Avatar

Red Hat SummitThis week kicked off with a trip to Boston and Red Hat Summit where Cisco is talking about our partnership with Red Hat on open source projects including OpenStack, and the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. I’m here to highlight some of our Nexus 1000V virtual networking innovations that involve Red Hat open source distributions of red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), KVM and OpenStack.

Best of Tech Ed AwardAs you probably know, Cisco started shipping the Nexus 1000V virtual switch for Microsoft Hyper-V this month (and it won a Best of TechEd Show award at Microsoft’s TechEd conference). But open source virtualization and cloud infrastructure platforms continue to be an important strategy for our entire data center portfolio here at Cisco. KVM will be the next hypervisor that we’ll ship our Nexus 1000V virtual switch on, and the rest of the Red Hat open source cloud infrastructure will be an important part of our open strategy, and that includes Red Hat Linux and their Red Hat OpenStack distribution.

Continue reading “Red Hat Summit, Nexus 1000V and All Things Open”



Authors

Gary Kinghorn

Sr Solution Marketing Manager

Network Virtualization and SDN

Avatar

What if you could apply application based Quality of Service (QoS) with just a couple clicks? Seriously. If you’ve read this far, I’ll tell you: ActionPacked! Networks, a Cisco Developer Network (CDN) registered partner, recently hosted my colleague, Bob Nusbaum for an awesome webinar and demo.

LiveAction Flow View
LiveAction handles QoS, NBAR2, and other AVC features easily and comprehensively

Bob described Cisco’s perspective on the future of routing – it’s all about applications! – and ActionPacked! gave a great demo of LiveAction software. Our attendees learned how to securely:

  1. Discover and prioritize 1400+ applications in your network
  2. Re-route groups of applications based on real-time network performance
  3. Reduce bandwidth expansion costs

The webinar is a deep-dive on Cisco AVC and explains how to simplify and speed delivery of applications with Cisco ISR-AX Routers and ActionPacked! LiveAction software.

Block Bit Torrent with AVC & LiveAction
If you don’t have time for a 60-minute webinar, take a look at the great video combining Cisco AVC and LiveAction to detect and block Bit Torrent.

Continue reading “Rule the World of Application QoS with Cisco AVC and ActionPacked! Networks”



Avatar

My father taught me at a young age that hard work pays off.   Over the years, this lesson has proven to be true, again and again. 

I reflected on this important lesson this week when new Q1 data from Synergy Research Group showed that Cisco has taken over leadership of the cloud infrastructure equipment market, just one quarter after IBM’s share of the market had hit a two-year high.

Cisco-WAASWhile market share can certainly fluctuate, the report is a strong testament to the strategy, focus, execution – and yes, hard work – of Cisco’s entire cloud team, which has enabled our enterprise and service provider partners to build and deploy best-in-class cloud computing solutions

According to Synergy, the first quarter was an exceedingly poor one for the server market, and as a consequence IBM and HP both took a big hit in cloud infrastructure equipment revenues. Meanwhile Cisco had a very strong quarter in public cloud networking infrastructure, helping it to grab more than 15% share of the overall cloud infrastructure equipment market.

 “Cisco has been steadily and consistently building its share in this market and now finds itself in the leadership position,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst.



Authors

Jeff Spagnola

Vice President of Sales, Cloud and Managed Services

Cisco Service Provider market segment

Avatar

When you think of the Caribbean, you may think vacation. But for Curaçao Technology Exchange (CTEX), business thrives in paradise.

Curaçao is growing in importance in the international finance and commerce industry, which is why the island needed the ability to support booming business. Built in a carefully planned location, CTEX chose the island of Curaçao to house the Caribbean’s first—and only—tier IV data center.

The lack of technology in the area has been a hindrance to business. Building this new, top-of-the-line data center will enable world-class collocation, security management, archival, disaster recovery, and managed services—allowing customers to rely on CTEX for high-end IT services in ways previously unattainable in the region.

“The location, connectivity, and laws make Curaçao one of the safest locations in the world to house critical information assets.”

 – Anthony DeLima, Chairman and CEO, CTEX

 Learn more about how Cisco is help CTEX provide bigger and better IT services from the article featured in Unleashing IT: World-class technology services in paradise.

 



Authors

Adrian den Hartog

Senior Marketing Manager

Field Marketing US Commercial

Avatar

chowj

By Joe Chow, VP/GM, Cisco Connected Devices BU

Part of the tech-buzz at this week’s Cable Show, in Washington, will be about customer premises equipment – set-tops, cable modems, gateways.

