Year: 2015

June 30, 2015 Leave a Comment
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Event Recap: Cisco at the EEI Annual Convention

I had a great time recently at the EEI Annual Convention on June 7-10 in New Orleans, LA. EEI is the Edison Electric Institute, the industry association of the Investor Owned Utilities in the U.S. with international utility membership from all over the world. The Annual meeting is a unique event that includes the attendance and presentations by the CEOs of member utilities. The theme of this year’s conference was “Electricity Matters”, exploring the exciting changes happening all across the electric power industry.

The first day was full of excitement, with presentations from Ted Craver and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. Moniz shared his thoughts about the dramatically changing U.S. energy landscape, outlining the recommendations defined in the administration’s Quadrennial Energy Review (QER), particularly relating to grid modernization, resiliency, and infrastructure investment.

EEI Chairman Ted Craver led a thought-provoking discussion with Elon Musk, CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors, who was joined by Tesla Motors Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder JB Straubel. The three leaders discussed electric transportation, energy storage, and the role of technology and innovation for utilities and their customers. Other sessions on the first day included:

  • Approaches to Grid Security and Resiliency – panel moderated by PPL Corporation Chairman, President and CEO Bill Spence, discussing specific actions and approaches the electric sector is taking to improve grid security and resiliency.
  • The Role of the Utility in the Evolving Distribution Grid – Company leaders, regulators, and consumer advocates highlighted the role of the utility in four areas: planning, design and operation, infrastructure enhancement and customer education and protection.
  • Complying With the EPA Clean Power Plan – moderated by Gerry Anderson, Chairman and CEO of DTE Energy, the conversation centered on the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and highlighted how new and innovative technologies can quickly change a state’s strategy for complying with the new rules.

Continue reading “Event Recap: Cisco at the EEI Annual Convention”

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Rick Geiger

Executive Director

Utilities and Smart Grid

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The Cisco IoT System and Industry Solutions: Enabling rapid prototyping, faster time to market, and better value

TonyShakib95percentImageThere’s no doubt that deployments of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions are increasing at a rapid pace as organizations face intense pressure to innovate and embrace the next wave of the Internet. Digital technology advances now enable new market entrants to threaten — and overtake — incumbents who fail to answer the innovation challenge. Think Uber, Airbnb, Tesla, and more. To up the ante on innovation and stay relevant, organizations across all industries are deploying IoT in an effort to embrace digitization.

How organizations embrace IoT as part of their digital transformation varies widely from industry to industry. For example, in manufacturing the focus is on automating inventory management, real-time monitoring/controlling of machine operations, and energy management. In the public sector, the emphasis is often on theft protection, asset tracking and real-time billing. What these industries and solutions have in common is the challenge of successfully navigating the very complex technology environment involved in getting the insights that drive successful outcomes. Successful IoT deployments require complex elements – connectivity, security, automation, analytics, and application enablement — to work together as a system to deliver those business insights.

At Cisco, we’ve done a great job of bringing powerful industry solutions to our customers that give them the business outcomes they need. Building these solutions requires drawing upon different ingredients to deliver an offering that is simple, agile, and repeatable. Many elements must to come together to deliver the value our customers need. The process for building a solution that seamlessly integrates all the elements to support a specific industry can be lengthy.

That’s why I’m excited about this week’s announcement of the Cisco IoT System. Continue reading “The Cisco IoT System and Industry Solutions: Enabling rapid prototyping, faster time to market, and better value”

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Tony Shakib

No Longer with Cisco

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The Napkins Dialogues: Life of a Packet (Walk), Part 1

Lately I’ve been giving a lot of presentations about storage basics. I actually really enjoy it, because it makes me rethink some of the things that I took for granted, and it helps me understand some of the gaps in my own knowledge when questions arise.

When you think of how we do certain things for storage, such as choosing block-based (e.g., FC, FCoE, iSCSI), file-based (e.g., NFS, SMB), or object (e.g., Ceph, Swift, CDMI) storage platforms and protocols, it’s easy to ignore the why these types of storage affect our Data Center architectures and performance. Continue reading “The Napkins Dialogues: Life of a Packet (Walk), Part 1”

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J Metz

Sr. Product Manager

Data Center Group

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Accelerate Your Business with the New Cisco IoT System

Consider this: By the time you’ve finished reading this short paragraph, another 1,000 “things” will be connected to the Internet. And we’re not even talking about a lengthy paragraph of Dickensian proportion — just this modest paragraph of 39 words.

Those newly connected things will be a mix of mobile devices, parking meters, sensors, thermostats, lab equipment, supermarket shelves, cars, cardiac monitors, and more. The fact is, this list of connected things keeps expanding by the second. Just a few years ago, the number of connected devices began outnumbering the Earth’s human population. Fast forward to 2020, and this gap will widen exponentially – with the number of connected things projected to exceed 50 billion.

As a result, countries, cities, industries, and businesses around the globe are becoming digital to capitalize on the unprecedented opportunity brought about by the next wave of the Internet. When people, process, data, and things are connected, we can capture unprecedented business value. And an essential part of capturing this value is connecting the unconnected through the Internet of Things. Continue reading “Accelerate Your Business with the New Cisco IoT System”

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Kip Compton

No longer with Cisco

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Small Business – Make it Big with Positive Customer Experience

Last week, I had an opportunity to attend an event for small and medium-sized businesses. It was an amazing experience. The business leaders there shared a passion for their solutions and a desire to take their companies to the next level and “make it big”. In a technology-enabled world, the features and functionalities of a product or service typically do not provide a sustainable competitive advantage. It’s certainly possible to grow a company if planned well. So why do only a few small businesses succeed in “making it big”?  What differentiates companies and how do certain small companies become large enterprises?

