Today the Australian and New Zealand Governments, along with founding partner, Cisco, officially open the inaugural Telework Week 2012. In Australia we are kicking the week off with The Telework Congress at Melbourne University, which will include presentations from an exciting lineup of speakers, including the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
(If you have not yet signed up for Telework week, it’s not too late, Australians can do so hereand New Zealanders can do sohere)
Australian Prime Minister Gillard opens the Telework Congress and National Telework Week with a live Cisco TelePresence keynote from Canberra. Showcasing the technologies that underpin teleworking, Gillard is the highest possible champion for telework in Australia.
Last week, The Hub Melbourne launched Australia’s first Dialogue Café. Dialogue Café is home to a high-definition video conferencing network specifically designed to facilitate dialogue between people from across the world to address social issues. The Hub Melbourne’s first Dialogue Café exchange will be with Cleveland, Ohio for a discussion on social enterprise business models. National Australia Bank (NAB) helped fund the project and we contributed by providing state-of-the-art Cisco TelePresence.
See the press release and video from the launch of the Dialogue Café here.
Dialogue Café will allow Australians to meet face-to-face with a diverse group of citizens around the world to informally discuss ideas that address social, environmental and economic issues, such as youth literacy and the job skills required for work in the 21st century. The concept is a vision of individuals from different cities and cultures around the world to collaborate and share experiences, to learn from each other and to work together to make the world a better place.
SAP TechEd Madrid is a showcase for the Cisco UCS Server Platform
Another November and another SAP TechEd in Madrid. Cisco will again be showcasing UCS as a preferred platform for all SAP solutions. SAP is again highlighting SAP HANA in the test drive area in Madrid, and Cisco will have their medium SAP certified C460 on display in the test drive area.
Cisco currently has several certified solutions for SAP HANA. SAP has aptly names these T-shirt sized. In the small T-shirt size, Cisco has the C260. In the medium T-shirt size, is the C460. In the large and extra large T-shirt size, Cisco had the B440 configuration with EMC and NetApp as the storage partners. But SAP HANA is not the only solution on display in Madrid.
Cisco will also have in their booth #1054, a VCE VBlock rack and a NetApp FlexPod rack. Both of these will be staffed by experts from VCE and NetApp.
The IT Process Automation team will also be represented in the booth. SAP is now selling this product as part of their price list.
This weekend, as the United States celebrates Veterans Day, Cisco’s Global Government team would like to thank all those who have and continue to serve.
The world is continuously changing, bringing new and complex challenges and now, more than ever, communities and citizens need and expect a connected government, one that will enable local government to be there to help, to serve and to protect, no matter what the circumstance.
A connected government is about creating new possibilities for citizens and employees. It’s about breaking down silos between agencies and departments, providing cost-effective solutions, increasing operational efficiencies, and delivering better, faster, real-time services. It’s about understanding how the world is changing, and adapting to that change with scalable, long term, solutions made possible through technology.
As governments of today face these variety of challenges, new and innovative approaches are being implemented and some local governments are leading the way by deploying cloud and mobility solutions to overcome these challenges in a collaborative and timely manner.
Our latest public sector video highlights some examples of how these challenges are being addressed globally.
Would you believe me if I say that, using just a few lines of JavaScript and HTML5 you could transform the Photo Booth app (available on Mac OSX) into a cool web based application, or overlay real-time audio and video onto your favorite WebGL based 3D game canvas, or build a plugin-less version of WebEx? Through this blog, I attempt to take you on a journey into the latest disruptive Web Standard called WebRTC. My goal in writing this blog, is to provide readers with some background information and dive a bit deeper into what WebRTC has to offer from the standards, and application developer perspective.
Before I jump in, let me introduce Cisco’s WebRTC crew –
Cullen Jennings, Ethan Hugg, Enda Mannion, Suhas Nandakumar (that’s me :)).
Background
The Web is evolving at a pace faster than ever before. The last few years has seen tremendous innovations in the Web Technologies, Applications, Infrastructure and Services. The advent of HTML5 has redefined the way Web Applications work by bringing in the capabilities & richness of native applications to the Web platform.
HTML5 technologies such as Web Workers, Browser-Native Media, Web Sockets and the like are redefining the roles and capabilities of the browser and the Web, and creating experiences that rival native applications.
Building along similar lines, is the introduction of WebRTC/RTCWeb technological standards into the HTML5 standards basket, which is concerned with bringing rich real-time, interactive communications natively to the browsers.