Of the CPE buzz, half of it will be about “RDK,” and the other half about how to divvy up what functions live in the house (via the CPE), vs. in the cloud.

That’s our prediction, anyway.

Let’s start with RDK buzz. It stands for Reference Design Kit, and is an industry effort to a) build new cable-specific hardware faster, and b) get new services and apps to the market faster, on that hardware. It was spearheaded last year by Comcast, and is expected to widen to other service providers.

At the Cable Show, we’ll be showcasing Continue reading “What’s New With Cisco, CPE, & RDK, You Ask?”



Authors

David Yates

as Director of Service Provider Video Marketing at Cisco

SP360

Avatar

Last week I attended the Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise (CITE) expo in San Francisco – home of delicious seafood and great surfing. At the conference I had a chance to talk about the changing tide of IT and how we can prepare for the next big swell.

Throughout history there are moments in time that define innovation.

In 1939, two guys in a garage built the first audio oscillator. It was sold to Disney and helped create Fantasia. In 1973, Motorola built the first mobile phone.  It weighed 2.5 pounds and was 9 inches long.  It let you talk for 30 minutes.  Then you needed 10 hours to charge it.  This was innovation at its finest.

Now today, the Internet of Everything is connecting people, processes, data and devices like never before. We can either ride this wave or get slammed.  Continue reading “Riding the Internet of Everything Wave”



Avatar

Cisco® TelePresence® has transformed the way we collaborate—enabling immersive, face-to-face meetings at a distance, and access to remote experts anywhere in the world. What if that experience was combined with robotic technology, to give the remote user “location spontaneity”—the ability to move around a faraway space…have a chance encounter in the hallway or tour the factory floor?

That is why Cisco’s new joint effort with iRobot—demonstrated publicly this week for the first time—is so exciting: We’ve created a mobile Cisco TelePresence unit that brings collaboration to you—or, conversely, brings you to wherever you need to collaborate. Called iRobot Ava 500, this high-definition video collaboration robot combines Cisco TelePresence with iRobot’s mobility and self-navigation capabilities, enabling freedom of movement and spontaneous interactions with people thousands of miles away.

Continue reading “New Video Collaboration Robot: TelePresence Gets Moving”



Authors

Avatar

Nobody can question that location-based services are hot these days–especially in the retail space.

Retail in general is under increasing competition and pressure to maintain its revenues and profitability, especially physical retailers who are threatened by online businesses, ranging from one person outfits to global giants.

Physical retailers big and small are all facing the same phenomenon: smartphone users walking around their stores (inside and out). Google and Nielson recently reported that shopping queries are two times as likely to be in store. So people are actively on their smartphones in stores. The significance of this statistic to retail is that there is a huge opportunity here to optimize dollars, be it marketing funds or operational savings–all of which can be enabled by location-based services.

iStock retail

Cisco’s location based services using the Mobility Services Engine and the Connected Mobile Experiences solutions is market leading and generates a lot of interest among customers and I get the privilege of speaking with many retail business executives on a global basis.

In retail, the two big rocks are revenue and loyalty.  The Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) solution helps line of business leaders reach those goals by aligning with the mobility trend. Armed with the location-based services of CMX, you can captivate your customers by creating personalized, context-based engagement to boost loyalty, while generating location analytics data on customer movement patterns and behavior for optimizing operational costs. Continue reading “Location Based Analytics and Services – Retail – What are the practical uses?”



Authors

Brendan O'Brien

Director Global Product Marketing

Connected Mobile Experiences

Avatar

ConradBy Conrad Clemson, VP of strategy, Cisco Service Provider Video Technology Group 

Well, we’re nothing if not patient. For those of us who’ve been active in cable VOD (video on demand) since it began, 12+ years ago, it’s totally great to finally see glimmers of acknowledgement for the category. It’s like knowing your kid is truly gifted at something, but not seeing validation of it until a dozen years after it seemed “time.”

I’m talking about this item, from the May 20 edition of the New York Times. Titled “Viewers Start to Embrace Television on Demand,” it plucks out all kinds of killer data points — like the fact that VOD views of ABC shows are up 32% (without fast-forward) over the last year. Cisco’s own VNI forecast issued 5/29 shows that VOD will be the fastest growing and highest penetrated residential TV service globally, with 402 million subscribers, reaching 29% of digital TV households globally by 2017.

Of course what started as movies on demand has changed over the years. It’s now more like Continue reading “The Cloud, the TV, and The Cable Show”



Authors

David Yates

as Director of Service Provider Video Marketing at Cisco

SP360