It’s the week of Thanksgiving, and as such it seemed a good time to pause, take a breath, look around, and say thanks. So, in no particular order:
Thank you to my engineering and technology co-workers, both here at Cisco and everywhere else, for being so adept in evolving and adapting in this great era of innovation.
Think about the pace of change in our lifetimes, attributable to very smart people, focused on innovating: We’ve gone to the moon, explored Mars and even built a space station. We’ve decoded the human genome in this same period of time. We’ve helped to create not just the Internet, but also the capability to “put the Internet in your pocket” - to make that endless stream of information available to people wherever there’s an IP connection.
Thanks, too, to our service provider customers, for challenging us to dig deep and do our best work to help create this next great era of consumer choice and innovation - to facilitate that shift to IP-based entertainment and communications experiences. They’ve challenged us to not just focus on innovation that benefit consumers but consider the viability of the business models in support of entire media ecosystems. Real market shifts occur when new technology delivers compelling consumer value while sustaining a tangible economic model. I’m very grateful that we’re a part of making it happen with you.
Growth in enterprise and consumer services, including cloud computing, video and collaboration services, are some of the key customer trends that underpin many service providers’ decision to further invest in Carrier Ethernet technology. And Tata Communications is no exception.
On Tuesday, Tata Communications, a global service provider and a leader in the Ethernet market, announced that it has selected the Cisco® ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers to support its new global Next Generation Ethernet Network; and is using the Cisco ASR 9000 to deploy the first global 802.1ah Provider Backbone Bridging (PBB) network.
In plain English, this means that Tata Communications’ customers will benefit by having a larger variety of services delivered with greater scalability, reliability, efficiency.
All existing and new services will be delivered with geographic specificity to minimize latency over a highly efficient network. Migrating to 802.1ah PBB will give Tata Communications a network that can deliver multipoint services more efficiently, while at the same time being able to handle a higher volume of services.
This should be exciting news for Tata’s customers specifically as well as the industry in general. The Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast for 2009-2014, projects that global Internet traffic will increase more than fourfold to 767 exabytes, or more than three quarters of a Zettabyte, by 2014. This amount is 100 exabytes higher than the projected level in 2013, or in other words an increase equivalent to 10 times all the traffic that traversed Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) in 2008.
It’s a well known fact in the IT industry that there is a spending push at the end of the calendar year as companies look to close out their budget. This year-end spending trend represents a great sales opportunity for both Cisco and our partners.
Helping our partners boost profits and provide value to our mutual customers are two core principles of our partner strategy. With that in mind, we recently launched a global sales initiative called “Year-end Sprint” (YES), which will allow us, together with our partners, to capture coveted year-end IT spending.
YES is a collection of several high-value, global architecture product and service offerings for customers that include additional incentives for partners. These offers span our four key architectures: Borderless Networks, Collaboration, Data Center, and Service Provider, including IP NGN and SP Cloud.
The service provider (SP) industry is at an inflection point. During the past couple of years, SPs have dealt with the economic downturn by focusing the majority of their attention on cutting costs -- to the point where there’s very little left to cut. Despite continued economic uncertainty, there is a shift underway to revitalize revenue growth. SPs are eager to identify and execute on new sources of revenue growth -- however, there is also clear recognition that revenue growth cannot come at the expense of profitability. Growth under such conditions means taking advantage of market transitions as they are happening, creating new platforms for growth.
One key opportunity for SPs lies in providing a more expansive set of services to small and medium sized businesses (SMBs)—particularly leveraging cloud-based capabilities. Based on our estimates, the SMB communications and IT infrastructure market collectively represents more than $120 billion in spend for 2010. SPs currently address 60 percent of this spend. By extending into cloud services, much of the remaining 40 percent becomes addressable.
Cisco IBSG Service Provider Director, Tine Christensen, addresses this opportunity in this video:
Hello, my name is David. I want to tell you a story. It’s a story about the people who imagined that there might be a way to enable humans to communicate across time and space. It’s about their passion and determination to pursue that dream, to boldly explore all the possibilities.
It’s also about a series of events that led us to the invention of new technologies, to the development of new systems and the ongoing investment in essential network infrastructure that enabled a bounty of telecommunication innovations that would ultimately benefit all humanity.
This story began to unfold more than 150 years ago. Since then, there’s been rapid progress. In fact, people are now accessing many types of multimedia content on a multitude of connected devices. The “connected life” reflects our desire to have many integrated services and experiences that are available anytime, anywhere, and on any device.
Today we’re launching a new project.
Welcome to the Connected Life Exchange – an evolving narrative about how people connect, communicate, and collaborate.
