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The growth of the Internet is resulting in a wave of new online tools that allow for increasingly more interactions between people, process, data, and things. For many years Cisco has used the power of the Internet to make a positive difference in the world.  With the spread of the Internet of Everything, we are collaborating more with other people and organizations to multiply our impact. That is why we are sponsoring, speaking at, and attending the UN Foundation’s Social Good Summit supported by Mashable, this week in New York City.

SGS

Continue reading “The Internet of Everything Meets Social Good”



Authors

Jennifer Barr

Social Media Manager, Online Brand

Cisco Talent Acquisition

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Partner-Weekly-Rewind-v2

Every Friday, we’ll highlight the most important Cisco partner news and stories of the week, as well as point you to important, Cisco-related partner content you may have missed along the way. Here’s what you might have missed this week:

Off the Top

We recently welcomed Sherri Liebo to the Channels Blog. Sherri is the vice president of our Global Partner Marketing organization and she has kicked off a new series focused on the broad partner ecosystem and what Cisco and partners can accomplish together.

Already this week, she has followed up with a new post on the value of the Internet of Everything (IoE) to partners.

Sherri’s blog series will continue in earnest during the next few weeks. Be sure to check out her kick off entry, welcome Sherri as one of our newest bloggers and be sure to follow her on Twitter @sherriliebo! Continue reading “Cisco Partner Weekly Rewind – September 20, 2013”



Authors

David Durham

Content Strategist

Channels

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When I think about what we’ve done recently to improve our customers’ experience with Cisco, the Cisco Support Website immediately jumps to mind. The web team actively consults customers and seeks new ways to improve the web support experience. I’ve invited Glenn Schleicher, who leads the team, to discuss our software download initiative and the impact our customers are seeing.

Glenn Schleicher By Guest Contributor Glenn Schleicher

As we try to fully appreciate how online pain points affect you, stories like this one really stick with us.

The “Overnight Wiring Closet” Remedy

Imagine that you are Cisco partner “Bill,” who shared this method for getting large UCS software images:  At the end of his day Bill would leave his laptop in his last customer’s wiring closet, start the download for the image he’d need the next day, hope it wouldn’t be interrupted overnight, and then retrieve the laptop in the morning before traveling to his next customer’s network upgrade.

Surely Cisco can do better than that in distributing software for its product lines.

Read the full article: The We’re Listening Blog: What Are We Doing About the #1 Task on Cisco.com?



Authors

Curt Hill

Senior Vice President

Customer Assurance

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Our latest episode is out!  This one is all about the Contact Center and we spent a lot more time showing examples of Social Media integration.  Everyone agrees that ‘the internets’ are a huge watering hole of opinions and valuable business data…but its overwhelming when trying to figure out just how you might leverage it.  Now you can integrate all that goodness with the maturity of business relevant call center and all the process that implies.

https://youtu.be/9oTM7YmMCb0

Jimmy Ray shares his personal experience volunteering to work in an actual (non-Cisco) call center all night long to gain better experience for how we developed this show.  Check out his blog for more details on this.

This show featured Packaged CCE (Contact Center Enterprise), Feature Rich Reporting, Finesse Agent, Social Miner and even a few field trips to see what Cisco is doing with their ‘Social Media Listening Center’ and a very cool mobile application we internally refer to as ‘Roadside Demo’ that will open your mind as to how mobile devices SHOULD be part of your Contact Center Strategy.

Enjoy! 

 

Robb



Authors

Robb Boyd

Producer, Writer, Host

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Technology moves very quickly and it is often difficult to keep up with new product announcements that are introduced in rapid succession. It is often necessary to take a step back and refresh our memory regarding how a solution is envisioned and then fulfilled.

As we look back on the last year, Cisco has released a lot of innovation focused on optimizing how IT defines and enforces policy; how they gain visibility of users, applications and devices; and how they simplify the network infrastructure. Continue reading “A Year in Review: Cisco Unified Access [INFOGRAPHIC]”



Authors

Brian Robertson

Product Marketing Manager

CMO EMM Mobility Solutions

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This is the sixth post in a blog series featuring Vine-format videos focusing on the “Six Essential Steps for Unleashing the Power of Enterprise Mobility”. The first blog post discussing how to build a mobile structure can be found here. The second blog post highlighting the benefits going virtual can be found here. The third blog post focused on preparing enterprises for the division of devices can be found here. The fourth blog post focused on creating an app checkpoint can be found here. The fifth blog post focused on defending data can be found here.

