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Next week, Microsoft will be hosting over 16,000 attendees from over 160 countries at their Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, Texas. Cisco is again a proud sponsor of this event and complete details about our participation are available on Cisco.com.

Stop by booth #1401 where Cisco will be demonstrating:

In addition to demonstrating the products and solutions that have catapulted Cisco to the #2 blade server vendor worldwide1, Rex Backman will be speaking on “Leveraging Cisco Datacenter Assets to Drive Private Cloud Revenue” Wednesday (4:00 – 5:00 PM, Hilton America Grand Ballroom D).

Both the Nexus 1000V and FlexPod won Best of TechEd 2013 awards. This was the third year in a row for a Cisco product to be so honored.

BOTE2013_Winner_ProdAwards

We’re looking forward to seeing you at WPC. Join the conversation on social media using the hashtag #CiscoWPC. If you won’t be able to join us and would like to learn more about how Cisco is changing the economics of the datacenter, I would encourage you to review this presentation on SlideShare  or my previous series of blog posts, Yes, Cisco UCS servers are that good. Or visit the Microsoft Cisco UCS portal.

  1. Source:  IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, Q1 2013 Revenue Share, May 2013


Authors

Bill Shields

Senior Marketing Manager

Product and Solutions Marketing Team

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We’ve had a great time at HITEC so far!  One of the common themes we’ve seen throughout the conference is the importance of an end-to-end connected hotel and the emergence of BYOC.  What’s BYOC?  It’s the result of BYOD.

Today, one quarter of mobile users own more than one mobile device, with an expectation of being constantly connected.  And with their own devices, they bring their own content (BYOC).  In the past few years, as mobile devices and content have flooded the market, hotels have seen revenues from content services such as pay-per-view drop significantly, as guests connect to their own content instead. Whether it’s already downloaded or streaming through Netflix, they want to be able to easily access their content when they want it.

Embracing BYOC

Make it easy for guests to BYOC and enjoy their own content to enhance the guest experience. This is an opportunity to create a new revenue stream with tiered access to wifi.  By offering basic, low bandwidth wifi for free and streaming, high bandwidth wifi for a premium (or as a perk for elite members), hotels can provide guests the option to easily access their own content while creating a revenue source.  In some cases, the model for BYOC is already there, it just needs to be presented to the guest in a different way: Do you want to just check your email and social sites?  Or do you want to stream videos on Hulu? Continue reading “Live from HITEC – BYOC and the Future of In-Room Technology”



Authors

William Gustafson

Vertical Solutions Architect

Cisco Systems

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As part of the Cisco Open Network Environment approach, there’s a lot of news coming out of Orlando from this year’s Cisco Live US event, and a lot of it involves OpenStack. OpenStack has never been more prominent at Cisco Live – and there’s much more to come. This is significant not only because it demonstrates our continued commitment to OpenStack but also the progress of our ongoing product integration efforts.

Slide07

We had multiple technical breakout sessions and technical seminars on OpenStack, delivered by Cisco OpenStack experts, throughout the event.  Here are a few of them:

We’re also featuring six product demonstrations with OpenStack integration. If you are in Orlando this week, please visit the World of Solutions Expo and see them all:

  • OpenStack with Cisco Nexus 1000v

We’re showing an OpenStack deployment on UCS hardware that uses Nexus 1000v as the underlying host virtual switch. Nexus1000v solution on KVM hypervisor is going to be available soon. We’ve developed an OpenStack Networking (i.e. Neutron) plugin that communicates with the Nexus 1000v VSM module and also configures VEMs on the host. We have introduced network profile and port profile constructs in OpenStack Networking as well as provided enhancement to the OpenStack Horizon (GUI) for Nexus 1000v.

  • OpenStack Networking and Cisco Nexus plugin

Our OpenStack Networking Cisco Nexus plugin can provide isolated tenant network segments on Nexus physical hardware by provisioning and de-provisioning VLAN’s. The plugin works with Nexus 3K/5K/6K/7K line of switches. This data sheet captures more information.

  • OpenStack and Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (Cisco IAC) turns OpenStack into a production-ready cloud platform – using our service catalog, orchestration, and cloud management software to complement and extend OpenStack functionality. At Cisco Live, we’re demonstrating how end users can order a virtual machine from the Cisco IAC portal, with OpenStack integration to Nova to fulfill this request.

