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Pew Research survey on 2,462 teachers indicates that 73% of their students use mobile devices to complete assignments, 45% use e-readers, and 43% use tablets. Technology in the classroom is not a future trend, it is already here.

Cisco K-12 Education BYOD Solutions brings freedom to learn anytime and anywhere with Cloud-Managed or On-Premise deployments. To find out more about Cisco Education BYOD Solutions and to ensure your network is ready for BYOD please register to the Cisco Virtual Forum for education leaders.  The BYOD Readiness Solutions booth is just one of many booths in the forum educating teachers, administrators, principals, curriculum directors and IT directors worldwide on Cisco solutions and services.    The forum will take place March 19th, 2013 in the Americas & Europe and the 20th as an Asia pacific event.  Register for the fast approaching event now!

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When I was a student in elementary school, we had desks, teachers, and blackboards (not even whiteboards!). My interaction with technology in the classroom was limited to an exciting experience playing Oregon Trail, a software game that my teachers leveraged as a hands-on experience for students to see what kinds of challenges pioneers faced going west in the 1800’s.  When I think about how deeply entrenched technology is in education today, I realize my teachers were quite ahead of the curve!

Anyone who has witnessed a child play with a smartphone can attest to the fact that technology comes easily to kids. Educators today are well aware of this situation and have been creating innovative ways to engage the interest in technology with school curriculum. Kids now “know” technology as a part of education starting as early as kindergarten.   Whether it’s a laptop carts, tablets in the classroom, smart boards, or leveraging the internet as a pure teaching tool, the availability of technological resources places no limits on how education can be delivered and innovated.

A Pew Research survey on 2,462 teachers indicates that 73% of their students use mobile devices to complete assignments, 45% use e-readers, and 43% use tablets. Technology in the classroom is not a future trend, it is already here.

Continue reading “Innovating the Education Experience with BYOD”



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Today, marks an important milestone in the history of routing, as Cisco introduces ISR-AX (Integration Services Router Generation 2 with Application Experience) and redefines the role of the router as the application delivery platform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBw18_S3jus

Quintiles – a biopharmaceutical in Durham, North Carolina – has experienced, first-hand, the benefits of an application aware router. They have successful rolled out VDI to thousands of users globally with key services of ISR-AX, namely Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS). With this solution, they have been able to onboard new acquisition employees within days instead of months, and dramatically increase productivity.

HDR – an Omaha, Nebraska-based architecture and construction firm – also relies on application services integrated on the router to guarantee application performance. HDR runs several mission-critical engineering applications worldwide, which are latency sensitive and transport over 10 terabyte files. They depend on the Cisco Application and Visibility (AVC) services available on the ISR-AX to provide a high quality of experience and resolve issues in a matter of minutes and minimize downtime. Continue reading “A Better (and More Affordable) Way to Deliver a High Quality Application Experience from Anywhere”



Authors

Raakhee Mistry

Senior Director

EN & Cloud Marketing

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For much of Wi-Fi’s history, technologists and mobile industry executives viewed it as the “poor cousin” to licensed mobile communications. Today, all that is changing with the explosive demand for mobile data, the proliferation of new and powerful devices, and shifts in customer behavior and usage.  Increasingly, Wi-Fi is seen by technologists and consumers alike as a partner to licensed mobile, enabling expanded wireless access.

Based on research and engagements with leading operators throughout the globe, the Cisco® Internet Business Solutions Group has identified six important trends that we believe are redefining this new world of Wi-Fi:

 1.     Predominance of Wi-Fi for Wireless Access Continue reading “Wi-Fi: From ‘Poor Cousin’ to Preferred Partner”



Authors

Stuart Taylor

Director

Service Provider Transformation Group

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Mobile workers accessing corporate applications and data from a range of personal and corporate devices is fast becoming the new normal. Month by month every survey confirms the inevitable—mixing personal and business data, devices, and apps. Companies are scrambling amidst a sea of new technologies to regain control of their IT infrastructure, and those thinking ahead are planning for more than just tolerance of personal data and scaling mobile access; they’re building the next evolution of application access, which is based on consistent policies for application and data across any access method or device. These architectures demand an integrated system that spans device, network, and application layers, and they demand policies for employee access based on much more than user name and password. Continue reading “Securing Your Company’s Data in a Mobile World”



Authors

Dave Frampton

Vice President and General Manager

Secure Access Mobility Product Group

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At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in early March, I had the opportunity to meet with leading mobile operators from several countries, small and large, and the focus of each discussion was remarkably consistent – how can mobile operators cost-effectively monetize the growing traffic on their networks?

