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This marks the 32nd year I’ve worked in healthcare. It doesn’t seem like very long ago that I worked as a registered nurse, caring for critically ill patients. Although I’m no longer working at a patient’s bedside, today’s healthcare organizations continue to put patient care first – starting with transformation in healthcare technology.

HealthcareDue to increased digitization of patient data and increased collaboration among insurance providers and doctors, IT innovation and integration in healthcare is on the rise.  A new survey from Black Book shows that economic factors and government regulations are beginning to nudge independent physician practices to the cloud.

As more move to the cloud, the recent package of HIPAA changes known as the “final omnibus rule” clarifies the legal framework for healthcare organizations to work with cloud services, as David F. Carr highlighted in his recent article in Information Week.

This is a fundamental shift for healthcare organizations that could set precedent for other industries like education, financial services and government. Are you ready for it? Continue reading “What Moving to the Cloud Means for Healthcare Organizations”



Authors

Kathy English

Former Cisco Global Sr. Director, Global Data Center Marketing Programs

No Longer with Cisco

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We’re here at the Internet of Things World Forum with over 800 delegates in a very wet Barcelona. This morning, Chris Yapp eloquently introduced the uses and potential uses for IoT in education and Jane Alexander blew us away with the innovations at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Gallery One in the first of three education-focused workshops. I was left with a wealth of ideas about how IoT can really engage learners in innovative, authentic and relevant ways.

Continue reading “Education and the Internet of Everything: Live Update from the IoT World Forum”



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pumpkin_face4Back on September 10th, Cisco announced the intent to acquire WHIPTAIL and today I’m excited to report to our Data Center blog readers that the acquisition has been completed!

Paul Perez has laid out Cisco’s vision for this technology and the crucial role that solid-state memory plays in the next evolution of UCS.   If you haven’t already seen his post, it’s well worth a read to understand where we’re heading with this.  As he points out in an earlier treatise on UCS, adaptability is the wellspring of sustained advantage.   The integration of WHIPTAIL’s innovative application acceleration technology into the computing fabric of UCS is a perfect example of this principle at work; all made possible by an architecture founded on the concept of a unified control plane with an open API.

So what are we adapting to by adding this technology to UCS?

  1. Customers need applications to run faster
  2. They need IT infrastructure to be reliable, efficient, and above all, easy to operate

The first one is (almost) the easy part: it’s common knowledge that solid-state memory moves faster than a scalded ape*.  Rolling that kind of energy into the environment in a way that avoids complexity and preserves operational efficiency is what elevates value to customers.

I’ve had the pleasure of starting work with Max Riggsbee, and he related to me that a large part of WHIPTAIL’s success is rooted in manageability.   I’m paraphrasing here, but the essence of his comment was “customers don’t want a variety of technologies in the data center, they want a variety of capabilities.”  In their architecture, you can see how WHIPTAIL understands that customers want to be able to manage application acceleration technology, on the fly, to create the right blend of speed, capacity and cost efficiency to meet the needs of the business in real time.   The ability to marshal infrastructure and data, in a way that empowers real time decision-making creates competitive advantage.

If that concept, one of centrally managing high performance resources as fungible pools that can be allocated in an application-centric way, sounds familiar, you now understand what a great addition WHIPTAIL technology makes to Unified Computing.  By deeply integrating an application acceleration tier into a unified system we can achieve both of the requirements above and set our customers up do things we haven’t even imagined yet.  IWT blogt’s like getting the trick and the treat this Thursday.

Dan Crain expands on this in a video interview today, marking the close of the acquisition and what is yet to come.   The Data Center team here at Cisco is really excited about what this is going to mean for our customers and how it contributes to our pace of innovation.  Welcome WHIPTAIL!!

 

*no apes were harmed in the writing of this blog



Authors

Todd Brannon

Senior Director, Cloud Infrastructure Marketing

Cisco Cloud Infrastructure and Software Group

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iotwf

I have the privilege of attending the Internet of Things (IoT) World Forum in Barcelona. The event brought in global executives across multiple industries, all with the common goal of using the network to connect ‘things’ and increase operational efficiencies. Here are some of the highlights: 

Smart City Tour

One of the most popular break out sessions at the IoT World Forum has been the Smart+Connected City Tour throughout the old city of Barcelona. Having blogged about the Connected Boulevard project in Nice, France earlier this year, it’s very exciting to see another city make a great leap forward in marrying the city with technology.

The tour took groups of delegates from the conference venue to the old Gothic part of the city with various demonstrations along the way. Within this tour many different aspects of a connected city were demonstrated, showing the potential for the CMX solution to both the citizens and city workers alike. Continue reading “CMX plays an important role in the Internet of Things at IoT World Forum in Barcelona”



Authors

Brendan O'Brien

Director Global Product Marketing

Connected Mobile Experiences

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If you missed SCTE Cable-Tec Expo at Atlanta last week., check out the following three videos on what Cisco took away from the show.

 

Cisco’s Joe Cozzolino, SVP &GM, Cisco SP Video Infrastructure, shares his thoughts on joining Cisco, and what the ‘hot topic’ demo areas are at the Cisco booth this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlZHA5vLZqQ Continue reading “SCTE Cable–Tec Expo 2013 in Atlanta: Video Blog Series”



Authors

David Yates

as Director of Service Provider Video Marketing at Cisco

SP360

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A Short Trip Down Memory Lane…

On the quest of becoming a truly social-minded culture, about a year and a half ago, we rolled up our sleeves and created a multi-level, multi-track social media training program that used game principles and integrated with our Education Management System to encourage and reward participation. We augmented our on-demand courses with a vibrant community filled with self-service resources, online discussions (we call them “social chats”), team challenges, and recognitions and testimonials.

