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Dr. William A. Kennedy knows how having a sick child can burden a family. In the 1970s, his brother suffered from metastatic Ewing’s sarcoma. Getting him the care he needed at a hospital 25 miles away was a full-time job for their mother and required help from other relatives and friends.

Today, Dr. Kennedy, a board-certified pediatric urologist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, is using Cisco technology to provide specialty “care-at-a-distance.” The result: children and families don’t need to leave their communities and miss significant time from school and work to receive world-class specialty care.

Dr. Kennedy with a patient. Photo courtesy Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.

In a blog post today on the Huffington Post, Dr. Kennedy writes that he has been able to reduce wait times for patients by running weekly “telehealth” clinics between Packard Children’s in Palo Alto and Pediatric Group of Monterey, nearly 100 miles to the south. Cisco technology “yields a high-quality clinical interaction that rivals the traditional in-person doctor visit,” Dr. Kennedy writes.

Please read Dr. Kennedy’s full post on the Huffington Post.



Authors

Alexis Raymond

Senior Manager

Chief Sustainability Office

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This post is part of a new series featuring Brian Higgins, Principal Healthcare Consultant at Comstor US. Comstor is a recognized global leader in Cisco product distribution and an established provider of networking and advanced technology solutions. Brian is a sales and business development executive with 35 years of experience in the global healthcare information technologies industry. He has a proven and successful track record of establishing and executing go-to-market strategies for both start-ups and well-established companies in the healthcare space. He is also a trusted sales and business development advisor to information and medical technology companies selling into all segments of the healthcare industry.

I recently hosted a webinar on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) for a community of technology resellers.

HIPPA and HITECH are the US version of “privacy and security” laws that are getting so much attention in our industry. I thought I had a reasonably good grasp on the subject, but my intuition was that the subject was complex enough to warrant an expert. We brought in a nationally recognized expert by name of Bob Chaput, Founder and CEO of Clearwater Compliance LLC, and (luckily for me) he did an outstanding job of explaining a very complicated set of rules and regulations in a simple and easy to understand way. 

While it was interesting to learn more about specifically who is covered by these laws and what their specific obligations are, the more enlightening discussion related to how far behind most industry stakeholders are in their compliance and the resulting economic ramifications.

For those of us in the channel that recognize the enormous opportunity of delivering technology to the healthcare sector, this is an important subject about which to have a first level of understanding. It not only gives us the credibility that our healthcare end users are looking for in a vendor, it also represents an opportunity to deliver valuable advice and services.  Finally, it’s a law that we might fall under if we are in the business of maintaining healthcare communications or information technology (HCIT) platforms, or delivering cloud services.

Similar privacy and security laws exist around the world, requiring partners to play close attention to what is occurring in their regions relative to this topic. Continue reading “What Partners Need to Know Before Selling into the Healthcare Sector”



Authors

Brian Higgins

Principal Healthcare Consultant

Comstor & The Brian Higgins Group

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On this week’s Engineers Unplugged, HDS’s Andrew Nielsen (@virtualkjell) and Cisco’s J Metz (@drjmetz) discuss a recent announcement and validated design, Hitachi UCP on Cisco UCS. Here are the basics:

 

Andrew Nielsen from HDS and J Metz from Cisco discuss recent announcements.
Andrew Nielsen from HDS and J Metz from Cisco discuss recent announcements.

Welcome to Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple:

  1. Episodes will publish weekly (or as close to it as we can manage)
  2. Subscribe to the podcast here: engineersunplugged.com
  3. Follow the #engineersunplugged conversation on Twitter
  4. Submit ideas for episodes or volunteer to appear by Tweeting to @CommsNinja
  5. Practice drawing unicorns

Questions for Andrew or J? Follow the conversation on Twitter! Follow us @CiscoDC. Ideas for an upcoming show? Let me know!



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As expected a lot of talks, sessions and interest this year about the reality of the  cloud deployment and hybrid cloud  at Gartner DC Las Vegas.

Cisco is now perceived as a very credible player in cloud – In fact a quick electronic poll  from the audience during one of  the key notes speechs ranked Cisco as the number 2 amongst the vendors.

As a proof point of Cisco influence in the cloud computing evolution, both David Yen , Cisco SVP & GM Data Center Group, and John Manville Cisco SVP , Global Infrastructure for IT, presented Cisco vision and achievement in terms of infrastructure and foundation for cloud  : Network programmability , and convergence infrastructure are at the core of the efforts driven by these Cisco executives and solution teams to deliver robust infrastructures for both our customers and Cisco IT organization.

