On November 5th Cisco participated at Light Reading’s OSS in the Era of SDN and NFV: Evolution vs. Revolution. Heavy Reading Senior Analyst, Caroline Chappell, organized this one-day event. In my mind, Caroline is our industry’s analyst’s analyst. She is always willing to dig down into the hard technical details so she can explain the importance of the technology in ways that the rest of us (including marketing) can understand.
Last year this was such a great event that I wanted to videotape the entire panel discussion on, “Service Orchestration and new speed of Service Delivery”. For those of you who would like to understand some of the key discussion points going on in the industry right now, I highly recommend watching the entire 45 minute discussion. Click here to view the discussion.
Today we unveil the six finalists selected by Cisco judges after a highly complex evaluation process, which started six months ago with 3,000 entries from more than 100 countries. I am calling these next-generation innovators, the Super Six.
One of the Cisco Cats awaits its friends in the Cat Club.
Everyone knows that cats rule the Internet. Since Cisco’s focus is the Internet of Everything, it would make sense that when they are abandoned or lose their homes, cats would want to gravitate towards the Cisco San Jose campus (even enter the lobbies!).
Time for work! Let me in!
Employees that work in San Jose, however, knew that these cats needed a little help, and they would all be “grumpy cats” (and maybe be in mortal peril!) if left on their own.
Cisco employees always seem to jump at the chance to help those in need, even the furry ones. Thus, the Cisco Cat Club was born.
“There are some people who say that we shouldn’t do anything for the cats, but we couldn’t just turn our backs on them and do nothing!” says Jennifer Hull, “Chief Cat Club Coordinator” and Executive Assistant with Cisco Capital.
Jennifer and almost 100 other employees volunteer to help the cats as much as possible. Spay and neuter is their first priority, using humane traps (by trapping experts, and the traps are never left unsupervised.) For those that they can’t catch, or newcomers (there are a surprising number that get abandoned at Cisco, and they’re pretty smart and wily) the volunteers spend their own money to buy food and work from a feeding schedule to be sure the cats get to eat. They also all pitch in if one of the cats is injured and needs extra help.
Of course, a lot of these cats end up being re-homed. If they’re caught early enough, as kittens, they can be easily fostered and adopted (many by Cisco employees – so they stay Cisco cats forever!)
For those that have been on their own for too long and are too feral, the Cat Club makes sure they’re still taken care of, rather than sending them to a shelter to be euthanized.
“A lot of people think these abandoned cats can survive on their own,” Jennifer says. “But when they’re used to being cared for and then dumped off, they can’t.”
By the Cat Club’s rough count, over 150 cats have been spayed & neutered, and a good number of those adopted. Cisco has a program that matches employee volunteer hours with donations, so the cats get extra help. Once the Cat Club submits their hours, the Good Home Animal Society gets funds that help pay for the spay and neuter program.
Flaco is one of the Cisco Cats that Jennifer Hull adopted herself.
Even Jennifer herself has a few Cisco cats. One cat, Flaco (which means “skinny” in Spanish,) especially captured her attention (and her heart.)
“We called him ‘the greeter’,” she recalls. “Every time a feeder would come, Flaco would show up to greet us. He was an older fellow, and when we caught him, we discovered he had no teeth! That meant special feedings, but we loved him, so it was no problem. I wasn’t sure how he’d adapt to a home, but I couldn’t help it, I took him in. He had several health issues, and that, combined with his age meant that he was only with me for a year. But he was the best cat I’ve ever had!”
Jennifer’s excitement for helping these cats is contagious. Just ask new volunteer Rebecca Amato, a Business Analyst for Cisco’s IOE (Internet of Everything) Market Development Ops group.
“I just started feeding the 20+ cats that live near my work,” she says. “Jennifer explained how they really take care of the cats: wasp traps, food bowls inside of water bowls in the summer (to avoid ants from getting into the food bowls), spay and neuter, etc. The cat club goes beyond providing food and water for the cats. I am looking forward to watching the cats gather after I fill the bowls for the first time!”
Does working for a group of people who give back like this appeal to you? Join the Cisco family!
When you think of innovation, these are the synonyms that come to mind. These characteristics are intimately related to platform diving – a sport I took up at the age of 40.
That was four years ago and I now dive competitively around the world. I also have a passion for innovation, in all its forms, and I push myself to work and think innovatively. These two pursuits have more in common than you may think. In fact, I’ve come up with six ways that being a competitive platform diver and striving to be more innovative share a common thread. Continue reading “Making a splash: Why Innovation is Like Platform Diving”
This blog was originally published on Cisco’s internal employee website.