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Watch video at http://youtu.be/3kD5EpXypFc

Over the course of this series, we’ve discussed how enterprises can better enable people to work in their own way, regardless of where they are and what device they are using. We started by making smart plans at an architecture level and then implementing secure policies along the way. The final step enterprises need to take may be the hardest one of all but can yield the greatest results. To increase productivity, business agility, and customer satisfaction, enterprises must actively embrace mobility in the workplace. Here’s a short checklist to help organizations with this last step:

1. Go Beyond Provisioning Mobility for Sales: Think “All-Company” Mobility.

The definition of mobility is expanding to include not just “road warriors” but also “corridor warriors,” as well as guest and home workers.

Make sure your mobility architecture is designed to accommodate them all. Then create a phased implementation plan. Determine which users and business processes you want to prioritize first and move forward at a pace that makes sense for your enterprise.

An all-hands-on-deck approach will also help drive future implementation of mobile solutions. Continue reading “The Sixth Step to Enterprise Mobility: Power to Your People”



Authors

Prashanth Shenoy

Vice President of Marketing

Enterprise Networking and Mobility

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Fast changing business conditions require agility, a difficult challenge in your distributed on-premises, big data and cloud environments. Data virtualization makes it easy for you to access your data, no matter where it resides.

Recognizing this accelerating customer requirement, Cisco acquired data virtualization market leader Composite Software in July 2013.

Cisco’s integrated data platform optimizes query, compute and network infrastructure,so you access and query all types of data across the network as if it is in a single place.

You get the benefits of greater business insight and the flexibility you need in IT, with significant cost savings. You can then adapt to change more quickly and make better decisions in real time, without physically moving your data.

Data virtualization makes it possible to:

  • Empower your people with instant access to all the data they want, the way they want it
  • Respond faster to your changing analytics and business intelligence needs
  • Reduce complexity and save money

To learn how business and IT leaders use data virtualization to address big data and cloud challenges and drive business advantage, you can attend Cisco-sponsored Data Virtualization Day 2013 in New York City on Wednesday, October 9, 2013 from 8:30 am to 4:00 pm ET.

This year’s powerful speaker line up includes:

Executives from Goldman Sachs, BMO Financial and Sky who will describe how they used data virtualization to address competitive, cost and compliance challenges

Analyst speakers including Forrester Research’s Noel Yuhanna and R20/Consultancy’s Rick van der Lans will describe the state of data virtualization today, while projecting its future

Cisco executives will communicate the vision surrounding their acquisition of Composite Software and the synergies that the combination will provide to the data virtualization user community

Continue reading “Introducing Cisco Data Virtualization”



Authors

Bob Eve

No Longer with Cisco

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While there is not yet an industry standard benchmark for measuring the performance of Hadoop systems (yes, there is work in progress – WBDB, BigDataTop100 etc), workloads like TeraSort have become a popular choice to benchmark and stress test Hadoop clusters.

TeraSort is very simple, consists of three map/reduce programs (i) TeraGen – generates the dataset (ii) TeraSort – samples and sort the dataset (iii) TeraValidate – validates the output. With multiple vendors now publishing TeraSort results, organizations can make reasonable performance comparisons while evaluating Hadoop clusters.

We conducted a series of TeraSort tests on our popular Cisco UCS Common Platform Architecture (CPA) for Big Data rack with 16 Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Servers equipped with two Intel Xeon E5-2665 processors, running Apache Hadoop distribution, see figure below,  demonstrating industry leading performance and scalability over a range of data set sizes from 100GB to 50TB.  For example, out of the box, our 10TB result is 40 percent faster than HP’s published result on 18 HP ProLiant DL380 Servers equipped with two Intel Xeon E5-2667 processors.

TS1

While Hadoop offers many advantages for organizations, the Cisco story isn’t complete without including collaborations with our ecosystem partners that enables us to offer complete solution stacks. We support leading Hadoop distributions including Cloudera, HortonWorks, Intel, MapR, and Pivotal on our Cisco UCS Common Platform Architecture (CPA) for Big Data. We just announced our Big Data Design Zone that offers Cisco Validated Designs (CVD)  – pretested and validated architectures that  accelerate the time to value for customers while reducing risks and deployment challenges.

Additional Information:
Cisco Big Data Design Zone
Cisco UCS Demonstrates Leading TeraSort Benchmark Performance
Cisco UCS Common Platform Architecture (CPA) for Big Data



Authors

Raghunath Nambiar

No Longer with Cisco