National Insurance Company Limited of India (NIC) delivers near real-time performance for its core applications to remote offices with Cisco’s Wide Area Application Service (WAAS).
National Insurance Company (NIC) Limited has many users across over 1,000 branches throughout India. These branches connect to their main data center using a decentralized network model that links remote offices using a mix of 64 Kbps and 128 Kbps connections. Under this model, NIC’s remote offices were facing slower application processing due to high WAN latency, heavy network traffic, and increasing transactions, among other factors.
NIC Deputy General Manager (IT), Mr. D. K. Sinha knew that they needed to do something different to boost application performance to cater for their new core insurance application (CIA). Their users were experiencing slow network performance, even with applications such as Lotus Notes; moreover, the bandwidth upgrade at remote locations came with a heavy price tag. In conclusion, NIC needed a new network solution to accelerate applications, cut branch infrastructure costs, and simplify remote data protection.
This past week, Thomas Scheibe (Director, Data Center Architecture) had the opportunity to co-present with VMware and NetApp at TechFieldDay on a broad range of Data Center topics.
Thomas is one of the leaders in our Solutions and Strategy Unit (SASU) that is responsible for creating Cisco Validated Designs (CVD). One of the topics discussed was the recent CVD on Enhanced Secure Multi-Tenancy and Thomas asked, “How many of you are familiar with the depth of technical content in a CVD?”
I’m somewhat disappointed to say that the show of hands was less than unanimous. Now this shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise to us, because in the past CVDs were primarily targeted at Network Administrators and the TechFieldDay audience is traditionally more focused on Servers, Storage and Applications. But considering that many of our Data Center solutions are no longer just focused on networking elements, we look at this as an opportunity to create awareness for the Architect and Administrator communities. We also look at it as an opportunity to solicit your input and feedback on how we can better deliver content that will help you design and deploy Data Center solutions that are becoming more complicated as convergence, virtualization, and automation blur the lines between IT organizations. Read More »
One of the great things about being a market disruptor is that you don’t need to carry along all of the baggage that slow down other companies as technology or market transitions occur. Of course, one of the frequent challenges to being a disruptor is that you often have to ask customers to adopt an entirely new technology standard in order to realize the benefits of your product.
When some of the largest companies in the world get together and demand choice, it means that any vendor interested in delivering solutions had better be creating architectural flexibility. And not just architectural flexibility, but also creating and enabling an open ecosystem with market leaders across a broad range of capabilities.
At a time when some vendors are moving towards vertically integrated solutions, limiting customer choice, Cisco continues to be committed to open standards and open architectures within the Data Center. This model has enabled tremendous growth in the Internet, and with more systems being interconnected (Internet, Public/Private Cloud, Mobile) the need for interoperability has never been greater. Read More »
“One trillion dollars is roughly the amount of earnings that American companies have in their foreign operations—and that they could repatriate to the United States. That money, in turn, could be invested in U.S. jobs, capital assets, research and development, and more.
But for U.S companies such repatriation of earnings carries a significant penalty: a federal tax of up to 35%. This means that U.S. companies can, without significant consequence, use their foreign earnings to invest in any country in the world—except here.”
By the way, Chambers and Catz also offer an idea for hiring an additional 2 million new workers as a result of allowing these foreign earnings to be repatriated.
