cloudverse, cloud_computing, collaboration, data center, Enterprise, enterprise voice, Hosted Collaboration Solution, Hybrid Cloud, infrastructure, Mobile Apps, mobile devices, private cloud, Public Cloud, unified communications

Earlier this week, we kicked off  special customer guest blog series with Andrew vonNagy, author of the blog Revolution Wi-Fi, and active on Twitter @revolutionwifi. Join us today as Andrew explores the next two major retail trends changing the Wi-Fi industry, and catch up with the first part if you missed it.

Trend 2: Empowering Sales Associates
Given the increasingly connected and smart shopper, consumers now have more product information than in-store sales associates in many cases. Yet sales staff are key to providing a great consumer experience in-store. Retailers need to empower sales associates with the depth of product information that consumers have, and to provide additional tools that facilitate existing and new services offered by the retailer.

Historically, only a fraction of retail sales associates have been provided with mobile devices, and those devices have enabled only a limited set of capabilities such as stocking, inventory management and product availability. One reason for this is the high cost of ruggedized mobile devices for use in retail. A typical high-speed scanner PDA can cost well over $1,200 each. In order to provide every sales associate with more information to help consumers, retailers are adopting lower-cost, feature-rich, smart mobile devices that provide more robust capabilities than specialized scanners. Mobile platforms built by Apple, Android, and third-party manufacturers are enabling this shift, along with a retail IT focus on enabling business processes in a more flexible, consistent, and re-usable fashion.

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Tags: 802.11n, digital signage, iPad, iphone, mobile devices, mobile pos, retail, sales, smartphone, tablet, wi-fi, wifi, wireless, wireless LAN