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 »

Tags: collaboration, Gartner, HCS, IP Phones, jabber, telephony, UC, unified communications, virtualization, vxi

A large part of my job is explaining things to people. You can have the greatest technology in the world, but if you can’t explain to people why it is important, and how it will make a difference in their life or their business, then you have only done half the job.

That is why I am interested in different learning styles. One of the more widely-known models to describe different learning styles is Neil Fleming’s VAK/VARK model. Fleming postulates that there are three different types of learners: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. To vastly over-simplify Fleming’s work, some people learn best by seeing, others by listening and still others by touching and doing. While this might seem self-evident, understanding a student’s learning style can be a vital tool for teachers. Moreover, knowing your own learning style can significantly increase the amount you can learn and retain.

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Tags: byod, education, mobility, unified workspace, video, vxi

Just imagine.  It’s HR benefits enrollment season.  And you’ve left your annual selections to the last possible minute.  And it’s the last day of the enrollment period.  You find yourself feverishly dialing the support line, hoping that by some stroke of luck there’s still an HR analyst around to help you wade through an employee guide (that you were supposed to have read two weeks ago but didn’t).  Read More »

Tags: BPO, desktop virtualization, vdi, VMware, vxi

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Forecast projects 18-fold growth in global mobile internet data traffic from 2011 to 2016 – and predicts that mobile cloud traffic will account for 71% of total mobile data traffic by 2016. In a world where mobility is on the rise, enterprises are facing a rapidly evolving landscape, where more and more personal devices are coming into the workplace. Cisco’s Unified Workspace lets enterprises securely adapt to the increasing presence of personal devices, by offering a set of three Smart Solutions that integrate multiple personal devices securely and seamlessly to increase productivity and enhance collaboration.

BYOD Smart Solution

The BYOD Smart Solution provides end-to-end BYOD lifecycle management and keeps productivity moving. In addition, it streamlines IT management by helping to secure data with unified policy.

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Tags: byod, Enterprise, mobility, productivity, remote expert, Smart Solutions, unified workspace, vxi

………..New Cisco Data Center Security Enhancements

The workplace is changing fast. Workers are becoming increasingly mobile. The introduction of employee-owned consumer devices like tablets, is becoming the norm; in fact, the average number of devices used by knowledge workers is between 3 and 4 and rising. While IT organizations acknowledge the productivity, business agility and cost benefits these developments can bring, they are also concerned by the associated challenges. Not surprisingly, numerous industry research papers point to device, application and data security, and regulatory compliance as the biggest challenges for mobility and BYOD projects.

To address these security concerns many IT organizations are applying desktop virtualization or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technologies to ensure management and protection of the applications, data and content centrally in the data center, regardless of which device is used. But how can IT ensure that VDI deployments themselves are secure?

Today, Cisco announced new data center security enhancements that further protect VDI deployments. These new innovations enable more scalable, secure access to hosted virtual desktops and more robust protection of data center resources. These innovations also ensure that business critical applications and virtual desktops hosted within the data center can be better protected from other virtual desktops that have become compromised or infected. (Read also today’s blog from John N. Stewart , Cisco Sr.VP, Chief Security Officer  “Does Virtualization Improve Security ? “)

Deploying a data center infrastructure that has the built-in security capabilities to address these challenges needs to be an integral part of any VDI design. The Cisco VXI Smart Solution  is a comprehensive, secure desktop virtualization solution that addresses these security concerns in both Citrix XenDesktop and VMWare View deployments; you can find more information on the designs here.

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Tags: Cisco, data center, desktop virtualization, security, vdi, vxi