Year: 2013

March 26, 2013 3 Comments
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Staying Ahead of the Curve With Next Gen Skills

 While more than 99 percent of things in the physical world today are still not connected to the Internet, the phenomenon called “The Internet of Everything” will soon wake up everything imaginable. As the network evolves and changes, becoming more sophisticated, the job roles and education requirements of network engineers also continue to change.

Gartner Research forecasts that worldwide IT spending will reach $3.7 trillion in 2013. In order to maximize the ROI of IT solutions, education is imperative. Companies require properly trained IT professionals to deploy, support and troubleshoot new and emerging technologies.

To enable our global community of partners and customers to realize the benefits of new networking solutions, we are pleased to announce the redesign of the Cisco Associate-level career certification programs and the evolution of the CCNA certification to CCNA Routing and Switching certification. Check out the video below to learn more about the changes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdeuArqolpU

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Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn

Vice President and General Manager

Cisco Services

March 25, 2013 7 Comments
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Inflection Point: Cisco Sets the Pace of Mobility Innovation

At Cisco, we take very seriously our ability to anticipate and catch market transitions. A few years ago, we saw a market transition that would affect our Service Provider customers in the area of Mobility. With 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi deployments rising, the world was clearly shifting from Coverage, Capacity to Services… and the importance of customer experience rising amongst operators worldwide. As a result, we set in motion a new strategy for our Service Provider Mobility Group (SPMG). The key to our strategy was to develop an architecture that would enable Service Providers to offer a differentiated experience to their customers.

Our Mobility CTO Paul Mankiewich refers to the new mobility operator requirements as “the Grand Challenge.” The inflection point is here. Not only do our key SP customers recognize it, but our competitors are also seeing the tremendous business opportunity represented by the “Grand Challenge,” especially as it relates to emerging Monetization use cases that are propelling the market’s rapid growth.

Our vision to Continue reading “Inflection Point: Cisco Sets the Pace of Mobility Innovation”

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Kelly Ahuja

Senior Vice President

Service Provider Business, Products, and Solutions

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CyberPatriot Program Showcases Future of Cybersecurity Workforce

DSC_0942_2March 14 – 15 marked the National Finals Competition of CyberPatriot, the largest high school cyber defense competition in the United States.

With students crowded around laptops, routers and clocks counting down, teams were given a business scenario. Told that they were newly hired IT professionals managing the network of a small company, they were given 12 virtual machines that they had to wipe of the most vulnerabilities in the shortest amount of time.

Taking place just outside of Washington, D.C., as the teams raced to defend their networks from attack, the event resembled a scene out of the show 24. And if it showed us anything, it’s that our future cybersecurity workforce is bright. Continue reading “CyberPatriot Program Showcases Future of Cybersecurity Workforce”

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Patrick Finn

No Longer at Cisco

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Maximizing well-being through technology

While many wish to prevent illness and combat health issues, Healthways is proactively promoting well-being through their commitment to “making the world a healthier place—one individual at a time.” Based in Franklin, Tennessee, Healthways has been operating for over 30 years in delivering health expertise to organizations and reducing health-related costs.

Customers use a web-based technology platform from Healthways called Embrace to collaborate and manage personalized health support. Since beginning, the number of users accessing Embrace has increased significantly – which means that Healthways must keep up with the demand. Rather than attempt to continue supporting their legacy infrastructure, Healthways decided to use Cisco® Technology to reinforce their infrastructure and get four times the capacity – therefore allowing access and providing services for all 10 million users.

In addition, by implementing the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (UCS), based on Intel® Xeon® processors, to increase capacity and strengthen the data center’s architecture, Embrace has realized an 18-20 percent reduction in power and cooling costs and a 20 percent decrease in hardware and licensing costs.

To learn more about their newly-found IT advantages, read Healthways’ story from Unleashing IT.

 

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Adrian den Hartog

Senior Marketing Manager

Field Marketing US Commercial

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Outtakes from #VM13 (Varrow Madness): Cloud Views, Chicken and Waffles, and More

Just back from Varrow Madness 2013 (#VM13) in Durham, NC, a local event for me, and a great opportunity to connect with customers, partners, and cloud knowledge. Here are some highlights.

 Rusty Buzhardt (Cisco), Jason Nash (Varrow), Elijah Stukenborg (Chiquita)

Rusty Buzhardt (Cisco), Jason Nash (Varrow), Elijah Stukenborg (Chiquita)

Really enjoyed an inspirational keynote by VCE President Frank Hauck and the opportunity to learn about some new technologies that are emerging in the Data Center space. Look for upcoming #EngineersUnplugged episodes for some discussions around NetScaler, Flash Virtualization, and more.

