It’s no secret that Cisco Unified Computing Sytem (UCS) has had some tremendous success in terms of customer adoption. In just three short years, UCS is nipping at the heals of IBM for the #2 spot for Worldwide x86 blade server revenue with 15.2% market share, compared to IBM’s 15.4%. In fact, Cisco now has over 15,000 customers that have moved from legacy architectures to a more “Unified” approach, combining compute, network and storage access into a single, easy to manage solution.
So what’s missing?
Well, believe it or not, until now it was relatively hard to do business with Cisco. Quoting and ordering took days instead of minutes. Well Cisco is changing that with the release of its new online presence called “Cisco Build and Price“, offering direct access to blade server pricing and rack server pricing.
A Simple Approach to Building and Pricing Cisco UCS Servers
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.
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.
