In the fast-changing, thin-margin world of consumer products, new winners and losers are created every day. Speed of innovation, time-to-market, and employee productivity can mean the difference between the next hot trend and a warehouse full of excess inventory. Success in the highly competitive consumer packaged goods (CPG) and retail industry depends on broad-ranging collaboration, accelerated innovation, and employees who are empowered and productive every step along the way—from product development, to merchandising and sourcing, to store management and customer service.
Welcome to the Cisco Sizzle! Each month, we’re rounding up the best of the best from across our social media channels for your reading pleasure. From the most read blog posts to the top engaging content on Facebook or LinkedIn, catch up on things you might have missed, or on the articles you just want to see again, all in one place.
Let’s take a look back at the top content from May…
Work-Life Balance … Or Work-Life Integration? Achieving a work-life balance can be tough, but Cisco’s CTO Padmasree Warrior takes a different approach. Instead of trying to balance the demands of work and home separately, she embraces integration and combines the two together whenever she can.
IoE: Powering Supply Chain Management Cisco is connecting the Internet of Everything to get supply chains perfectly linked. Watch this video to explore how IoE instigates meaningful actions to happen faster.
Cisco Ranks High With Young Professionals Career Bliss recently compiled a list of the top 10 companies where young employees are happiest, based on more than 48,000 employee-generated reviews. It’s no surprise to us – Cisco was ranked as #5 overall! Many thanks to our employees for this honor – you make us happy, too!
How Organized is Your Cabling? Any IT guru will agree: this is an amazing feat of organization. Extra credit to anyone who can keep cabling in line like this!
How IoE Will Bring Up to $14 Trillion of Value to the World During the 2013 Cisco Editors Conference, Padmasree Warrior and Sean Curtis demonstrated how applications, cloud, data centers and intelligent networks come together to deliver new experience and opportunities. Watch to learn more:
Cisco and Wired: Re-Imagining Magazines As We Know Them Cisco and Wired are joining forces to provide living examples of the Internet of Everything and its future possibilities. Explore this interactive magazine to see how IoE is changing every aspect of our lives.
What Keeps a CEO Up At Night? In this latest installment of Leadership@Cisco, Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers talks about his love for adventure, the importance of family and the characteristics that make a good leader. Learn what he’s most passionate about, where he sees technology going in the future and what keeps him up at night in this video.
Cloud Curious? Cloud computing is fundamentally changing the way businesses and people consume information. It is enabling IT as a service, evolving collaboration and changing content delivery. See for yourself how Cisco is helping service providers of all sizes navigate the world of many clouds:
Coordinated Attacks Against the U.S. Government and Banking Infrastructure In this blog post, Mike Schiffman and other Cisco employees inform us of a round of planned cyber attacks that have been launched against the U.S. government and banking systems. They provide an overview of the situation along with resources and best practices to prevent and respond to the attacks. For more information on how to protect against these attacks, don’t miss this post:
Welcome to the Cisco Sizzle! Each month, we’re rounding up the best of the best from across our social media channels for your reading pleasure. From the most read blog posts to the top engaging content on Facebook or LinkedIn, catch up on things you might have missed, or on the articles you just want to see again, all in one place.
Let’s take a look back at the top content from April…
Are you prepared for the IoE Economy?
In this blog post, Cisco’s Chief Futurist Dave Evans and Joseph Bradley of Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group share two use cases for IoE – connected marketing and connected healthcare – with both a near-term and futuristic lens.
John Chambers Receives Honorary Doctorate
Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers received an honorary doctorate from San Jose State University at the honors convocation ceremony in April. His main message to the grads? Never stop learning.
Tomorrow Starts Here
What if the next big thing, isn’t big at all? It’s lots of things, all waking up. Explore how IoE will change the way we work, live, play and learn.
Innovation May Spark Economic Renewal
If we’ve learned anything from the last two decades, it’s that every time we think the Internet has exhausted its transformative potential, something highly disruptive comes along. Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior talks IoE innovation and the $14.4 trillion value at stake that will spur research, new investments and new jobs.
A Typical Day
Explore how the Internet of Everything is sparking innovation and instigating meaningful actions to happen faster.
Is Your Site Safe From Attack?
Ars Technica editor Dan Godin compiled a list of Apache website compromises that have been impacting thousands of legitimate sites by allowing entrance to remote attackers. Until his research, no one had realized the magnitude of the situation and how widespread the attacks were. Check out the full insights, including potential solutions, in this blog post.
