As our team prepares to attend Hotel Technology Next Generation’s (HTNG) North American Conference next week in Atlanta, we are excited to have one of our very own as the keynote to really highlight Cisco’s leadership in the hospitality industry. Cisco’s Bob Friday, CTO, Wireless Networking Group, will be joined by our partner John Bollen, MGM resorts VP of IT to discuss key trends in the industry and specifically at MGM. They will discuss guest needs and demands, how to turn the mobile opportunity into revenue, and the vision of the industry and where it is going.

The keynote will hit on all the imperatives that Cisco Hospitality is driving citing Cisco’s recent Wi-Fi installation at MGM Resorts as a key example. Together, the pair will discuss how certain trends are impacting both Cisco and MGM solutions developments, investments and more. With Bob Friday’s experience in mobility, he will also address what he is seeing in other industries and how it can be applied to hospitality.

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Tags: Bob Friday, Cisco, cto, hospitality, hotel, hotel technology next generation, HTNG, HTNG North American, IT, John Bollen, location, location analytics, MGM, mobility, network, networking, platform, technology, wi-fi, wifi, wireless, wireless networking

This last weekend Cisco launched the new implementation of our enterprise collaboration platform, Cisco WebEx Social and what an exciting update it is! Read More »

Tags: Enterprise, platform, social, WebEx Social

Each year Cisco’s Strategic Leadership Experience brings together senior managers, directors, and executives across the company globally,  to engage with each other and align to business priorities through various sessions and other interactions. This multiday event requires a heavy amount of pre-work, communications, and generates a wealth of presentations, video, and other content that needs to be housed for easy access by event attendees as well as those unable to attend.
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Tags: Cisco IT, iwe, leadership, platform, quad

All enterprise social collaboration platforms include gathering points whereby people can unite with others around a common goal; for example, a program or project, social interest, organization, market segment, product, corporate initiative, technology, etc. Within Quad – Cisco’s Enterprise Collaboration Platform and product – these gathering points are referred to as communities. The longevity of any given community will vary based on several factors, which include temporal needs, relevancy, and usefulness. Some communities will be required for a long time while others may only be needed for a short time. Without clear mechanisms to identify the usefulness of each community and manage those that reach end of life, a social collaboration platform can become difficult to manage from a community governance vantage point. The performance of the platform can be negatively impacted by excessive community clutter resulting from orphaned or unused communities.

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Tags: coc-collaboration, community, iwe, management, platform, quad

There comes a time in the evolution of building a technology platform that you have to pause and look back where you’ve come from, before continuing on with the journey. As I think back to the formation of the Cisco Eos platform, it was a time of hard work and rapid growth.

The Cisco Media Solutions Group went from being a business unit with an idea, to truly taking form in 2007 when Cisco made three software acquisitions—Five Across, the assets of Tribe.net and the assets of Click.tv. From that day forward, we were charged with developing an innovative platform that could get media companies online in a simple, manageable way. That long journey started with the single though difficult step of uniting three independent companies and countless independent perspectives into a single team executing against a single vision.

As with any consolidation effort, tough decisions had to be made. One of the most important we faced was what development platform we were going to leverage. Our three teams had experience in just as many languages: Ruby on Rails, PHP, and Java – not to mention Adobe Flex and even a bit of C. After much debate, we chose to use Java for the back end, which includes the core Cisco Eos data and content components like blogs, discussions, and member profiles. And we chose PHP for the front end, the dynamic page-rendering environment that our users can customize for presentation to end consumers. Read More »

Tags: API, architecture, cisco eos, data, platform, social entertainment, technology