Gartner recently released their 2012 Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony, and I am incredibly pleased to share that Cisco was placed in the leader’s quadrant. These results come just after Cisco was recognized as a leader in Gartner’s 2012 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications. We believe that, together, these reports signal the momentum that Cisco is experiencing as a leader in Collaboration.
And yes, the momentum has been strong! This past April, Cisco achieved a new milestone by shipping more than 50 million IP phones. We’ve also gained significant traction with Cisco Jabber, which enables instant messaging, conferencing, voice and telepresence video on multiple devices, increasing 55% in license volume year over year.
Our history of success has been validated many times before, not only by sales growth and market share gains, but also acknowledged by technology analysts as an industry leading vendor in this space for more than ten years. Most of you have followed this validation and we believe this year’s Magic Quadrant is just another example.
At Cisco, we understand that our customers don’t make decisions on data, voice or video alone. Instead, they are looking for integrated solutions that deliver the rich media capabilities their users demand, and at the same time, provide the agility, resiliency and high quality experiences the business demands.
According to Gartner analysts Jay Lassman, Geoff Johnson, and Steve Blood in their Corporate Telephony report, “We evaluated vendors for their understanding of how customer needs are changing (both for users and the IT group responsible for managing telephony). It was especially important to see how vendors proposed to complement, or compete with, UC collaboration solutions.” Read More »
Return on investment has been around for ages, but the meaning of ROI is taking a spin in today’s business world. Companies are no longer purchasing solutions for technology improvement; they are investing in better industry processes as a whole. In return, they can achieve positive cash flows.
Concentra, a national healthcare company, provides a perfect example. With an outdated data center, the company had exhausted their power and cooling resources and was in need of reconstruction.
Concentra did some research and discovered that, by significantly investing in revamping their IT infrastructure, not only could they dramatically improve efficiencies and performance, but they could also create a positive cash flow for the company.
Furthermore, implementation doesn’t have to be risky. Concentra’s Senior Vice President and CIO, Suzanne Kosub, says, “With the right planning and financial analysis, we were able to show exactly how much the project would cost, how long it would take to pay for itself, and what the company would gain moving forward.”
The consumerization of information technology has been a boon to innovations in the workspace. With mobile phones and tablets, today’s employees and consumers carry a significant amount of technologies on them. Retailers can leverage these technologies to enable employee productivity and improve customer experience if it can be managed effectively an securely.
In my life, I had the honor of working on some of the most bleeding edge virtualization technologies of their day. My first was IBM’s VM, VSAM and a host of other v-words. My last was at XenSource (now Citrix) and Cisco, on what I still think is the most complete hypervisor of our age, true to its theoretical foundation in the Math paper I just mentioned.
Though Xen is arguably the most widely used hypervisor in the Cloud or sum of all servers in the world today, I actually think its most interesting accomplishment lies in what its founders just announced this week. Therefore, I want to extend my congratulations to my good friends Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt for the admirable work at Bromium with vSentry.
I think it is remarkable for two reasons. It addresses the missing part of what hypervisors are useful, which is security; for those of you that actually read Popek & Goldberg’s paper, you would note that VMM’s are very good at intercepting not just privileged but also sensitive instructions, and very few people out there, until now have focused on the latter, the security piece. But there is one more reason, in fact the key point of this paper, the necessary and sufficient conditions for a system to be able to have a VMM or hypervisor, and I am hoping the Xen guys who have done so well articulating that for real (not fictional or hyped) hypervisors, can also help sort our the hype from fiction in what is ambiguously called nowadays a “network hypervisor”.
Could this approach be what is actually missing, to sort out truth from hype in what we call SDN today? Is this the new age of hypervisors? Or is this just another useful application of an un-hyped hypervisor?
In this last part of this series I will discuss the top customer priority of visibility. Cisco offers customers the ability to gain insight into what’s happening in their network and, at the same time, maintain compliance and business operations.
But before we dive into that let’s do a recap of part two of our series on Cisco’s Secure Data Center Strategy on threat defense. In summary, Cisco understands that to prevent threats both internally and externally it’s not a permit or deny of data, but rather that data needs deeper inspection. Cisco offers two leading platforms that work with the ASA 5585-X Series Adaptive Security Appliance to protect the data center and they are the new IPS 4500 Series Sensor platform for high data rate environments and the ASA CX Context Aware Security for application control. To learn more go to part 2 here.
As customers move from the physical to virtual to cloud data centers, a challenge heard over is over is that they desire to maintain their compliance, security, and policies across these varying instantiations of their data center. In other words, they want to same controls in the physical world present in the virtual – one policy, one set of security capabilities. This will maintain compliance, overall security and ease business operations.
By offering better visibility into users, their devices, applications and access controls this not only helps with maintaining compliance but also deal with the threat defense requirements in our overall data center. Cisco’s visibility tools gives our customers the insight they need to make decisions about who gets access to what kinds of information, where segmentation is needed, what are the boundaries in your data center, whether these boundaries are physical or virtual and the ability to do the right level of policy orchestration to maintain compliance and the overall security posture. These tools have been grouped into three key areas: management and reporting, insights, and policy orchestration.
