Today, there is lots of buzz around the big news from Cisco and our ecosystem partners with the launch of next generation VXI validated solutions.   If you missed our launch event, you can still get all the details online via our community.

Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) delivers desktop virtualization with secure access to data, voice, and video for fixed and mobile devices.    

Pretty cool but, why is virtualization important for government agencies? 

1. cost control, more than ever government agencies are focused on strategies to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs
2. flexibilty, allow government workers ability to work in different workplaces, from city hall to public works, with choices of different combinations of virtual desktops, voice, and video devices including latest smartphones, tablets, and Cisco Virtualization Experience Clients (VXC)
3. security, better security and control of information in the data center rather than distributed endpoints and with the ”bring your own device” (BYOD) to work phenomenon, security is more critical than ever
4. uncompromised, helping government agencies achieve mission objectives without compromising cost or resilience mandates

See more details below. Read More »

Tags: Borderless Networks, Cisco Validated Designs, collaboration, cost control, CVD, data center, desktop virtualization, desktop virtualization infrastructure, endpoints, government challenges, software appliance, thin client, thin clients, vdi, video, virtualization, virtualization experience infrastructure, Voice, vxi, waas, WAN, wide area network

In Part 1 of this post, I described how Cisco IT addresses the first key question—about reporting on voice service availability. In this Part 2, we’ll cover the second question: How does the call sound to all of the connected parties?

Cisco IT Metrics for Measuring Call Quality

Although it seems counter-intuitive, the best source of information about voice quality may not be the people who were on the call. Of course, user trouble tickets about problems such as static and echo can be important indicators of bigger issues in a voice system. But we often find that users don’t report voice quality issues, so additional tools are needed.

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Tags: coc, coc-collaboration, cuom, monitoring, mos, quality, UC, unified communications, Voice, voip

A unified communications solution provides the tools to work from anywhere on any device

Whether telecommuting is a privilege for your employees or a necessity for your small business, chances are good that at least a couple people in your company work from home or while on the road. Many small companies enable telecommuting via a virtual private network (VPN), which is a good first step in giving employees remote access to business resources on your network. But for folks to be as productive away from the office as they are in the office, they need additional collaboration tools provided by unified communications (UC). If you’ve built the right network for your business—one that supports your existing needs and future applications—you can more easily add UC to further untether your mobile employees. Read More »

Tags: small business, UC, unified communications, Voice

Measuring the quality of voice calls that are carried across a corporate network often comes down to just two key questions:

1. Availability: Will calls go through the first time and every time?

2. Quality Metrics: How do we know how well the call sounds to all of the connected parties?

In this two-part post, I’ll describe how Cisco answers these questions through the tools and processes we use for monitoring voice call quality.

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Tags: availability, coc, coc-collaboration, cuom, monitoring, UC, unified communications, Voice, voip

Here’s a Thursday quick quiz: What integrates social networking, voice, video, and unified communications into one workspace? Is it:

a)    Facebook
b)    Microsoft Office
c)    Cisco Quad

If you chose “c” then go get yourself an ice cream cone! But seriously, Cisco Quad, just like your ice cream cone, is pretty sweet—it’s a powerful enterprise platform that can improve business productivity, and accelerate growth by bringing content, business applications, communications, and enterprise social software into a single, intuitive experience.

So how does it work? Quad is a truly unified communications platform, with blogs and wikis. Users can also schedule meetings and engage in instant messaging, voice, and video communication, as well as manage and share documents.

Ready to leverage Quad at your own office? Right now, partners can take advantage of the QuadNow program, which offers Quad at a significant discount—95% off the list price.

Read on for details on the program, as well as to watch a demo of how Quad works.

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Tags: blogs, Cisco Quad, partners, unified communications, video, Voice