Year: 2015

March 31, 2015 1 Comment
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Mastering Design, One Red Dot at a Time

One of my favorite designers, John Maeda, believes that the most successful tech companies of the future will really be design companies.

When John’s somewhat bold prediction is put in the context of this quote from Steve Jobs, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works” – it’s easy to see that John is right.

So if the future successful tech companies will really be design companies, what does that mean for all the “non design companies” of today (read: most tech companies and especially most IT tech companies)? This is an opportunity for all tech companies to understand the real value of design.  I believe that change has to start at the top, so for Silicon Valley, it means business leaders have to come to grips with this transformation. Not just hiring more UX people, or opening a “design center,” but embracing design as a way to lead your entire company.

It should come as no surprise that I place such high importance on the Red Dot awards.  They are a validation of amazing design quality from beyond the technology industry.  Our products in the Collaboration portfolio have won six Red Dot awards in the last 18 months – that’s as many as Cisco has won in all its 30 years.

Last week, I found out we won two more. Our newest video endpoint and the flagship of the Collaboration portfolio – the IX5000 – just won a “Red Dot Best of the Best” 2015 award, the highest distinction in Red Dot’s product design category. In 2015, only 1.6% of the nearly 5,000 submissions received this top prize.

The Cisco TelePresence IX500
The Cisco TelePresence IX5000

Continue reading “Mastering Design, One Red Dot at a Time”

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Rowan Trollope

Senior Vice President and General Manager

IoT and Collaboration Technology Group

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ACI – Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure for Microsoft System Center, Windows Azure Pack and More

ACI_John+Satya
John Chambers with Satya Nadella at ACI Launch

From the beginning Microsoft has been a strategic partner with Cisco in the development of our Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technologies and solutions. In fact Cisco CEO John Chambers shared the stage with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella at the ACI launch several months ago in New York City.

ACI itself in the data center is a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-driven application profiles. ACI delivers software flexibility with the scalability of hardware performance. Traditionally, IT approaches took a siloed operational view, with no common operational model between the application, network, security, and cloud teams.  With ACI, a common network operational model delivers IT application agility, simplified operations across teams, assured network and application performance, and scale. Continue reading “ACI – Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure for Microsoft System Center, Windows Azure Pack and More”

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Rex Backman

Senior Marketing Manager, Big Data Solutions

Data Center and Cloud

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Cisco UCS Breaks Oracle Records, I Break the Code

You know the code, “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”. I’m breaking it.  I’ll be joining my Cisco colleagues for COLLABORATE 15 in Las Vegas, but will be sharing all the good stuff we have planned. Even worse, I’ll be taking pictures.

http://instagram.com/p/052wMoNNlm/

Before you judge, take note of what I’ll be sharing (you would too).

Cisco UCS has earned 37 world records running Oracle database and workloads. Want blazing performance for Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft without breaking the bank? Cisco UCS delivers. Seriously, this kind of news can’t stay in Vegas.

I’m also looking forward to the preconference bootcamp on Oracle Virtualization and Licensing on April 12th. Dave Welch, CTO and Chief Evangelist with House of Brick Technologies will be joined by Cisco’s John McAbel for a 4 hour deep-dive to help you plan your Oracle deployments and lower licensing costs. Here’s a secret registration tip, send an email to registration@ioug.org to add the bootcamp to your schedule.

Continue reading “Cisco UCS Breaks Oracle Records, I Break the Code”

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Gary Serda

Senior Strategic Partner Marketing Manager

Global Partner Marketing

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3 Tips for Growing your Network with LinkedIn

In the social media world, Facebook and Twitter get a lot of time and attention. Both platforms have huge user bases and appeal to both businesses and consumers. However, LinkedIn is the go-to professional network for over 347 million members in over 200 countries worldwide.

When I originally started using LinkedIn it was generally more of a consumption model – meaning people looked at content but didn’t necessarily engage with that content. I know my personal habits were to post some things, update my profile as needed, and “just browse” what was going on with my connections. Over the past couple of years, LinkedIn has made significant changes to their user interface (UI) to encourage more content posting and engagement within the platform.