The MPI-3.0 standard is now available in hardcover (it’s green!). The book is available for cost by Dr. Rolf Rabenseifner at HLRS; no profit is being made by these sales. Here’s an excerpt from Rolf’s original announcement:
As a service (at costs) for users of the Message Passing Interface, HLRS has printed the new Standard, Version 3.0 (852 pages) in hardcover. The price is only 19.50 Euro or 25 US-$.
At Cisco, we focus our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) work on specific areas, one of which is critical human needs. Or, more simply, food, water, shelter, and disaster relief.
A lot of the nonprofits we have partnered with over the years in this area, such as food banks and disaster response agencies, have been working round-the-clock dealing with the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.
Consider this a “shout out” to those organizations that are doing so much for those affected, whether in New York and New Jersey or the Caribbean. We will tell you how Cisco is supporting the relief effort in a future blog post.
Mariuxi Chicoaiiza and her son grabbed a hot lunch from the Red Cross Emergency Response Vehicle in Moonachie, NJ
Photo: Julie Daigle/American Red Cross
We are excited by the demand for Cisco’s Intelligent Automation for Cloud Starter Edition designed for pilot cloud deployments. Just Recently we announced the new version of our stack, Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) 3.1. The release of Cisco IAC 3.1 continues to demonstrate Cisco’s commitment to enterprise customers and service providers to successfully deploy and manage their private, public or hybrid cloud environments.
There are so many opportunities to build private, public, and hybrid clouds with our Cloud Portal, Process Orchestrator, Server Provisioner and Network Services Manager. Over a year ago we embarked on a journey to build cloud behaviors into our product through a concept we call Accelerator Packs which are XML files containing the service catalog, data model and orchestration workflows that snap into Cisco IAC Starter Edition or Cisco IAC 3.1. Accelerator packs extend Cisco IAC’s ability to manage multiple cloud environments such as Openstack, Amazon EC2 and VMware vCloud Director. Accelerator packs were designed to meet the needs of our differing customers: large service providers, or enterprises acting as a service provider, that desire completely custom behaviors, and other customers that are looking for pre-built and Cisco supported cloud-in-a-box solution.
Our platform is like the iPOD. When installed and turned on you have a blank slate, no music ships with that iPOD. Our automation packs are like the music and video files that upload and then your iPOD comes alive. With our 3.0 Starter Edition and the 3.1 release, we have productized many playlists for a starter and enterprise grade cloud. This means more than 70 pre-built portal services and over 150 orchestration workflows. But wait, there is one more thing: Cisco Advanced Services, Cisco partners and customers can build their specific content to extend the productized behaviors and content. It can be transportable from one instance of Intelligent Automation for Cloud to another for leverage and integration.
How do we encourage sharing between all the 100’s of folks building content for this platform?
This will be the place for Cisco, Partners and Customers to post, download, improve, upload content for sharing within the community. This content can only run on the Intelligent Automation for Cloud software, so if you would like purchase a version of the platform for non-production test and development use, please go here. While the solution accelerators are NOT open source, the use of this site is governed by these terms of use.
I am of often surprised by how much interest Intelligent Automation for Cloud receives from Service Providers and enterprises that are building ITaaS. I come across another individual who fits the mantle of Cloud Hero, someone who really stands out in their drive and passion to transform their organization and achieve a pragmatic cloud for their stakeholders. Enterprises have choices to either build their own private cloud their way (which many are doing) but they can also choose to leverage a service provider as well. There is a broad ecosystem of players in this space from of course Amazon, Rackspace, to traditional Telco’s to more focused and nimble smaller cloud service providers. How you as a service provider (or a cloud architect at your enterprise) think about and drive your organization toward the right choices for your cloud is absolutely critical the adoption, revenue, and ease in operational excellence.
Do you compete at the low end – what some call a commodity cloud? Do you go after complete multi-tenancy based upon Cisco Network architectures and compete on functionality? Do you think through how you are going to sell services and what your value proposition will be? Are there creative angles that you can enable with your Cloud Orchestration framework? Which of your internal systems do you really need to integrate with? All are great questions. Producing a revenue generating (or charged back private cloud) requires the attention to a multitude of details. Organizations need an energetic individual who speaks their mind and can lead an organization the right balance of business, technology, and ultimately success in monetizing the cloud.