  • Cisco UCS Manager and OpenStack

Cisco UCS Manager has extensive hardware provisioning and diagnostic capabilities that will soon be brought into OpenStack. What we’re showing this week is the ability of UCS Manager to detect chassis and blade hardware configurations and initiate an automated OpenStack node deployment. The UCS Manager OpenStack developer community information can be accessed here. Additionally, we also had a breakout session that walked through deploying OpenStack using our Cisco OpenStack Installer (COI): starting from bare-metal provisioning all the way through the deployment of the controller and compute nodes as well as storage, and networking. Visit here for COI setup instructions.

  • Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation with OpenStack

The newly announced Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation is our next generation network fabric solution that provides high performance converged networking across the data center. This week, we’re showing OpenStack Networking with Dynamic Fabric Automation to provision network overlay within the Fabric.

  • OpenStack integration with Cisco onePK

Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) architecture expands the capabilities of OpenStack Networking by providing a onePK plugin. We’ll be showing how various Cisco ONE elements can be programmed through OpenStack Neutron and offer Layer 2 and Layer 3 services in an OpenStack deployment. See here for more information.

At the recent Red Hat Summit , OpenStack was also very prominent; the launch of their commercially supported distribution of OpenStack (Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform) filled one of the few remaining gaps for mainstream customer deployment. We’re continuing to work with the OpenStack community and partners like Red Hat to advance the adoption and success of this open source cloud platform.  If you want to learn more about OpenStack and Red Hat on Cisco UCS, you can watch these videos from the Red Hat Summit.

This new level of project maturity as well integration with the Cisco Nexus and UCS platforms is accelerating customer adoption of OpenStack. Cisco Live is the obvious place to showcase our success and ongoing commitment to OpenStack.

Stay tuned for more from the OpenStack team at Cisco!



Authors

Rohit Agarwalla

Software Engineer

Office of Cloud CTO

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 Your car GPS alerts you on an accident and automatically found the best detour. The car ahead of you suddenly brakes and your car adjusts automatically.  Your car alerted your mechanic that something is ‘not quite right’ and started sharing diagnostic data, before you set out on your excursion.

During your road trip, your car guides you to the nearest gas station when you’re driving on empty in the middle of a strange town. You sneak in one last meeting before arriving at the campsite. Your car ensured that your conference call never had to reconnect even while going through the tunnel.

Now, if your car is going to be this smart, then it must be able to deliver critical information not only fast, but also securely and reliably.

This is the vision for the Cisco Connected Car.  Cisco’s expertise in delivering enterprise grade connectivity to Fortune 500 companies is being customized for passenger vehicles.  Cisco provides an end-to-end architecture that comprises an intelligent software client in the vehicle, a reliable roadside and backhaul framework and an automotive cloud infrastructure that is highly scalable, secure and fast.  This architecture is designed to seamlessly manage and deliver mission critical information to millions of connected cars.

This robust framework provides the foundation for a whole new suite of automotive applications.  Cisco believes that the Internet of Cars is an excellent use case of how The Internet of Everything will transform the way we drive and the automotive business.  The Internet of Everything brings together people, process, data and things to make networked connections between vehicles to vehicles, vehicles to people, and vehicles to everything a growing necessity. Cisco recently released an Internet of Everything Economic analysis that identified a $350 billion value at stake when connected commercial vehicles are connected.

Check out the Connected Car Demo featured at Cisco Live below

https://youtu.be/9f2QADTukz8

Learn more about the Cisco Connected Car vision by visiting the Cisco Internet of Things (IoT) Booth (#1558) within the Partner Pavilion at Cisco Live..  You’ll find interactive demos and cars talking to traffic lights and other cars.   Don’t forget to bring along your great ideas to enter our contest to win some great prizes!

You can also find more info on our website at

www.cisco.com/go/connectedcar



Authors

Helder Antunes

Senior Director

Corporate Strategic Innovations Group

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The verdict is in. The Ninth Judicial Circuit Court of Florida’s innovative interpretation services are revolutionizing the legal system throughout the Sunshine State.

On a public sector roundtable today at Cisco Live!, the Ninth Circuit’s Trial Court Administrator Matt Benefiel shared insights on the Florida court system and the challenges the state faced in providing equal services to its culturally and demographically diverse communities.

