Year: 2014

March 24, 2014 Leave a Comment
Avatar

Cisco At Hannover Messe 2014

Hannover Messe is once again upon us.  The world’s premier industrial technical showcase will be held in Hannover, Germany from April 7-11, 2014.  Last year’s faire had a clear focus on the “The Integrated Industry”, often referred to “Industry 4.0 and “Smart Factory” 

This year the motto for the world’s biggest industry fair is  “Integrated Industry – NEXT STEPS!”  The next steps towards the intelligent, self-organizing factory are examined from every angle and field of study. From M2M to 3D visualization, from bulk forming to nanotechnology, everything is focused on taking the next step.

Hannover Faire

Cisco will feature our industry leading technology and product solutions that empower the “Integrated Industry – NEXT STEPS!” in the  SmartFactory KL booth located in Hall 8, Stand D20.  SmartFactory KL is a demonstration that showcases the integration of multi-vendor solutions and products into a highly flexible production plant.  The demonstration will showcase how  interoperability enables:

  • Quick setup and modifications of multi-vendor assets
  • Modular, extendable concepts to fit the needs of the SmartFactory 
  • Product changes in real-time
  • Construction of a versatile R&D platform for production automation and related IT

Cisco provides a complete and unique breadth of infrastructure including wired and wireless routing and switching, physical video, compute, and communications solutions to uniquely support and enable current and future SmartFactory 4.0 requirements.

The SmartFactory demo shows how you can leverage Cisco’s Connected Factory architecture to converge IT and Operational Technology (OT) systems and create an integrated enterprise smart engine that:

  • Integrates Cisco’s video and unified communication platforms with real-time plant floor data
  • Scales and leverages global experts remotely for increased operational efficiency and innovation
  • Secures plant assets and improves operational workflows at each work cell
  • Analyzes and views KPI information on any device at anytime with location based services

So, come by and visit us at Hall 8, Stand D20.  Our Cisco Subject Matter Experts will be available to discuss topics that are specific to your business and technology imperatives.

See you at the show!!!

 



Authors

Avatar

Kevin Davenport

Cisco’s Global Solutions Manager

Industrial Intelligence

Leave a Comment
Avatar

CyberPatriot Competition Kicks-Off with a Bright Start

The sixth season of the National CyberPatriot Competition kicked off back in November, and the National Finals are coming up: March 26th – 29th. Conceived by the Air Force Association, CyberPatriot is a premier Internet defense competition designed to excite, educate, and motivate the next generation of network defenders, which are critical to our nation’s security. It is the largest high school cyber defense competition in the United States, with two divisions:

  • Open Division – Open to an accredited public or private institutions, registered home school associations, and community organizations like the Boy Scouts and Boys and Girls Clubs of America.
  • All Service Division – Open to students in Junior ROTC programs, Civil Air Patrol squadrons, and Naval Sea Cadet units. Continue reading “CyberPatriot Competition Kicks-Off with a Bright Start”


Authors

Avatar

Patrick Finn

No Longer at Cisco

Leave a Comment
Avatar

EuroMPI/ASIA 2014: Call for Workshop papers

Held in conjunction with EuroMPI/ASIA 2014 (see the associated call for papers), September 9-12, 2014.  In-cooperation status with ACM and SIGHPC.

This year, EuroMPI/ASIA 2014 will hold two workshops.  Accepted workshop papers will be included in ACM’s ICPS conference proceedings of the EuroMPI/ASIA 2014.

Workshop information is available on the EuroMPI/ASIA 2014 web site, and details of their workshops are in their web respective sites. If you have any further questions, please contact associated workshop organizers listed in their workshop web sites.

We are looking forward to your submissions!

Continue reading “EuroMPI/ASIA 2014: Call for Workshop papers”



Authors

Avatar

Jeff Squyres

The MPI Guy

UCS Platform Software

Leave a Comment
Avatar

Identity Management: It’s About You, Not Your STB.

In an age where we routinely view content on our STBs, laptops and handheld devices, service providers are revisiting a fundamental issue – how to define their subscriber base. For decades, subscribers have been associated with the STB sitting in their homes. But as subscribers watch content on an ever-broader range of devices, that model is creeping into obsolescence.

Cisco’s Videoscape Identity Management platform offers service providers a means of managing subscribers that reflects the new reality. The model is oriented toward the subscribers themselves; the devices they use for viewing are no longer integral to their identity. Conceptually untethering subscribers from their devices has a liberating effect on the user experience: the content they have on one device can be viewed on another, and as far as subscribers are concerned, it matters not all at what that device is, what room of their house it’s in, or even where in the world they are. They can even pause what they’re viewing on one device and resume playback from the exact same point on a different device.