What I’m most proud of is that we did this in house and on a shoestring budget (imagine toddler-sized shoes and shoestrings). The original team was very small, namely the wonderful Elizabeth Houston (please give it up for @elhoust) and yours truly (@petra1400). Having seen great success with our internal program and inspired by the possibilities of growing and even bringing it to our customers, partners and general public, we have added some resources and upgraded to kid-sized shoestrings. Soon, the external-facing training program pilot, a scaled down version of our internal program was born. (For the record, the current team is still really small and also includes @kmgibbs and some of @nrrivas07 and our fun intern, @efannie’s time).

We knew it was just a matter of time before we wanted to expand the customer-facing program and mirror it after our internal program as much as possible.

Driving in the Fast (and Furious) Lane

Over the past few months, we have been working furiously on making this dream become a reality. While we have a little longer to go before you can test drive our new social media training center, we want to share some screen shots of this new environment. Continue reading “A Sneak Peek into Our New Social Media Training Center”



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In order to provide important services and innovations that better align to business, data centers must deploy advancecd IT architectures. Who says? IDC. In fact, this month they reported that adoption of integrated systems has moved from evaluation to mainstream. And yet IT remains besieged.

What is the essence of the problem? Traditional management tools. While the conversation with IT professionals at all levels is about improving data center efficiency and responsiveness, without unified management and automation, converged infrastructures are only solving half of the problem. Basically IT is still managing the trees instead of the forest.

Let’s look at an example. One industry-leading converged infrastructure solution built around Cisco UCS and EMC storage is VCE Vblock. Standardizing on Vblock delivers scalability, agility and operational efficiencies that allow IT to move away from a tactical mindset toward delivering infrastruture services efficiently to better align with business priorities. BUT, Vblock alone can’t move IT from tactical to business alignment.

Cisco UCS Director is a vital companion to the Vblock data center architecture because it simplifies provisioning and management of physical and virtual resources. Cisco UCS Director lets you manage your entire standardized Vblock environment as a single entity, delivering operational efficiency and reducing costs.

Watch the following video to find out why
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF8WA8MPnZ8&feature=youtu.be

Together Cisco UCS Director and Vblock transform IT from a legacy model to a dynamic environment that delivers faster time-to-value, less risk and higher efficiency for today’s 24-hour-a-day business.

Intrigued? To see how Cisco UCS Director can escort you through the forest of innovation, try a free 60-day test drive through your trees toward workforce productivity and reduced operational costs.



Authors

Joann Starke

No Longer with Cisco

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A portion of this blog was originally published on WASHfunders.org 

Data isn’t sexy. It doesn’t have the emotional appeal of water flowing from a hand pump for the first time into a child’s waiting hands. Nor does it have the “going viral” potential of Matt Damon refusing to use the toilet for a year.

But data is a valuable commodity for the organizations working to deliver clean water and sanitation to people who lack those basic resources. Having the right data can drive smarter decision-making and make water and sanitation projects more efficient, more effective, and more appealing to funders.

But in parts of the world where clean water is the scarcest, data is often the hardest to gather. Internet connections can be limited or nonexistent in remote parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This makes it difficult to gather data that can be analyzed and shared in a timely way. By the time you’ve gone home, entered your notes into a spreadsheet, compared it to other reports, and shared your findings with colleagues, the situation in the Malawian village you visited might have changed significantly.

Malawi_nyaulombo_shallow_well
Photo: Water for People

Continue reading “Being Boring in the Water Sector Pays Off”



Authors

Khanh Russo

Lead the critical human needs investment portfolio

Cisco Foundation

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Cisco is a Zettabyte sponsor at this week’s Strata Conference + Hadoop World in New York, NY, October 28-30.

Everyone’s talking about big data, but who’s actually doing it right—and how? Find out at Strata + Hadoop World, where big data’s most influential decision makers, architects, developers, and analysts gather to shape the future of their businesses. If you want to tap into the opportunities brought by big data, data science, and pervasive computing, you’ll want to be there too.

Stop by the Cisco Booth and please attend our breakout session:
“Deeper Insight into Operational Big Data Clusters”, delivered by Samuel Kommu, Cisco Technical Marketing Engineer
Wednesday at 1:45pm. Check here for more details.

We will showcase how our Cisco Nexus, UCS and our workload automation solutions–all configured specifically for Hadoop– that enable rapid deployment, predictable performance, and massive scale to help you get the most value from your big data deployments.

Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler for Big Data2

Also, stop by the Cisco booth to receive you free copy of Unleashing IT Big Data Edition. This special edition of Unleashing IT is all about Big Data. There is nothing simple about scaling up to the challenge of managing the mountain of data flooding into your data center every day. To learn how to start extracting value, avoid pitfalls, and best practices of big data management, check out our new edition, containing expert advice, thought leadership, and industry insight.

UIT

Big Data blogs I follow:
Raghunath Nambiar
Scott Ciccone

Cisco Big Data Resources: www.cisco.com/go/bigdata



Authors

Andrew Blaisdell

Product Marketing Manager

Products, Solutions and Industry Marketing (PSIM)