With citizens speaking English, Spanish, Creole, Mandarin, Russian, Vietnamese and a number of other languages, including those who communicate through American Sign Language (ASL), the state of Florida was spending millions of dollars each year on court interpretation services. Continue reading “Florida Shines with Connected Justice”



Authors

Patrick Finn

No Longer at Cisco

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This week I had the privilege of speaking at Cisco Live 2013 about the coming explosion in connectivity among people, processes, data, and things, which Cisco calls the Internet of Everything (IoE).

This massive technological and societal shift promises to transform and accelerate our lives in profound ways as the number of connected objects soars from 10 billion today to 50 billion (and rising) by 2020.

Yet even before I left for Orlando or gave my first Cisco Live presentation, I saw ample evidence that IoE is not just a vision of the future. Increasingly, it is the Internet of today—and evolving rapidly all around us.

IoE represents the orchestration of a bevy of emerging technologies, including Big Data analytics, video, mobility, cloud, and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. And it will ultimately infuse almost everything—roads, jet-engine parts, shoes, refrigerators, soil, supermarket shelves, you name it—with cheap, tiny sensors that will generate terabytes of data to be sifted for key insights.

Continue reading “The Internet of Everything: a Future Vision, Arriving Today”



Authors

Joseph M. Bradley

Global Vice President

Digital & IoT Advanced Services

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Hi Everyone! My trusty film crew and I are here at CiscoLive! Orlando. It has been great so far with the launch of the new Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series, Cisco 4451-X, Cisco ASR 1000-AX, and Sup8E for the Catalyst 4500!  Over the next few days we’ll be doing interviews with some of the awesome people here at Cisco who helped create these technologies, as well as other people doing interesting demos, and some with unique perspectives.

To kick things off, we get a little sittly with the 6800 and I got an interview with Shawn Wargo on what’s exciting about Instant Access.  Enjoy and let me know what you think.

Continue reading “Enterprise Networks at CiscoLive Day1 Recap”



Authors

Lauren Friedman

Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks

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As I partake in Cisco Live! activities, I wonder how the network team handles the thousands of geeks with their 3-4 geek toys each connecting to Wi-Fi from anywhere around the convention center.  I know a thing or two about how they went about planning, but hey, there is always Murphy’s Law that creeps up and nothing (always) works as planned…surprise surprise… think about the size of this conference and the World of Solutions (trade show floor) where so many of the partners want to show off their latest and greatest capability by setting up their own network. BAM: you have interference of all kinds all over the place. It’s a good thing the AP’s that are deployed have Cisco CleanAir® Technology to automatically classify and mitigates the interference. But wouldn’t it be great to be able to visualize the interference and the RF?

Enter visualization and Metageek.

It doesn’t take long for someone in the wireless industry to know that Metageek’s geeks know a thing or two about giving sizzle to RF and packets. We’ve certainly been around long enough, so that’s why we’ve been working with Metageek to cook up the Chanalyzer Pro with Cisco CleanAir® , the industry’s most advanced spectrum intelligence technology with the industry’s most visually captivating and comprehensive RF analysis tool. Perhaps you caught yesterday’s press release?

metageek Continue reading “Metageek Chanalyzer Pro + Cisco CleanAir = Powerful RF Visualization”



Authors

Sangita Mahishi

Product Manager

Wireless Networking Group

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This blog was originally published on the Huffington Post

As I watch the unfolding story of cyber outlaw Edward Snowden skipping around the globe, I’m struck by the talented young man who employers “fought over,” despite the fact that he had no formal STEM education. In contrast, the National STEM Conference in Austin last week brought together over 1,500 folks to ponder and discuss the critical need for more American students to be knowledgeable in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM.

While many young people today are brought up with some innate sense of these skills, as Snowden was, this conference dared us to imagine the innovation and creativity that could come from this future generation if they were provided the formal education to reach their full potential in these fields.

All the participants at the National STEM Conference brought diverse ideas to the table. Corporate leaders mixed with curriculum developers who chatted with government officials who socialized with teachers. More than one session and hallway chat highlighted the desperate need to interest and retain younger and younger students in STEM education. Fewer conversations occurred about the relevancy of field. Even fewer attendees spoke about their own education “journeys,” when a STEM learning moment drove them into their current career path.

Continue reading “To Ignite Interest in STEM, Remember Our ‘Sputnik Moment’”



Authors

Mary Anne Petrillo

Senior Marketing Manager, Digital Strategy

Corporate Social Responsibility