Year: 2013

January 29, 2013 Leave a Comment
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A new wave of Cisco Cloud Connectors Further Accelerates Adoption of Cloud Services

In my previous blog I introduced the concept of Cisco Cloud Connectors, which help enhance cloud services for customers and partners, and listed the latest Cisco Cloud Connectors.

Today I am excited to share the next round of Cisco Cloud Connectors developed with third-parties and just announced at Cisco Live London! These Cisco Cloud Connectors expand further into a broad set of cloud-based applications and were developed by a growing list of third party partners. These new Cisco Cloud Connectors help address pain points in various domains such as storage, hospitality, security, VDI, identity, shipping and digital signage. Continue reading “A new wave of Cisco Cloud Connectors Further Accelerates Adoption of Cloud Services”

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Rony Gotesdyner

Manager of Product Management

Cisco's Cloud Connectors

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Education Systems Continue Exchange at Education World Forum in London

My first blog entry from the Education World Forum (EWF) reported how the powerful opening presentations challenged this high powered conference. By the half-way mark we have been given a fascinating snapshot of the issues and opportunities facing education systems all around the world.

Two founding presentations have set the tone for much of the event: from Russell Quaglia, the US’s foremost authority on student aspirations,  on the importance of valuing student voice not only to encourage and motivate the individual learner, but also to help drive education systems; and from Andreas Schleicher of OECD on the importance of developing 21st century skills to meet the challenges of a radically changing employment market where the need for routine manual skills is rapidly disappearing, and individuals will need to change jobs much more frequently.

Continue reading “Education Systems Continue Exchange at Education World Forum in London”

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Stephen Crowne

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The Evolution of Immersive Video in the Retail Bank Branch

Increasingly over the past several months, I have been working with more and more retail banking clients. A common theme has emerged during these discussions that centers on video and collaboration in the branch. The top of mind question is, “how are banks using video in the branch to grow top line revenue in a very tightly regulated environment and with ever increasing downward pressure on fee revenues?”

As retail banks have slowly emerged from the global financial crisis of 2008, they are increasingly looking for ways to differentiate themselves with their products and services.  Studies show that the branch is still relevant in the eyes of the retail bank consumer, but the role the branch will play in the future is beginning to change.

Cisco’s IBSG team published a white paper on this topic, which covers the transformation that banks are currently going through. Retail banks are wrestling with moving from a multichannel environment to an omnichannel environment. The difference is, instead of offering a different experience and set of products and services across various delivery channels, they offer a more integrated and consistent experience across delivery channels. These traditional delivery channels include: branch, Internet and contact center to name a few. Currently, the mobile channel is growing in popularity and use, especially with new applications like remote deposit capture right from a mobile phone or tablet. Continue reading “The Evolution of Immersive Video in the Retail Bank Branch”

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Tom Caddoo

Practice Architect

Banking, Americas Business Transformation

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Nexus 1000V Expands Cloud Network Services Ecosystem with vPath Integration in the Imperva Web Application Firewall

Nexus 1110 Imperva-2We are ramping up another news cycle around our Nexus 1000V and cloud network services portfolio this week at Cisco live! in London. Among the updates, business security solutions vendor Imperva is demonstrating integration of its SecureSphere Web Application Firewall (WAF) into the Nexus 1000V vPath service insertion architecture. This marks the first third party product to participate in the Cisco vPath architecture, which allows virtual services to be easily inserted and chained into Cisco virtual networks and virtual overlays.

[Note: Join Cisco for a Live Announcement Webinar on Cloud Innovations on February 5: Register Here]

Regular readers of our data center and cloud blog will probably recall the importance of vPath in enabling virtual services for virtualized multi-tenant cloud environments, and for allowing policy mobility along with VM mobility. The Cisco vPath architecture currently supports our own virtual services including Virtual Security Gateway (VSG), the ASA 1000V Cloud Firewall, and virtual WAAS for WAN optimization. vPath also boosts performance of service traffic paths and orchestrates service chaining so that VM traffic is processed in a ordered chain defined by policy.

