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These days, the generation of data has become almost as constant as breathing. With every click or swipe, today’s mobile, hyperconnected consumers exhale an ever-expanding trail of digital details, revealing troves of information about their wants, needs, interests, well-being, and aspirations.

All of that data offers great promise for retailers looking to know their customers in deep, new ways in order to provide carefully targeted products and services. But it is also a source of headaches. Those same retailers are wrestling with a complex new realm of Big Data analytics, where a deluge of information from new sources like video, mobile, and social media threatens to swamp their capacity for processing. That is, if they can properly access those new data streams in the first place.

Continue reading “Building Trust in the Expanding World of Big Data Retailing”



Authors

Ronald van Zanten

Director, Internet Business Solutions Group

EMEAR and Latin America, Retail and Consumer Goods Industries

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kagriffiBy Kate Griffin, Principal Consultant, IBSG Service Provider

Big Data has become top of mind among CxOs,but service providers (SPs) and most businesses today are just beginning to explore data analytics. “Big Data” generally refers to the growing scope of data analytics in terms of the variety, velocity, or volume of data involved. When this flood of Big Data is harnessed and refined, it has the power to transform economies, make businesses more efficient, and improve our daily interactions as consumers.

To assess service providers’ interest and readiness to take part in Big Data’s growth, the Cisco® Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) conducted in-depth interviews with executives from 12 global communication service providers. The SPs we interviewed see data analytics as a key opportunity. Some 80 percent of them consider Big Data an important strategic priority for their companies over the next three years. Cisco IBSG also tested key concepts concerning Big Data with 200 senior SP executives at the Telco 2.0 conference in London last summer through in-session polling questions. Eighty-eight percent of these delegates also view Big Data as a “very important” or an “important” strategic priority for the next three years (see Figure 1). Continue reading “Service Providers Are Just Getting Started with Big Data”



Authors

Chris Osika

Senior Director, Global Lead

Service Provider Practice Internet Business Solutions Group

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Many organizations continue to struggle with the pace, complexity, and changing demands of a data-driven world. Hence, it’s not a big surprise that agility, flexibility, and cost efficiency continue to be important themes in the data center. These demands and needs may be acting as a forcing function for organizations to modernize aging, complex, and costly RISC/UNIX infrastructures in order to meet todays business goals. Data center managers are looking to grow and stay ahead of the competition by transforming IT from a cost center to an innovation center. We see more and more how important it is to choose an infrastructure that can easily adapt to ever changing business requirements.

The Cisco Unified Computing System, NetApp storage, and our jointly developed FlexPod platform are standards-based, cost-effective solutions that can meet or surpass performance, reliability, and availability requirements that RISC/UNIX customer have come to expect. The FlexPod architecture can scale up or out, and it can be optimized for a variety of workloads in both virtualized and non-virtualized environments.

I urge you to read our new, joint solution brief which highlights how Cisco and NetApp with support from software and hardware partners can meet the requirements of the most demanding mission-critical IT applications and modernize your IT infrastructure with maximum efficiency and minimal risk.



Authors

Tim Stack

Product Marketing Manager

Data Center and Virtualization

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Enabling bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and rich-media collaboration applications can help increase productivity, deliver superior employee collaboration, and improve business agility. The right campus access network can simplify BYOD and collaboration so that you can free up time to focus on strategic projects.

Continue reading “Can Access Switches Simplify BYOD and Collaboration?”



Authors

Pradeep Parmar

Senior Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks

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In a prior blog entry, I discussed how we are resurrecting a Java interface for MPI in the upcoming v1.7 release of Open MPI.

Some users have already experimented with this interface and found it lacking, in at least two ways:

  1. Creating datatypes of multi-dimensional arrays doesn’t work because of how Java handles them internally
  2. The interface only supports a subset of MPI-1.1 functions

These are completely valid criticisms.  And I’m incredibly thankful to the Open MPI user community for taking the time to kick the tires on this interface and give us valid feedback.

Continue reading “MPI and Java: redux”



Authors

Jeff Squyres

The MPI Guy

UCS Platform Software

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I recently hosted a live webcast on measuring business value with Cisco’s Unified Workspace Smart Solutions.  The webcast addressed key challenges many IT architects and managers face when trying to determine the right metrics for evaluation when considering IT projects. It was great to have Jai Valluri who leads the Business Transformation team at Cisco co present with me.  He brought a wealth of knowledge on this topic from consulting with our largest and most strategic customers to help quantify the business value of deploying solutions such as Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) and Cisco BYOD.   Continue reading “Bringing VDI and BYOD together for a Unified Workspace”



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This is the first post in a continuing series related to social media training efforts underway at Cisco.  I sat down with our corporate Cisco Social Media Listening team members members (Charlie Treadwell, Bernadette Koscielniak, George Metrik, Nancy Rivas, Michael Hopps, Davythe Dicochea, and Jennifer Robertsto ask a few specific questions around social listening:  

Why is social listening important to a business?

Listening is an ongoing process that is a necessary and integral component of your social business strategy.  Being present on social channels provides an opportunity to learn from what your customers are saying and gain insights which help drive business results. Listening can also help uncover influencers, identify signs of an impending crisis, and more.  Altimeter business analyst, Charlene Li said in a post:

66% of online Americans are actively using social networking, but only 16% of companies use social media to engage with customers…You can’t have credibility saying you are customer-centric if you ignore your customers in social media channels.”

Executives are consistently investing in listening platforms and processes.  A recent December 2012 report from eMarketer indicates executives plan to increase spending in social listening by 14.8% of their social media marketing budget in 2013:

SM Marketing Programs Planned Increase Spend

Continue reading “Social Media Business Strategy: Listen and Learn from Your Customers – Part 1”



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Last week, CES kicked off an exciting 2013 for the industry and Cisco.  With just a select few of our innovations modeled in our video and SP/ mobile demos our customers, partners and press expressed great interest in our approach to helping carriers monetize these connected experiences.  During the show, we were elated by MGM Resorts International’s announcement of their use of Cisco’s location-based mobile analytics to both monetize and improve hotel guest experiences at the Bellagio and other hotels across Las Vegas.  We had a number of great discussions on how our SP Wi-Fi can be used as a Business Innovation Platform and how Data-in-Motion has become the new imperative for true subscriber insights.  And, we were thrilled that the Videoscape demos were so popular that they were overbooked throughout the week.

At Cisco, Continue reading “Join Cisco at Mobile World Congress 2013”



Authors

Kit Beall

Vice President

Cloud and Business Services

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Are you looking to grow your business and boost profits?  With close to 500K businesses and an estimated addressable market of $21B globally, mid-size customers offer partners a lucrative selling opportunity.

I recently presented at the Alexander Group’s Chief Executive Forum, an event for Global 2000 leaders that explores sales-related topics and innovative solutions.  After the event, I sat down with Alexander Group Senior Vice President Gary Tubridy to discuss how Cisco is engaging with our partners to do more.  In particular, we discussed how we are enabling our partners to sell into the Mid-Market with Partner Led, the go-to-market model that empowers and rewards Cisco partners to lead sales with midsized and small customers.

Watch the full interview or read on to get the highlights.

Continue reading “Where Are You Focusing Your Sales Efforts in 2013? Check Out the Lucrative Mid Market”



Authors

Andrew Sage

Vice President

Global Distribution & Small Business Sales