“Follow your dreams. Don’t be afraid. Hold your heads high!”
These were the words shared by Alison Gleeson, Cisco’s Senior Vice President of Americas Sales and Jordi Botifoll, Cisco’s President of the Latin America Theater, to students at a recent Cisco Networking Academy event during Cisco Live! Cancun.
The 30 students came from Mexico’s Yucatan and Quintana Roo area. They come from primarily underprivileged neighborhoods, but these young men and women are trying to make a better life for themselves and their families by pursuing careers in technology.
Often it is said that ‘partnering’ is part of the Cisco DNA and its true: Cisco’s Partner ecosystem for years has brought together an ecosystem of trusted partners which deliver solutions, software and services that provide needed business solutions and outcomes.
Cisco has a strong ‘bench’ of technology partners, too. These partners allow us to combine Cisco solutions with their technology platforms resulting in integrated architectures focused on specific industries or use cases. Frequently these are delivered in the form of a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) and are available freely on the Cisco Design Zone.
For Cisco Big Data and Analytics solutions, where our Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data is the foundation, partners are key. We partner with industry leading Big Data firms to deliver flexible architectures and solutions which help to make your data the foundation of your digital business. Below, in alphabetical order, are new videos from some of our Big Data partners. Each is a Big Data leader in their own right and each has worked closely with Cisco to bring solution(s) to market. These are short and sweet videos – so carve out a few moments in your day and view a few:
Cloudera:Children’s Hospital of Atlanta Customer Success Story
I’ve been working with Cisco UCS since the very beginning. From the earliest days, whenever a customer ran into problems, I would often be asked to help figure out what was going wrong and to help fix it. Generally, this would involve a review of the system, and when we found less desirable configurations we would work with the partner and customer to clean things up. As a part of this process, I began documenting the good and the bad I saw, which evolved into what I describe as UCS “better” practices. This post aims to describe some of these practices and why they are useful. Follow-up posts will expand on this and include additional important practices. Continue reading “Using best better practices with Cisco UCS Manager”
Still too often, nowadays, I look at my phone and my stomach drops.
I see: “3G”…
Even worse, I see: “1x”…
I think to myself: It’s the year 2015 and the world is becoming increasingly digitized. IDC’s Internet of Things Forecast states that there will be 4 billion people using 50 billion devices all in one hyper-connected world. I (along with 3,999,999,999 other people) believe it is my right to always have a consistent and high-performing 4G-LTE connection.
Cisco believes that we can capture this massive market opportunity by delivering the best collaboration experience across every endpoint, every screen, every workspace, and to every user. Our vision is to dramatically increase the number of video-enabled conference rooms – moving from every one in 10 conference rooms connected with video, to every one in four within the next ten years. And we want people to be able to connect to those rooms easily from any device or system they have today. That’s why today we are announcing Cisco’s intent to acquire privately-held Acano Limited, a leading provider of collaboration infrastructure and conferencing software.
Acano’s portfolio includes video and audio bridging technology and gateways to enable customers to connect different collaboration solutions from disparate vendors across cloud and hybrid environments. Together, Acano will help Cisco expand the interoperability and scalability of our collaboration portfolio – allowing customers to connect from anywhere, from a browser on a mobile device to the corporate boardroom, and now scaling to easily connect thousands of users across an organization.
Over the last two years, Cisco’s collaboration business has provided a standout example of the strength of our build, buy, partner, invest and co-develop approach to innovation. Internally, Cisco’s collaboration team has achieved several significant milestones, refreshing the entire endpoint portfolio in the past 12 months and simplifying our offerings from 65 endpoints down to 17, and driving double-digit endpoint growth each quarter for the past year. We’ve introduced a new cloud collaboration platform and Cisco Spark, a new team collaboration service. Acquisitions also played a key role; over the past two years we’ve acquired three companies to help accelerate our development in cloud, Collaborate, Assemblage and Tropo. And we’ve introduced key partnerships such as one with Apple earlier this fall to integrate iPhones with Cisco environments and provide unique collaboration capabilities on iPhones and iPads.
Today’s acquisition builds upon this strategy. By combining Acano’s expertise with a Cisco team that has driven incredible growth of our collaboration business, we believe we can accelerate our collaboration momentum and bring new capabilities to market faster. The Cisco and Acano teams together will help make video dramatically more pervasive to the desktop and to conference rooms of all sizes.
*UPDATE: January 29, 2016: We are pleased to welcome the Acano team on board! Watch the video.