Continue reading “Nexus 1000V Expands Cloud Network Services Ecosystem with vPath Integration in the Imperva Web Application Firewall”

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Gary Kinghorn

Sr Solution Marketing Manager

Network Virtualization and SDN

January 28, 2013 8 Comments
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Zero to 5000 Citrix VDI Users Logged-in and Working in Just 30 Minutes!

Making sure your users don’t go to sleep (or worse) waiting to log-on
Hi Everyone! I am the team lead Technical Marketing Engineer for Cisco Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions on UCS and Nexus. While I have done some blogging in my time – this is my first blog for Cisco. I have been in this space for over 22 years, before “virtualization” was called that, working with published applications and published desktops (MetaFrame and early RDP.)
With the Citrix and EMC teams, I have been focused for the past few months on validating what I think is a really exciting solution – even if I say so myself. So recently not much time for blogging I am afraid.
Over the last couple of years we have seen desktop virtualization, specifically Hosted Virtual Desktops (HVD,) become increasingly more mainstream – but today we are really experiencing an upsurge of deployments – and not just pilots – but full blown multi-thousand seat deployments.
As you are probably aware the worst nightmare is that you deploy the solution and the users don’t adopt it because it doesn’t provide them the user experience they need or want.
One of the key requirements for success is an infrastructure that won’t just provide the right experience for the first few hundred users – but that will scale linearly as you grow into the many thousands.
You can rely on Cisco Validated Designs to deliver for you! We use real world test scenarios to insure that you can implement our designs in your environment and be successful.
The keys to a successful deployment of a large scale HVD environment start with:

Continue reading “Zero to 5000 Citrix VDI Users Logged-in and Working in Just 30 Minutes!”

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Mike Brennan

Sr. Product Manager

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Graphics

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The Internet of Everything Has Begun

IoE is Here

When most people think of their early experiences with the internet, the memory comes with a sound: the scratchy noise of a dial-up modem.

What a long way we’ve come. We have gone from clumsy desktop computing to a world of mobile computing with smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Businesses can interact with customers real-time through video chats and CEOs can talk to shareholders from 20,000 feet in the air. As the capabilities of devices increase, the Internet of Things will quickly evolve into the Internet of Everything (IoE). And Cisco technology is fueling that transition, playing a big role in connecting the unconnected. Continue reading “The Internet of Everything Has Begun”

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Marie Hattar

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#CMAD: How Cisco is Defining the Role of a Community Manager

Thanks to Altimeter Group analyst Jeremiah Owyang, today marks the third anniversary of Community Manager Appreciation Day.  While there is not a lot of available data on the job outlook for a community manager, you only need to look at the job growth for a social media manager to know the trend is still on the incline. Community managers are the connectors between the community they cultivate and the brands they represent. They are creative individuals who push the envelope in how content and information is shared with their communities. They are analytical – sifting through a multitude of data and using a plethora of social tools to assess on an almost daily basis, how people are engaging with the brand.  They are strategic thinkers who translate often complex business and technology concepts into rich and engaging content that creates meaningful dialogue. At Cisco, they are all of these things and much, much more.

A HUGE thanks to our Community Managers at Cisco globally (approximately 150 total), for continuing to move the needle and advancing the role of community management.  I’ve talked to several of them recently to get their thoughts on what it means to be a community manager at Cisco and of course, their celebratory plans for Community Manager Appreciation Day.

What does it mean to be a community manager at Cisco?

  • Thinking strategically about how and where to effectively communicate our messages, collaborating with other community managers to combine brainpower and synchronize efforts, planning a cadence of social activities for the year, and responding appropriately to open questions and comments on our social channels.
  • Listening to customers to help inform our social media strategy and how we engage with them.
  • Developing, engaging and nurturing a community of people of all different backgrounds and demographics that share one common interest: Cisco.
  • Being extremely alert, organized, creative and engaged to meet the needs of a growing community of partners and customers opting into social networks to learn more about Cisco.
  • Connecting with Cisco fans and employees globally in real-time and 24/7.