The answer lies in understanding the end-customer behavior of such businesses. Typically, small companies expand based on their initial customers, who become their “brand ambassadors”. This is especially true with social media. Typical buying behavior no longer depends only on a supplier’s marketing activity. It’s largely driven by word-of-mouth from happy or unhappy customers.

Total Customer Experience                                                                  

Customers engage your business at multiple touchpoints – far more than ever before. And in the end, the total customer experiences across those touchpoints makes them happy or unhappy (Figure 1).

Figure 1 – Connecting the customer journey
Figure 1 – Connecting the customer journey

The “Total Customer Experience” for a particular customer becomes Continue reading “Small Business – Make it Big with Positive Customer Experience”

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Nayankumar Vaghela

Director - Product Management

Contact Center Business Unit

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Simplify Your Journey with the Cisco IoT System

IoT_journey_3

Cisco continues to augment its Internet of Things (IoT) portfolio, and recently launched the Cisco IoT System for its partners. With the Cisco IoT System, a comprehensive set of Cisco IoT technologies and products, partners can provide their customers an opportunity to deploy, accelerate, and innovate with IoT across various industries.

The platform has six pillars:

  • Network Connectivity
  • Fog Computing
  • Physical and Cyber Security
  • Data Analytics
  • Management and Automation
  • Application Enablement Platform

Each of the six pillars offers a cohesive and comprehensive set of IoT technologies and products that combined together become an integral part of the overall Internet of Everything (IoE) solutions.

The Cisco IoT System provides a fully integrated solution. This is important because as we connect more “things,” greater demands are placed on the network infrastructure. IoT requires elements such as connectivity, security, automation, analytics, and open APIs to work together as a system to deliver business benefits. The IoT System integrates these components and ensures inter-operability, thus allowing partners to offer a complete solution to their customers, as a single vendor. Continue reading “Simplify Your Journey with the Cisco IoT System”

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Andres Sintes

Global Senior Director, Partner GTM

Global Partner Organization (GPO) - Digital Transformation & IoT

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Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire OpenDNS

Every day, more people, processes, data and things become connected. As this trend continues to grow exponentially, so too, do opportunities for security breaches and malicious threats. With an estimated 50 billion devices being connected by 2020, enterprise customers will face greater challenges in protecting their ever-expanding networks. To address these risks Cisco is focused on providing solutions across the extended network for its customers, what we call Security Everywhere. We are embedding threat protection capabilities from the enterprise infrastructure to the data center, from mobile to the cloud, and on the endpoints within their environment.

To enhance our strategy, I am pleased to announce our intent to acquire OpenDNS, a leading provider of advanced threat protection for any device, anywhere, anytime, delivered in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. The acquisition will extend our ability to provide customers enhanced visibility and threat protection for unmonitored and potentially unsecure entry points into the network, and to quickly and efficiently deploy and integrate these capabilities as part of their defense architecture. This acquisition builds on Cisco’s security strategy, adding broad visibility and predictive threat intelligence from OpenDNS’ cloud platform, accessed by more than 65 million users daily.

To build on Cisco’s advanced threat protection capabilities, we plan to continue to innovate a cloud delivered Security platform integrating OpenDNS’ key capabilities to accelerate that work. Over time, we will look to unite our cloud-delivered solutions, enhancing Cisco’s advanced threat protection capabilities across the full attack continuum—before, during and after an attack.

The OpenDNS team will join the Cisco Security Business Group under the leadership of Senior Vice President and General Manager David Goeckeler. Their deep security expertise and key technologies will be a natural fit to Cisco’s security vision and the Security Business Group. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of fiscal 2016.

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Hilton Romanski

No Longer with Cisco

June 29, 2015 1 Comment
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Unleashing Value with Today’s IoT Innovation Leaders

Who is innovating the next big thing? Where are they? Will it be you?

Whether in a garage, lab, university, startup or coffee shop, we at Cisco are searching the world over for entrepreneurs developing the next innovative game-changers around the Internet of Things (IoT).

How will we find you?alexbloginnovationgrandchallengepic1

On Monday, June 22, we launched the second annual Innovation Grand Challenge to discover the latest and greatest IoT innovators over the next six months. We’re enticing them out of the shadows and into the spotlight with $250,000 in total prizes and $150,000 to the overall winner. Further, winners will gain access to Cisco’s IoE Centers of Innovation, premier resources, mentorships and vast opportunities with partners and investors to change the way we live, work, play and learn.

When will we identify the winners?

The submission period runs from June 22 through Sept. 7, with the top three innovators to be announced on Dec. 7 at the IoT World Forum in Dubai. Information about guidelines and submitting entries can be found here. Continue reading “Unleashing Value with Today’s IoT Innovation Leaders”

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Alex Goryachev

Senior Director, Innovation Strategy & Programs

Corporate Strategic Innovation Group

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Segment Routing, the engine to Application Engineered Routing

Screen Shot 2015-06-29 at 1.57.12 PMGuest blog by Frederic Trate, SP Product and Solutions Marketing

For those, who read my previous blog, you surely want to know more about Application Engineered Routing. As Segment Routing sits at the very heart of Application Engineered Routing, let me start explaining how the former works.

I’m going to draw an analogy between how IP networks route data traffic and how the airline companies transport luggage. The point here is not to get into technical details; for those interested in the nitty-gritty of Segment Routing, I recommend reading the following white paper:

Let’s take the example of a piece of luggage,  Continue reading “Segment Routing, the engine to Application Engineered Routing”

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Greg Smith

Sr. Manager, Marketing

Cisco Solutions Marketing