Looking at things from a service provider perspective, the newfound ability to target subscribers individually on any device opens a world of monetization opportunities, either by providing entirely new services or enhancing existing features. Below are six new features service providers can offer subscribers as a result of this shift: Continue reading “Identity Management: It’s About You, Not Your STB.”



Authors

Avatar

Ezra Olman

Technical Writer

Service Provider Video Software & Solutions Group

Leave a Comment
Avatar

Cloud Services to Move the Internet of Everything (IoE) – and the SP Business – Forward, Faster

Throughout my recent meetings with Service Provider customers at Cisco Live Milan and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, there were two recurring themes throughout my meetings (and there were a lot of them as my peers and I hosted nearly 1000 of them in the four days of MWC alone).

The first was the power and promise of the cloud.  Whether carriers were leveraging Cisco’s advanced capabilities in the areas of Network Function Virtualization (NfV) or various virtualization, orchestration and automation capabilities – all with the goal of increasing revenue, reducing Opex and enhancing agility – each Service Provider was keenly interested in the impact Clouds can and will have on their businesses.  That’s why the Evolved Services Platform announcement we made resonated so well.

The second was the heightened level of discussion around the dramatic changes Service Providers are seeing in the way people, process, data and things are being connected – essentially the Internet of Everything (IoE) – and thus driving the need to leverage advanced capabilities.  While Cisco has spoken about this for the past year, the idea of the IoE is now being recognized as moving beyond vision to actual opportunity for providers who sit at the center of it all.  The recurring questions they had was around how to seize that opportunity and what was best path forward for their business to create value and differentiation amidst so much and so fast the speed of change.

This is where the two themes come together.  This is where Cisco Cloud Services come into play.

At the Cisco Partner Summit today, we are announcing our Cisco Cloud Services.  Designed as a suite of Cisco application- and network-centric cloud services on a truly open and global public cloud infrastructure comprised of many different clouds tied together, or Intercloud if you will, it provides cloud capabilities for any of our global service providers and partners to leverage quickly.  Cisco Cloud Services combine the flexibility, efficiency and scalability of a public cloud, with the security and control of a private cloud, with the scale and reach that only Cisco and its partners can enable.

It also Continue reading “Cloud Services to Move the Internet of Everything (IoE) – and the SP Business – Forward, Faster”



Authors

Avatar

Doug Webster

Vice President

22 Comments
Avatar

Introducing Cisco’s Global Intercloud

In 2011, Cisco’s Chief Information Officer Rebecca Jacoby established CITEIS, a ‘private cloud’ designed to more quickly, more flexibly and more cost-effectively give our employees the I.T. resources they need to do their jobs. CITEIS has reduced the time it takes to provision compute, storage and networking from 6-8 weeks to 15 minutes, and by virtualizing more than 92% of our data center environment, we’ve also reduced the TCO of our I.T. environment by more than 66%.

Those are impressive results, and Rebecca is a world-class CIO, but even her organization isn’t attempting to unilaterally keep up with the pace of change – with cloud scale, with global reach, with rapid business service delivery, or with the analytics capability required to derive value from the Internet of Everything.

No one organization can.

Like many of our customers, Rebecca has embraced a hybrid IT model. Cisco increasingly relies on a combination of private cloud and public cloud services. Aggregating, integrating, customizing and securely delivering services based on hundreds of applications from dozens of vendors in public and private clouds has become a critical part of Rebecca’s  role.

And this is the reality faced by CIOs all over the world today.  In order to move with speed, scale, global reach and world class economics, they all recognize that ‘hybrid cloud’ strategies must be embraced.

Continue reading “Introducing Cisco’s Global Intercloud”



Authors

Avatar

Rob Lloyd

President, Development and Sales

Leave a Comment
Avatar

The Rise of the Intercloud

For a number of years Intercloud has been a term known only in the academic world and amongst few industry experts.
The Intercloud is a “cloud of clouds” and the Wikipedia description perfectly outlines the reason why Intercloud is the critical enabler to capture the immense value of the Internet of Everything-
“The Intercloud scenario is based on the key concept that each single cloud does not have infinite physical resources or ubiquitous geographic footprint.”

That’s exactly the point!
It’s not about one cloud, no matter how large, but it’s about how to distribute the capacity and the intelligence to deal with connecting billions of things and trillions of events.
And when it comes to people, processes and data that – along with things – form the Internet of Everything, new Data Sovereignty requirements make the goal of building one cloud to address all those requirements virtually impossible…until today!