How are you celebrating Community Manager Appreciation Day?

  • Go through some social metrics reports and analyzing the effectiveness of social media tactics and performance of the social channels. Hopefully, I’ll be sipping on a cup of Chai Latte while doing that to celebrate!
  • Thanking our community on Twitter and Facebook for giving me the best job ever!
  • Thanking our Cisco Corporate social communities for allowing me to have a role at Cisco that is ever-changing, exciting and challenging all at once.
  • Thanking our Cisco fans for their continual support positive engagement!

  Continue reading “#CMAD: How Cisco is Defining the Role of a Community Manager”

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Autumn Truong

No Longer with Cisco

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How to get the most out of CiscoLive! London

Just a few more hours until CiscoLive! London kicks off! We’ve got some great talks, challenges (competition where you can win a variety of prizes), and new solutions being launched.  In Lauren’s Borderless blog, she highlights a few of the activities and events that will be the most fun/cool/educational/tasty.

<SIDENOTE:> If you’re skipping CiscoLive then you’ll want to head right over to register for our live webcast, “Get Your Network Ready for BYOD with Cisco Unified Access” on January 29.  You’ll also want to start hanging out at the Cisco Borderless Networks community where we’ll have a Q&A and we have a bunch of upcoming events and fun. </SIDENOTE>

Here’re a few of the main bullets from the Borderless Blog that you don’t want to miss:

Continue reading “How to get the most out of CiscoLive! London”

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Vivian Chan

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Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day: Recognizing the Dedication of Our Community Managers

It’s that time of year again when we recognize and celebrate the work of so many unsung heroes, the Community Managers. Community Manager Appreciation Day is celebrated globally on the 4th Monday of January and was started back in 2010 by Jeremiah Owyang.

I joined the Cisco Global Social Media team in March of last year and have had the pleasure to work with many of our community managers. A common strength that shines through with all our community managers without a doubt is their dedication.

It’s dedication from Anna Sui, Partner Community Manager that allows 81,000 partners to tap into the Partner Community every month. Anna manages over 100 thriving topic areas and has built an extensive community and subject matter expert network where partners can receive and share latest news, product and program updates.

The Cisco Collaboration Community team, made up of Laura Douglas, Denise Brittin, Lisa Marcyes and Kelli Glass, empowers technical IT audiences in the Collaboration Community to learn about collaboration technologies for businesses through peer and Cisco interactions. Direct daily contact with Cisco Collaboration leaders, product managers, services consultants, technical marketing and Cisco engineers through the forums provides visitors with expert information and trusted relationships. The community also offers Cisco customers the opportunity to become more hands-on in shaping the direction of Cisco Collaboration solutions by joining the Cisco Collaboration User Group (CUG). Over 8000 (and growing) CUG members participate in betas, 1-on-1 feedback sessions with product managers, and “sneak peak” pre-announce product briefings.

The Collaboration and Partner communities above are just two examples, yet I know there are many more fantastic examples at Cisco. I’d like to ask all our community managers to take a couple of moments on Monday and reflect back on the dedication they have shown during the previous year and for them to recognize the amazing job they have done. And feel free to share successes by commenting on this blog post.

For our newer community managers and community managers to-be, I’d like to highlight our recently published Cisco Communities Playbook. Although the process of building an online community can be daunting, the Playbook provides guidance around defining, developing and driving engagement within communities. The Playbook still makes a great read for our veteran Community Managers providing ideas that may not have been considered previously.

As I wrap up, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank ALL of our Community Managers for the amazing dedication they have shown and wish them every success as they continue to drive their communities forward. Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day and please do share how you’ll be celebrating.

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Tim Husband