This is the second section of our two part interview with Brent Cobb, Cbeyond’s Chief Revenue and Customer Officer. The first part is located here.
How will IPv6 Transition affect your customers?
Brent Cobb:
Cbeyond has been watching IPv6 unfold since the late 90s. Today the company is in the implementation phase of its transition to support IPv6, and we’ve chosen Cisco’s Carrier Grade v6 (CGv6) implementation as its solution. To us IPv6 will impact how the plumbing of the Internet works – but we try to take the really sophisticated technology of operating a network and applications out of the discussion and service delivery to the small business into the discussion. The majority won’t be impacted directly by IPv6 because Cbeyond will make changes within our network, within our data centers, and within our application environment so our customers don’t have to understand the difference between v4 and v6. It will be transparent to our customers because we’ll handle the complexity.
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Your customers want all the benefits that borderless networks have to offer; things like working from home, VPN access anywhere, and secure network access via any device. But how do you best walk customers through the costs, benefits, IT staff requirements, ROI, and the dizzying array of considerations around a sizable IT upgrade?
With a series of questions, scenarios, and analysis, the new Borderless Networks ROI Benefits Calculator is a free tool that helps partners analyze customers’ IT costs and needs—whether it’s a future network deployment or a post-deployment ROI analysis.
By plugging data into the calculator, you receive a tangible list of benefits that a customer would see from upgrading their infrastructure (like reductions in help desk costs, increases in end user productivity, or energy savings).
Cisco tapped independent technology and market research company Forrester Research to create the calculator. Forrester gathered data from its research on Cisco Borderless Networks and the market in general, interviewed Cisco marketing and sales personnel, spoke with organizations offering solutions, and conducted a survey of 121 IT network execs.
It’s time for another edition of Partner Update, our video newscast covering the top Cisco partner news headlines in five minutes (or less). While this update is less than four minutes long, it’s jam-packed with news and announcements for partners.
The first item is so hot off the presses, so it didn’t make our newscast. Keith Goodwin just posted a blog today highlighting the next step in the evolution of Cisco’s Worldwide Partner Organization and how it affects partners. The changes fall into three main areas: Partner Led, Partner Marketing, and geographic alignment. Keith also provides information about the new executive team in his post.
For the rest of your breaking news, watch this week’s Partner Update video. This week’s top headlines include: a full recap of Cisco Live, how your customers can get twice the power per Ethernet port, tips to help service providers capitalize on the cloud, new apps that help you manage servers from anywhere, huge WebEx discounts for partners, and more.
Tune in and watch the latest partner news:
Read on for more details, time stamps so you can jump ahead to news items of interest, and links to what we covered in this week’s newscast.
Cisco IT maintains about 21 Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) clusters to support 150,000 hardware phones and 51,000 software phones used by our global employees, contractors and contact center agents. In general, Cisco IT likes to stay up to date, and upgrades to most major releases of the Cisco UCM as soon as possible – frequently this occurs before the code is available to our external customers. We do this to take advantage of new features and to help the product developers identify needed improvements before the release is made available to customers.
Mobile devices have changed the way we manage our lives—in fact, just the other day I used apps on my smartphone to pull up recipes and locate a nearby grocery store. (Now only if there were an app that could enable a smartphone to cook dinner.)
Did you know that there’s an app that can help you manage your Unified Computing System (UCS), too? UCSand, which is available for Android phones and can be found in the Android Market, enables you to monitor and control your UCS. Sounds pretty cool, don’t you think?
It definitely can be a useful tool, according to Colby Cousens, Systems Administrator for the City of Melrose, Massachusetts.
The city has a secure, multi-tenant FlexPod architecture in their data center. This solution provides the City of Melrose with the ability to offer secure network, storage, and compute resources to their partner communities.
“One of my own shortcomings regarding UCS is that I don’t get into the manager as often as I should to check events and warnings on the system,” Colby said. “The UCSand app highlights the value of Cisco’s XML-API in allowing a program to pull targeted data out of the UCS Manager without requiring an individual to navigate through extra configurations or information at the time.”