This was music to my ears, because Cisco had many of the answers they sought. 

We had over 900 customer meetings in Barcelona, and I personally heard from many service providers that we are solving their real business problems and that they see great value in Cisco’s broad architectural solution.

 The fact is, Cisco had seen the mobile Internet explosion forming years ago.  With the mobile Internet predicted to grow 13-fold between 2012 and 2017 by the addition of billions of connections between people, devices and objects, we accurately predicted the business opportunities and challenges facing mobile service providers today.   

And so last month, Cisco introduced several major innovations to enable service providers to more effectively monetize those connections.  These Cisco technologies enable service providers to deliver new, better and more personalized connected experiences and to gain more intelligence about those networked connections that they can utilize to deliver new revenue-generating services.

Many of the new business opportunities presented by the growing connectivity of people, data, processes, information and devices (the ‘Internet of Everything’) center on analyzing and monetizing “data in motion,” which basically consists of real-time and near real-time data generated by mobile and fixed connections between people, things and processes. 

To help ensure service providers accommodate exploding network traffic and profit from it, Cisco recently introduced innovative mobile solutions in three key areas: software, access and infrastructure.

Intelligent Software via Cisco Quantum

To better enable service providers to analyze and monetize the data in motion in their networks, Cisco last month introduced Cisco® Quantum™. The result of the integration of more than $1.5 billion in recent acquisitions with in-house innovation, Cisco Quantum delivers unparalleled mobile network intelligence and is a component of Cisco’s ONE programmable networking approach, which is a key building block for the delivery of new network services and is fundamental to Cisco’s cloud, core networking, and data center strategies. The Quantum suite includes:

  • Cisco Quantum Network Abstraction Suite: provides a real-time network abstraction layer for network data collection, aggregation and orchestration to augment available information in all network decision processes.
  • Cisco Quantum Policy Suite: offers a next-generation policy management solution that enables service providers to scale, control, monetize and personalize any service on any type of network through a flexible, interactive architecture that supports application-centric policy capabilities.
  • Cisco Quantum Analytics Suite: provides business and network analytics capabilities that enable both historical and real-time predictive policy decisions. It includes dashboards for data visualization and programmable interfaces to create system alerts in conjunction with policy.
  • Cisco Quantum RAN Optimization Suite – Service provider mobile investment is shifting away from macrocell-only networks to heterogeneous networks (e.g., macro and small cells such as Wi-Fi, 3G, or LTE).  The size and complexity of these networks necessitates self-optimizing networks and a transition to live and automatic optimization in the radio access portion of the network. This Quantum suite addresses this pressing need, allowing service providers to effectively manage their networks, with major network investment savings for both operating and capital expenditures.

Mobile World Congress confirmed this strategy, as global service providers, including Vodafone Netherlands, recognized the importance of using Cisco’s intelligent network to deliver new experiences and expand revenue opportunities.

Two other service providers announced that they are using “Cisco smarts” to offer new types of services: Cricket, a U.S. mobile operator selling downloadable songs with its Muve Music service, and Shaw Communications, a Canadian cable operator offering its subscribers mobile service via Cisco Wi-Fi hotspots.

 



Authors

Kelly Ahuja

Senior Vice President

Service Provider Business, Products, and Solutions

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On March 8, NBCNews.com reported that the unemployment rate among post-9/11 U.S. military veterans was 9.4 percent in February, well above the national unemployment average of 7.7 percent.

Nearly 1 in 10 ex-service members who served in Iraq and Afghanistan is hunting for a job, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The NBCNews.com story mentioned how Cisco is partnering with software developer Futures, Inc. to connect the 200,000 members of the nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America to civilian jobs through a free, online tool.

The IAVA Career Pathfinder is free online tool for U.S. military veterans

Continue reading “Technology Helps Reduce High Unemployment Among Post-9/11 Veterans”



Authors

Alexis Raymond

Senior Manager

Chief Sustainability Office