Three Networking Truths
There’s a clear consensus that one size does not fit all when it comes to deploying Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions to different organizations. Time to dispel common networking misconceptions with three truths about the future of networking as Cisco sees it.
We’re entering the age of the Internet of Everything (IoE), which is about connecting the Internet to the physical world (people, process, data, and things). We’re early in the process, with approximately 10 billion devices already connected. By 2020, Cisco projects that this number will reach 50 billion “things.” One of the key areas of impact identified in the Cisco Internet of Everything Economy report, “Embracing the Internet of Everything To Capture Your Share of $14.4 Trillion,” is customer experience. The report estimates that IoE-driven customer experience advances — based on increasing customer lifetime value and growing market share by adding more customers — will drive $3.7 trillion of the estimated $14.4 trillion of IoE Value at Stake globally over the next decade.
IoE is enabling organizations to engage with their customers in whole new ways and to create new business models. IoE is all about making new connections possible: interactions among people, and between people and devices. It’s also about the ability of devices to communicate with each other, with applications, and with digital services, and then empowering those technologies to take action based on these communications.
When more of the world is connected, expect the delivery of your customer experience to shift beyond the boundaries of your current web and mobile sites, and past the walls of your offices and stores. New technologies connected to the Internet — including things like Google Glasses, IP-enabled lightbulbs, new gesture technologies, and sensors — will form the foundation of IoE. However, it is the data stream produced by all of these new connections that will have the greatest impact on your relationship with your customers.
With IoE, you will be better able to build customer loyalty and delight — creating emotional brand connections, personalizing the experience, and targeting offerings based on the data generated by IoE. Just think about what the IoE-powered future might look like across your customer journey.
Transform the process of building awareness and encouraging purchases,by bringing together data from various sources, including sensors that pick up signals to help anticipate customer needs. Target these customers in real time based on history, location, and activity.
Apps move from performing cross-brand product comparisons to enabling customers to determine where to find items based on criteria they set, including best price, product ratings, and the most convenient retail location to shop (automatically taking traffic and wait times into consideration).
Connected vending machines, digital signage, and other surfaces will recognize customers and deliver customized content at the point of need.
Items will be ordered on — and delivered to — a customer’s mobile phone, wherever it is located.
Post-sale, connect with the personal side of customers’ lives to help them achieve their goals. This will enable you to add post-sale value to create new revenue streams and drive new insights for innovation. Look for ways to be proactive, anticipate and prevent issues before they happen, or make suggestions that will improve a customer’s life.
Mobile devices or sensors react to the environment and are set to receive personalized messages placed by you or your customers’ social circles.
Sensors on clothing monitor customers’ health, enabling them to analyze and collect information about themselves, optimize their personal behaviors, and alert caregivers when there is an issue.
Connected cars move beyond monitoring an automobile’s performance to collecting data about customers’ driving habits, providing instant insurance quotes, and communicating with things along a route
These capabilities can be offered as services, and the great thing is they can be updated and improved over time. Companies like Nike are already way ahead with products like Nike Fuel. Nike has secured a role in my life around my fitness goals, and given all the history it has collected about me, I am not likely to switch to a competitor anytime soon.
If you want to be in a position to tap in to the potential of IoE, it’s time to get thinking about the role your brand will play in this new world. One of the first steps in designing your customer experience is good information about the needs and trends of your customers. Cisco is helping through primary research such as the Connected Customer Experience Report for Health Care, with more industries to come. Please also follow us on the new Cisco Customer Experience Facebook page and Twitter for updated information.
In Part 2 of this blog series, I’ll provide specific details on how to get started in realizing the benefits of IoE for improving customer experience. In the meantime, I’d love your thoughts on how IoE will redefine customer experience as we know it.
This blog was co-authored by Dave Evans and Joseph Bradley, Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG).
To receive the most value from the Internet of Everything (IoE), business leaders should begin transforming their organizations based on key learnings from use cases that show how IoE works in the real world. Cisco IBSG’s Economics practice recently developed 50 private-sector use cases to determine the Value at Stake in the new IoE Economy. It determined that $14.4 trillion of value (net profit) will be created or will migrate among companies and industries based on their ability to harness IoE.
This blog will provide both near-term and more futuristic examples of IoE in healthcare and marketing/advertising to help you better understand the possibilities of IoE in different time frames. We provide both a futuristic view (Dave) and a near-term perspective (Joseph). Read More »
