In the past couple of years, I have been delighted to see how the digital revolution has accelerated the pace of innovation at warp speed. It has been even more gratifying, however, to experience how this trend has disrupted traditional relationships between technology suppliers and their customers.
Today, the most successful suppliers and customers have become more like trusted partners co-innovating solutions together. Fading fast are the days when the relationship between seller and buyer consisted of a handshake and a few check-in calls before re-engaging again when contract renewals came up. Continue reading “Co-Innovating With Our Customers”
It seems like once a week I come across an article about how mobile devices will revolutionize customer care. To some degree, the articles all share a theme: “Make your life simpler with anytime anywhere access to… your bank, insurance provider, even a doctor.
These articles are chock-full of facts and figures. They tell us consumers prefer to access customer care via mobile devices. And they report that companies are in their infancy when it comes to implementing improvements to meet this demand.
(And can you believe it? I’m almost finished with the introduction and I haven’t dropped the most bodacious customer-care buzzword of all: omnichannel!)
So much has been written about omnichannel that I don’t think I can add much more. Other than: As a consumer, I want it! I want the consistent customer care experience that omnichannel promises as I move from one channel to another.
But if I’m being honest, what I really want is a complete end-to-end experience on whatever channel I happen to be on.
My options are limited if I’m logged into my banking app on my iPad and I need live help. I could use my phone and call into a queue, or request a call back, or maybe even start a chat session. But how is this making my life simpler? I still have to re-authenticate myself, maybe go through an IVR process, explain what I’m looking for… You get the picture. Continue reading “Introducing Cisco Remote Expert Mobile”
Attackers are constantly looking for ways to monetize their malicious activity. In many instances this involves targeting user data and accounts. Talos continues to see phishing attacks targeting customers of multiple high profile financial institutions. In the past couple of months, we have observed phishing attacks against various financial customers including credit card companies, banks, credit unions, and insurance companies, as well as online businesses such as Paypal and Amazon. These phishing attacks have gone old-school in that they either attach an HTML document or include HTML data in the actual email to present the user with official looking pages that appear to be from the actual businesses being targeted.
By Leonard Luna, Senior Marketing Manager, Cisco Service Provider Solutions
Cisco’s Packet Optical Networking Conference (PONC) triumphantly returned to Dallas this past May after two consecutive years in San Jose. Over 270 members of the network operator community attended the ninth iteration of this annual event. The conference followed the traditional 3-day agenda:
Day-1: General Session presentations featuring Cisco leadership/experts, industry analyst and VIP customer presentations, with the Keynote delivered by Kelly Ahuja, Cisco SVP Service Provider Segment.
Day-2: Workshops – Attendees selected from 12 sessions covering a variety of solutions including packet, optical, SDN, EMS/NMS, orchestration, cloud, PON, transceiver technology, and segment routing.
Day-3: Exposition & Bonus Technical Sessions. A variety of over 10 live demonstrations were on display including 4 bonus technical sessions covering TDM migration, Optical Network Design, High Speed Optics, and Virtual Routers.
It’s an old adage. While it has always been true, it’s especially relevant now. Today’s pace of technology change is akin to a vortex, relentlessly and chaotically sweeping everything into its spiral path, demanding digitization. As with a real vortex, the force of this change is too strong to ignore and those objects (or business models) that fail to adapt will break apart and fall away.
Indeed, digital disruption has the potential to overturn incumbents and reshape markets faster than perhaps any force in history. Organizations that do not drive their own digital business transformation will be left behind. Those that do will be pulled toward a “digital center” in which business models, offerings, and value chains are digitized driving new revenue streams and substantive business outcomes.
The driver behind this pace of disruption is the Internet of Everything (IoE), the networked connection of people, process, data, and things. Cisco projects these connections to surge from 15 billion today to some 50 billion by the end of the decade. IoE is sowing disruption, certainly — but it is a force for disruption and creation. With a total Value at Stake of $19 trillion from 2013 to 2022, IoE represents a profound market transition — and opportunity.
Much of the discussion about Cisco ACI has been about accelerating the deployment of applications across infrastructure – defined by application needs and driven by policy. There is another powerful benefit from ACI for the datacenter network administrators of today who are stretched thin trying to debug outages or respond to concerns about poor application performance. For all of them, the latest release of ACI software, Brahmaputra or APIC 1.1(1j) and NX-OS 11.1(1j), provides exciting new enhancements for managing, monitoring, and troubleshooting data center infrastructure.
ACI’s Brahmaputra release adds significant operations support in the form of:
Pro-active tooling: ACI tools such as iTraceroute, iPing, health scores and atomic counters work to eliminate downtime. Users can work before issues become user detectable to identify and resolve issues. Configurations can be validated prior to deployment.
Re-active tooling: When issues do occur in a production datacenter, users need to have the right tools available to resolve them.
For the ACI engineering and product team extensive software release notes, go to these links
During Cisco Live San Diego, there were a number of sessions covering these new capabilities to address “what can ACI do for me today?”. The answer is directly addressed by the benefits centralized management, monitoring and troubleshooting can deliver when you view and operate the entire fabric as a single system.
If you need help dealing with the complexity of today’s non-application centric data centers, I recommend that you take in the following Cisco Live sessions that highlight the simplified troubleshooting and centralized operational benefits of ACI which network operations teams can benefit from immediately, improving their productivity and speeding up remediation for application problems.
If you don’t know about the podcast series, This Week in Startups (TWiST), hosted by my friend Jason Calacanis, it’s worth checking out. Jason is a legendary investor and media mogul who has his fingers in every part of the tech industry. Each week, he brings CEOs, business founders, venture capitalists, angel investors, and tech experts into his San Francisco studio to talk about the latest trends and happenings inside the world of Silicon Valley and beyond.
I first met Jason around 10 years ago in Los Angeles. We were playing poker at a friend’s game. His brash poker playing style matches his approach to investing: nothing ventured, nothing gained. But unlike his approach to prospective business ventures, in poker, Jason never met a hand he didn’t like.
Since I’m part of this little startup Cisco, I got to be a guest on the show last week, episode 552. Jason invited me on to talk about entrepreneurship and how it’s been finding its way into big companies. We covered it all – DIY video conferencing, our new business messaging app Cisco Spark (and how he thinks we can monetize it), why John Chambers gave me a job, our theories on mergers and acquisitions, how AirBnB is improving lives, Uber pooling, Luxe, and, actually, a lot more.
Ecosystem partners are an important adjunct to Cisco Connected Mobile Experience (CMX). They augment the analytic and customer engagement capabilities of the solution with innovative business and/or industry-specific features. This blog is one in a continuing series that will highlight several of our CMX Ecosystem Partners. Today—Phunware.
Based in Austin, Texas, Phunware is a Cisco Solutions partner and leader in the Mobile as a Service industry (MaaS). The Phunware platform enables businesses to use mobility to engage, manage, and monetize their customers.
The Phunware Venue Solution is fully integrated with Cisco Connected Mobile Experience (CMX) and built upon Phunware’s Multiscreen as a Service (MaaS) platform. This solution creates an immersive, on-site mobile experience for all iOS and Android devices. Key benefits include:
By Leonard Luna, Senior Marketing Manager, Cisco Service Provider Solutions