NewRulesEmerging

Cisco and our Intercloud Provider Partners will turn the “impossible” into our second phase of our World of Many Clouds strategy as we state our intent to become the number 1 Platform for the Internet of Everything.

Just think about those disparate LAN protocols, mail systems, SNA networks, etc. that Cisco multiprotocol IP Routers interconnected via IP and the global Internet in the last decades.

Now think about today’s cloud world with private and public clouds, based on disparate hypervisors, various software stacks, different security frameworks, different policies, geographical locations, etc.

Don’t you see the same pattern? Much like Cisco was a key player in building the global Internet, we are now at the heart of building the global Intercloud!

Announcing Cisco Cloud Services

Today, at Cisco Partner Summit in Las Vegas, we announced a major evolution of our World of Many Clouds strategy – Cisco Cloud Services – with plans to build the world’s largest global Intercloud together with key strategic partners and service providers. This first-of-its kind global open public network of clouds and represents the next phase in cloud computing.  This will be a cloud truly built for the Internet of Everything, capable of scaling to billions of connections, and trillions of events, offering customers unmatched flexibility to integrate their private, public, and hybrid cloud capabilities to achieve business advantage.

ExpandingOurCloudStrategy

Cisco InterCloud Differentiators

Continue reading “The Rise of the Intercloud”



Authors

Avatar

Fabio Gori

Vice President

Cross-Architecture Marketing

1 Comment
Avatar

Cisco Cloud Services Opens New Opportunities for Partners

The market is moving fast and the pace of change is dramatic. The days of partners launching new services into the market every 6-12 months are gone. Customers are expecting new applications almost daily that will allow them to deliver innovation, increase top line revenue and accelerate productivity across their company.

As the supply of cloud services grows we see the need for our partners to tap into a diverse set of public clouds around the world to enable unmatched data sovereignty, and we see more opportunities for them to work together around common standards of workload interoperability, global portability and security. However until today, there has never been the right platform to allow partners to harness the world of many clouds on behalf of their customers. Cisco today announced plans to build a global intercloud – a network of clouds – together with a set of partners.  Called Cisco Cloud Services, this new intercloud opens up a myriad of new opportunities for partners.

Cisco is expanding the Cisco Powered program to include Cisco Cloud Services. Cisco will sell these new services through channel partners and directly to end customers. Partners who develop Cisco Powered services can extend their portfolio through new Cisco cloud offers for faster time to market and global scale. Continue reading “Cisco Cloud Services Opens New Opportunities for Partners”



Authors

Avatar

Bob Gault

Vice President

Cloud and Managed Services Partner Organization Cisco

March 23, 2014 Leave a Comment
Avatar

Pandemic Preparedness: Is Cloud based Virtual Care in your strategy?

Source: CDC Fluview 2013-2014 Influenza Season Week 11 ending March 15, 2014
Source: CDC Fluview 2013-2014 Influenza Season Week 11 ending March 15, 2014

I was thinking the seasonal flu for the year was almost over, and then last week, I get flu. While looking at the CDS fluview, it continues to report a downward trend in its week 11 reports. Most of the states have almost had turned green, expect for Texas, and I just happened to be lucky in Texas.

When we carefully look at the trends of current seasonal flu based on the Influenza positive tests results reported to CDC, it shows that the last 2 months of 2013 had an upward trend and peaked at the end of the year and the downward trend started in the early weeks of year 2014.

Source: CDC Fluview 2013-2014 Influenza Season Week 11 ending March 15, 2014
Source: CDC Fluview 2013-2014 Influenza Season Week 11 ending March 15, 2014

Now, for a second, let’s think: what happens if the trend didn’t take a downward trend, but kept trending upwards – one of the typical situations that differentiate an epidemic or pandemic with a seasonal flu trend.

Pandemic is an epidemic occurring over a very wide area affecting large number of people. This can happen when new strains emerge for which people have very less resistance and there are no ready made vaccines available and hence the disease spreads while preventive and medical care is developed to overcome the situation.

According to flu.gov, each flu season, nearly 111 million workdays are lost due to the flu, amounting to approximately $7 billion per year in sick days and lost productivity. A pandemic could cause not just the financial cost of lost productivity, but also result in wide spread loss of life if not managed well.

While predicting the exact time for the next pandemic is impossible, preparing for one is an absolute must for businesses and communities to ensure the health of employees and citizens. WHO and CDC lead the effort in providing recommendations and checklists for pandemic preparedness.

Continue reading “Pandemic Preparedness: Is Cloud based Virtual Care in your strategy?”



Authors

Avatar

Rajesh Vargheese

CTO

Cisco Healthcare Solutions