If you are interested to know more about these sessions, stay tuned. I will post in the following days on this same blog the  slide decks from David and John ,as well as two short and very  interesting videos that I did these days:
-One one hand a short dialog between Giuliano Di Vitantonio, Cisco VP Marketing Data Center and Cloud,  and David Yen.


-On the other hand a summary of the presentation by John Manville (see introduction blog from Omar Sultan Living with the Programmable Cloud)

Along the same lines , I also invited a panel of bloggers and tweeps , who attend Gartner DC  to share with us their reaction to these presentations and  their view on the current challenges faced by the IT organizations.

In this video you will hear from Presidio Steve Kaplan (@ROIdude), VCE Jeramiah Doodley (@jdooley_clt)  , Cisco Jason Schroedl (@Jschroedl)  and Todd Brannon (@tobranno) .

Continue reading “Cisco at Garner DC Las Vegas : A pragmatic view and approach of the evolution of the data center in the era of clouds an …”



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The United States continues to be the world’s largest manufacturing economy, employing nearly 17 million people – about 1 in 6 private sector jobs. However,  the modern manufacturing industry is struggling to attract the highly skilled workers it needs  for the tech-savvy, evolving role required in today’s manufacturing operations.

Historically, manufacturing jobs were thought of as mind-numbing, remedial tasks done in dark and dingy factories. This “old” perception of a manufacturing environment creates a barrier to attract new employees to the manufacturing environment we see today – clean and safe with employees managing advanced machinery that drives innovation and productivity.  Cisco, together with key manufacturing organizations, such as The Manufacturing Institute, are working to educate a new generation of workers on the needs of today’s manufacturers and get them excited about this challenging, but very rewarding career.

Cisco solutions are at the forefront of this evolved role within manufacturing, especially as more companies demand efficiency and collaboration among their workforce.  For example, manufacturers are constantly seeking new ways for their employees to become more productive, while streamlining their day-to-day tasks. To be more efficient and collaborative, employees must be connected to share ideas and insights. So you simply just connect them, right? If you consolidate the intellectual capital of all the workers into a central repository and give your employees access; then they can start sharing insight on how to do their jobs better and smarter.  Simply put, it’s just adding non-networked people to the network.  And Cisco is working with numerous manufacturing companies across the country to make this key transition needed to support the quality control and productivity improvements plants demand with the collaboration younger workers expect.

Continue reading “Manufacturing’s Evolving Workforce”



Authors

Bob Dean

Executive Director, Manufacturing Industry

Business Transformation Organization

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I’m one of the lucky ones. Many of my peers work in companies that aren’t as forward looking about IT as Cisco is. Where they struggle to keep up with the demands of today’s employees, I’m fortunate to work in an environment that offers workspace flexibility and access to telepresence, web conferencing, and a social platform based largely on the employee’s choice of device.

That’s not to say that we’ve got it all figured out at Cisco. As I onboard new college graduates, I, too, find myself struggling to meet their expectations. I think we’ve entered a phase in which all business and IT leaders will lag slightly behind the workplace expectations of the new generation.

To better understand this fundamental shift, we recently commissioned Forrester Research to look specifically at mobility, virtualization, and other enterprise-level technology initiatives.  Continue reading “Mobility and Virtualization in the Next-Generation Workplace”



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As 2012 comes to a close, it’s a good time to reflect on what we’ve experienced in data centre virtualisation over the past 12 months.

Let’s start with our customers. We’re seeing Australian businesses of all sizes and industry verticals using Cisco UCS to gain solid advantages to their business and lowering IT costs.  And while market share can vary from quarter to quarter, we are enormously pleased that for the first time leading analyst firm IDC has reported that Cisco is the current market share leader for x86 blade servers in Australia (Source: IDC Q3 CY2012 x86 Blade Server Market Share, Nov. 28, 2012).

Continue reading “Cisco Celebrates Progress in the Australian Server Market”



Authors

Linda Horiuchi

Senior Manager, Australia and New Zealand PR

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In Cisco Data Center Services, we’ve been building towards this for the past 3 or 4 years.  We’re formalised our approach over the past year.  Our early adopter customers have already given us terrific feedback.

And tomorrow I’ll start telling you all about this via a series of blogs.  Follow me on Twitter (@StephenSatCisco)  for a quick summary as the series progresses.

Now, if you are at the Gartner Data Center conference this week in Las Vegas, please do drop by the Cisco stand and seek out the Cisco Services team and my good colleague, Erik Vogel, a director in our Data Center Services practice team.  He’ll tell you all about it today!

So watch this space – you heard it here first!!  (Wow, I’ve always wanted to say that :-))



Authors

Stephen Speirs

SP Product Management

Cisco Customer Experience (CX)