Avatar

In his blog post yesterday, Wim Elfrink shared the recent news that the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina and the State University of New York (SUNY) will join The Global STEM Alliance. Since I had someone ask me this week – “what exactly IS the Global STEM Alliance?”, here are the basics.

Unveiled last month at the Internet of Things (IoT) World Forum in Barcelona, Spain, The Global STEM Alliance is a joint initiative founded by The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy) and Cisco. This initiative recognizes the importance of working together, in both physical and virtual communities, to bring Internet of Things (IoT)-based curriculum resources, local and remote mentorship, and access to universities to the next generation of entrepreneurs, scientists, and innovators around the world. Continue reading “New World of Education Driven by Internet of Everything”



Authors

Kerry Best

Marketing Manager

Public Sector Marketing

Avatar

Forget about fighting crowds on Black Friday and maxing out your credit card on Cyber Monday. Join a movement that matters and kick off the giving season with #GivingTuesday on December 3. Just post or tweet about how you give back on any social media channel and use the hashtag #GivingTuesday.

Cisco is proud to be a partner — for the second year — in #GivingTuesday, an online effort to create a national day of giving on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving. We are participating in two ways — by promoting Cisco’s annual Global Hunger Relief Campaign (#CiscoHungerRelief) and by driving volunteerism at several of our sites.

Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers sorts food with employee volunteers at the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties
Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers sorts food with employee volunteers at the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties

Continue reading “Cisco Employees Line Up to Participate in #GivingTuesday”



Avatar

In previous blog posts, my colleagues have written about Cisco’s leadership in cloud infrastructure (#1) and cloud professional services (#1). And as I’ve blogged about in the past, we have a growing portfolio of cloud and infrastructure management software solutions. Now Cisco is getting recognition as a strong performer in cloud software innovation and strategy.

Cisco was among the select companies that Forrester invited to participate in its new Forrester Wave report, The Forrester Wave: Private Cloud Solutions, Q4 2013. The report focuses on commercial software offerings for enterprise private cloud deployments, ranking the 10 most significant vendors (from an initial field of 27) based on 61 different criteria – with more than 100 customer interviews. You can download the full report here.

In this evaluation, Cisco received the highest score in strategy and is in the top three overall for our current offering.   Continue reading “New Independent Analyst Research on Private Cloud Software Solutions”



Avatar

BayThreat 2013, the fourth annual information security conference in the San Francisco South Bay, will be held December 6th & 7th. Many South Bay security professionals attend this technical conference. Cisco is a proud sponsor and my colleague, Joe Karpenko, and I will be presenting Beware of Network: Unleash your Network on Threats and Adversaries.

We’ll discuss the results of Cisco’s ongoing threat analysis research and how to leverage network instrumentation as critical incident response components that will help protect your network infrastructure, proprietary and customer information, servers, clients, and users. Network instrumentation is the basis of many of our incident response recommendations and ideally should be implemented while we are preparing to respond to incidents, not in the middle of one. Once we’ve instrumented the network we can leverage the information it provides to gain insight into and quickly respond to threats.

The full list of presenters for the two day conference is here. Please join us and all of the other attending security professionals on December 6 & 7, 2013 at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, CA for BayThreat 2013!



Authors

Randy Ivener

Incident Manager, Applied Intelligence Team

Security Intelligence Operations

Avatar

MSFT Logo New

The Microsoft ecosystem continues to be an important area of focus with our Cisco Datacenter product and solution teams. UCS, Nexus, UCS Management, and ACI teams have continued to innovate and launch new offerings during the past few months. Let’s take a look at our recent happenings and launches that can help enable your organization to deliver an optimal datacenter environment for your Microsoft platforms:

1. PASS, Microsoft SQL Server, and Cisco’s Unified Datacenter…

SQLPASS

We’ve ramped up our focus on Microsoft’s SQL Server platform! Investments in PASS (Professional Association of SQL Server), Pass Summit 2013, and the PASS Virtualization Chapter afford us the opportunity to educate this world-wide BI and Data Management audience on UCS, Nexus, FlexPod, and VSPEX. Stay tuned for more from us, too as Microsoft gets closer to shipping their SQL Server 2014 platform.

2. Cisco and the Microsoft Cloud OS Launch…

CloudOSOccurring around the world during the November 2013 to January 2014 timeframe is Microsoft’s Cloud OS launch – the coming out party for Windows Server 2012 R2 as well as System Center 2012 R2. Cisco will be a local sponsor at many of these events – in fact as of this writing we have wrapped up our participation at multiple events in Canada, Germany, and South Africa. Please stop by your local Microsoft Cloud OS event and visit the Cisco booth to learn more as well as listen to Cisco’s Chief Technology & Strategy Officer Padmasree Warrior on our Microsoft alliance and datacenter solutions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LxJRcTPd1w&feature=youtu.be

3. Cisco, Microsoft, and the Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)…

SatyaJohnMicrosoft was a key strategic partner at our recent New York City ACI launch with strong support from key Microsoft leaders such as Satya Nadella, Executive Vice President of their Cloud and Enterprise business unit. Satya shared the stage with Cisco CEO John Chambers in announcing ACI to the public.  In addition, Microsoft’s Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, System Center blogged on the event and created a video on his ACI thoughts.  Microsoft – with their key platforms of Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint – sees ACI as a way to deliver ‘…datacenter without boundaries for our customers…

Continue reading “Cisco’s Microsoft Momentum Continues…”



Authors

Rex Backman

Senior Marketing Manager, Big Data Solutions

Data Center and Cloud

Avatar

 

As we head towards Thanksgiving, it amazes me how fast time flies. 4th of July was a few weeks ago, right? I have yet to start holiday shopping, although the conversation at least came up this week. Wait! There is so much to get done before Christmas, so much to do with the Cisco Small Business Team! But yes, I digress.

