The place: San Francisco. The time: a Saturday afternoon.
The scenario: after lunch, two out-of-town couples find themselves in a neighborhood where taxi cabs are scarce. One of the women remembers a new iPhone app called Uber that allows you to wirelessly order a Lincoln Towncar and bill the trip to a credit card.
Elapsed time between signing up with Uber and the car arriving: 10 minutes. Estimated incremental cost above a traditional cab: $7.
This week in No Jitter, Cisco Collaboration Vice President Murali Sitaram is featured in an extensive Q&A with editor Dave Michels. Entitled, “Cisco’s Quadragenarian,” Sitaram is working to take Cisco, a company with a strong networking core, and move it towards collaboration software that is both social and cloud-based.
Murali discusses his role, Cisco’s perspective on social business software, the post PC-era, collaboration in general, people-centric collaboration, email and more. In part he says:
“In today’s post-PC era, employees no longer are tied to their desk or required to sit in a conference room to do their jobs…Social collaboration adds a new layer to the communication experience, allowing companies to innovate, grow, expand into new markets and increase productivity.
Over the last two or three decades we have been living in the era of the “document” or…email…if you think about it, people don’t really collaborate or work in that way…We have conversations, we share in communities…previous generation of tools have outlived their utility and we must rethink how people work.”
MPI implementations are large, complex beasts. By definition, they span many different layers ranging from the user-level implementation all the way down to sending 1s and 0s across a physical network medium.
However, not all MPI implementations actually “own” the code at every level. Consider: a TCP-based MPI implementation only “owns” the user-level middleware. It cannot see or change anything in the TCP stack (or below). Such an implementation is limited to optimizations at the user space level.
That being said, there certainly are many optimizations possible at the user level. In fact, user space is probably where the largest number of optimizations are typically possible. Indeed, nothing can save your MPI_BCAST performance if you’re using a lousy broadcast algorithm.
However, lower-layer optimizations are just as important, and can deliver many things that simply cannot be effected from user space.
Earlier this week, Eric Schoch, Senior Director for Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution business and Roberta Mackintosh, Verizon’s Director of Unified Communications and Collaboration hosted a ‘Collaboration to the Cloud’ discussion over TelePresence and WebEx with journalists and analysts in Boston, Florida, New York, Washington and Toronto.
Eric and Roberta expanded on each company’s vision for collaboration in the cloud and gave details on their partnership to offer Unified Communications and Collaboration services. Verizon has integrated Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) and now offers an enterprise unified communications and collaboration platform which can be tailored and customized for its customers. The platform can be deployed as cloud-based only or as a hybrid of a cloud service and on-premise offering. In phase one of the deployment, some of the applications included are voice, video, instant messaging, and presence based such as Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unified Mobility, Cisco Unified Presence, Cisco Unity Connection, and Cisco WebEx Meeting Center (hosted by Cisco).
View the video to hear more about:
o Why I should care about cloud collaboration as a service provider?
o Why are service providers essential for collaboration in the cloud?
o How is Verizon currently deploying collaboration solutions via the cloud?
o What are the collaboration deployment issues that are facing enterprises?
So you bit the bullet and integrated social features into your brand’s website. Give yourself a pat on the back, because the hard work is done, right? Think again.
If you thought your job ended at launch, you’re headed for the brick wall. You about to embark on a journey that will lead you to engaging fans and potentially monetizing content like never before! Providing your audience with the best possible video viewing experience and reaching them on all of the devices they use is a task that many underestimate before undertaking. This leads to media companies that develop rich media experiences on their own, homegrown platforms often discovering operational challenges they couldn’t plan for, making for a never ending pile of work and significant financial investments to keep the communities they’ve started vibrant.
One great benefit about websites that deliver a social entertainment experience is that they are very dynamic and engage audiences in ways that build long-term loyalty and value (to both the consumer and the business). However, this can also mean being forever relegated to updating content, the website and features as services change or individual technology components are updated. It also means managing a growing community to ensure a good experience is maintained and the brand promise is delivered.
Media companies are great at developing content, and quite frankly, they should focus on their core business of creating the content instead of the technology platform for delivering it. This is exactly why CMSG continuously updates the Cisco Eos software platform – to make the delivery of a premium content experience embedded with social features, easy. With this in mind, let me quickly introduce you to the latest enhancements to Cisco Eos. The full announcement can be found here.
How do our new features make your life easier? Your web and mobile content experiences more engaging?
By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist