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Amy Lewis

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Now Available On-Demand, The Cisco Virtual Forum for Education Leaders

Edu-Virtual-Forum 540x420 Cisco Now v3The Cisco Virtual Forum for Education Leaders, 2013 opened on March 19th to rave reviews by attendees from schools, colleges and universities from around the world. Here’s a sample of their feedback:

  • “Thanks to all the Cisco folks who put this together. It was informative, exciting and motivational!!!”
  • “Thank you so much for providing this virtual forum. What a GREAT way to share ideas and resources!”
  • “It was a pleasure speaking with everyone and hearing the marvelous presenters! Thank you Cisco!!!”
  • “Very informative. Good presenters. Fun and engaging.”
  • “I think you covered all the topics on technology and learning well.”
  • “I loved the “classroom of the future” presentation, is it available to share with other educators in my district?”

If you missed the opening day of the Virtual Forum, you’re in luck. All the sessions and content are now available on-demand. Registration is free!

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Gary Serda

Senior Strategic Partner Marketing Manager

Global Partner Marketing

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Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire SolveDirect

The network is emerging as the central nervous system for business in today’s hyper-connected world. As a result, it will be expected that people, things and sources of data are all connected and communicating with each other in real time. Today, I am pleased to announce Cisco’s intent to acquire SolveDirect, a privately held company headquartered in Vienna, Austria that provides innovative, cloud-delivered services management integration software and services.

The move towards multi-sourcing and cloud services is accelerating the development of large ecosystems of companies – from enterprise IT and manufacturing, to SaaS providers – that need to share data in a secure and scalable way. Most of the interactions between these service partners today require manual effort, growing cost and complexity for an organization as their number of service partners grows. SolveDirect’s cloud-based solutions offer enterprises and service providers a flexible way to integrate with service partners, and automate sharing of processes, data, and workflows in real-time by eliminating manual practices and bottlenecks, driving significant operational efficiencies. SolveDirect’s capabilities will enable Cisco to extend our portfolio of smart and connected IT services to our global ecosystem of customers, partners and resellers.

Acquisitions and investments are a key part of Cisco’s build, buy and partner innovation strategy. The SolveDirect acquisition aligns to Cisco’s goal of developing and delivering innovative solutions that streamline data and workflows across a unified network. The SolveDirect team will join the Cisco Services team, under the leadership of Mala Anand, senior vice president, Cisco Services Platforms Group. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will acquire all shares of SolveDirect. The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to be complete in the fourth quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2013.

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Hilton Romanski

No Longer with Cisco

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Social media login no longer required for comments

A number of you complained when blogs.cisco.com switched to requiring a social medial login to leave comments.

It turns out that you were not alone.

Industry-wide, it seems that many people do not want to associate their personal Facebook/Twitter/etc. logins with work-related social media (i.e., this effect was seen at more than just Cisco).  The social media gurus here at Cisco have therefore dropped the social media login requirement in order to leave comments on Cisco blogs.

You can now leave blog comments in the same way you used to — just provide your name and email address.

Yay!

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Jeff Squyres

The MPI Guy

UCS Platform Software

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Real world ROI results with UCS servers – a detailed study at Loughborough University

I recently worked with Loughborough University on a financial impact study of their initial deployment of Cisco UCS. The study documents their findings of a dramatic improvement in IT efficiency, bearing out the advantages that attracted them to the UCS solution. Loughborough’s Customer Case Study has been revised with the results of this TCO study as well new details on the next stage of their deployment of Cisco Virtual Experience Infrastructure (VXI) Smart Solution.

We examined Loughborough’s projected growth rates and compared the continuation of their previous rack server environment against a UCS solution combined with an expansion of their virtualized environment. Server consolidation and reduced administrator workload contributed to exceptional results: a total savings of US$878,789 (40% OpEx and 60% CapEx) with a 225% ROI and 22% IRR. Compared to the previous environment, Loughborough’s UCS deployment will drive down cost in several key areas over the coming five years:

  • server hardware – 38%
  • switching infrastructure and cabling – 80%
  • power and cooling – 49%
  • new server provisioning – 79%
  • virtualization software – 39%

“When we compared the legacy server and network with one based on Cisco UCS, TCO effectively halves over a five-year investment lifecycle.”

Dr. Phil Richards, Director of IT, Loughborough University.

As a result of Cisco’s Unified Fabric approach, the study shows that Loughborough will need only six switches (three redundant pairs) to support their end state vs. 30 in their legacy environment and a corresponding reduction in cables from 646 to just 44.

These results are typical to what other customers achieve when they switch to UCS. See my first blog post, Yes, Cisco UCS servers are that good.

Would you like to learn more about how Cisco UCS can help you? There are more than 250 published datacenter case studies on Cisco.com. Additionally, there is a TCO/ROI tool that will allow you to compare your existing environment to a new UCS Solution. For a more in-depth TCO/ROI analysis, contact your Cisco partner.

Loughborough University TCO Study Waterfall

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Bill Shields

Senior Product Manager

UCS Solutions Product Management