This week, my colleague Product Manager, Nasser Tarazi, who manages the Cisco Small Business Wireless Access Points, created a short video covering how Cisco’s Single Point Setup makes the configuration, deployment and management of multiple access points a snap. In less than 5 minutes, he had a secure wireless network with two access points. All of configuration was done through a setup wizard that guides you step-by-step how to configure the access points.  They automatically optimize the key radio settings so that is one thing less for you to do.  I could go on and on about how easy and fast it was, but it would be easier for you just to watch the video.

The bottom line is that Single Point Setup saves you time and money and you don’t need to be or have an expert to configure these products.  In fact, this is a consistent trait for all of Cisco Small Business Wireless, Switching and Routing Portfolios. We believe that making our Small Business portfolios are among the easiest to deploy, configure and setup as we have made it one of the top priorities.

Please take a look when you have a moment. If you have a little more time, remember to take a look at our list of Cisco Small Business online emulators. These emulators do just that, it provides a simulation of how the router, access point and of course switches can be set-up, configured and managed, all in an intuitive way.

Nasser would also like to note that the AP541N is now End-of-Life. The replacement products are the WAP551 and the WAP561.

Thanks for taking a look.

Marc



Authors

Marc Nagao

Product Manager

Small Business RV Series Routers

Avatar

Let’s talk about one of the biggest IT trends out there: THE CLOUD. And, let’s talk about why it should matter to you as you’re poking around and researching Cisco products. As you probably know, “the cloud” is more than just one of the hottest buzzwords out there – it’s where the market is shifting towards, and quickly. But you might be wondering…why is Cisco, the market leader in networking hardware, talking about cloud?

One word: CSR1000V.

If you need a primer on the CSR, check out this quick video below. The Cliff Notes version is that Cisco basically took its IOS XE operating system from the ASR1000 and created a virtual router, and voila – behold the CSR1000V, providing virtualized routing and security capabilities in the cloud.

As you might’ve heard through the grapevine, the CSR can now be deployed in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Now that we’re one of the cool kids in the AWS ecosystem, it was a great time to launch the CSR1000V (AMI version) at the 2nd annual AWS re:Invent conference held on November 12-15. re:Invent is AWS’s global community (customer and partner) conference targeted at the developer crowd. This year’s attendance was 9,000 strong, evenly split amongst startups, midsize companies, and large enterprises. Continue reading “Cisco Virtual Router Debuts at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas”



Authors

Jolene Tam

Product Marketing Manager

Security

Avatar

New World of Education Driven by Internet of Everything

Last week at Cisco’s Customer Briefing Center in New York City, I had the pleasure of announcing to international media the proliferation of our Global STEM Alliance that brings world-class education to students of all ages most anywhere. We are now experiencing a multiplier effect with this vital program driven by the Internet of Everything (IoE) to fulfill the unmet needs of highly skilled workers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

This week’s developments dramatically build on the initial Global STEM Alliance unveiled last month at the Internet of Things (IoT) World Forum in Barcelona, Spain, by its inaugural partners, The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy), Malaysia, the city of Barcelona and Cisco.

Continue reading “Global STEM Alliance Now Spans Four Continents to Meet Demand for Future Scientists, Entrepreneurs and Innovators”



Authors

Wim Elfrink

Executive Vice President, Industry Solutions & Chief

Globalisation Officer

Avatar

Last month I attended a summit of subject matter experts on securing the Internet of Things (IoT). At first, I thought I had the wrong room, because it seemed that everybody other than me was an architect or engineer working for a device manufacturer, and as a result the conversation was dominated by placing security controls into the devices, themselves. In contrast, I tend to approach the issue from the perspective of protecting the core of the network. But just when I was beginning to think I had wasted an hour-long drive and was going to be bored out of my skull all day, a few of us started debating the issue and the conversation began to evolve.  Before long, we had found common ground in the fact that security controls are all about trust relationships – ‘I trust you, therefore I will allow you to do that’.

Now trust is a funny thing, because by its very nature it can neither be one-sided nor one-dimensional. Instead, it must be built into every aspect of the transaction; a sort of “digital handshake” to ensure all is well before doing business. In other words, each of our pre-conceived perspectives was correct, yet we were all being stubborn and short-sighted! Continue reading “Embracing IoT? Security Must Be at the Core”



Authors

Jeff Aboud

IoT Security Manager

Internet of Things Technologies