Here are three top tips to leverage LinkedIn’s feature to help expand your network.

Continue reading “3 Tips for Growing your Network with LinkedIn”

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Tina Shakour

Social Media Strategy Lead

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SUMMARY: Open at Cisco is Moving!

“In our collective eagerness to talk about our growing list of cloud offerings, emerging cloud strategies, and contributions to the cloud community, we all started blogging from different places. The data center folks were talking about Cisco’s cloud-optimized hardware on one blog, the open source enthusiasts were talking about OpenStack and the Metacloud acquisition on another (this one), and still other groups were discussing cloud security and cloud as it relates to SDN on other blogs.”

Read Ali Amagasu’s full post here:
Open at Cisco is Moving!

OpenStack Logo

 

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Silvia Karina Spiva

No Longer at Cisco

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Industrial Operations Kit shown off at San Diego Conference

You may already have seen the announcement of the Cisco Industrial Operations kit (if not you can read about it here: New Cisco Offerings Help Unlock the Industrial Value of the Internet of Things).

As organizations such as utilities, oil, gas and energy companies, and municipalities, look to leverage new IoT applications, demand is growing for a quick and simple way to deploy Field Area Network (FAN) pilots, as well as reduce the cost of deploying a secure network infrastructure for medium and small size deployments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_y0_g49GFc&index=2&list=PLC9B77E2CF83FB00D

Gaurav Agarwal, Technical Marketing Engineer, Vertical Solutions, Cisco, provides a short introduction to the Cisco Industrial Operations Kit and how it virtualizes deployment to reduce setup time to days for Field Area Networks and Industrial Networks.

It’s all about Cisco helping customers start to deploy multi-service FAN solutions quickly and more cost-effectively. By actually virtualizing secure network services on a single Cisco Unified Computing Server, the Industrial Operations Kit can now be deployed in a matter of days, instead of weeks (or, in some cases, saving months!).

It’s based on the Connected Grid Network Management System and plays a critical role in creating efficient, secure and affordable industrial architectures for small to midsize organizations and large field area network pilots.

Here’s what Kip Compton,  vice president of IoT Systems and Software, Cisco, had to say at the launch “The IE 4000 and Industrial Operations Kit demonstrate how Cisco is taking the lead in bringing IoT capabilities to customers of all sizes. The market is demanding new infrastructure capabilities, and Cisco’s leadership in Gigabit switching technologies and comprehensive, end-to-end field network deployment offerings puts us in a unique position to help organizations build out long term strategies that address the challenges of an IoT environment. We have developed these offerings to give customers the ability to accelerate their IoT innovations.”

For the technical amongst you, The kit includes a single headend router, bundled with Cisco PRIME Access Registrar software for authentication, authorization and accounting, and the Connected Grid Network Management System with Cisco Embedded Services Routers for zero-touch deployment, managing up to 300 industrial routers and 250,000 RF Mesh endpoints with a single server.

Jeff Carkhuff, vice president of global solutions marketing for electricity, Itron was quoted as saying: “…With the Cisco Industrial Operations Kit, we are able to offer our customers more choices to match their specific needs, giving them an easy path to more IoT-friendly environments.” Continue reading “Industrial Operations Kit shown off at San Diego Conference”

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Peter Granger

Senior Sales Transformation Manager

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Partner Voices: Identity, Security and the Internet of Everything

As I often do with our Cisco Partner Voices blogs, this week’s entry is really more about me getting out of the way and letting the partner tell the story. I mean, after all, that’s what this whole series is about, right?

This week, I had the opportunity to hear from Geoff Webb (@GeoffvWebb), Senior Director, Solution Strategy for NetIQ. Geoff had some thoughts on the Internet of Everything (IoE) that are definitely worth sharing with the Cisco Partner Ecosystem.

In Geoff’s words, the Internet of Everything holds incredible promise – the opportunity to completely redefine how we interact with technology, the way we use information, even the way we perceive the very world around us.  We’re going to be surrounded, 24/7, by smart devices that do everything from help us drive our cars more safely and monitor crop yields across the world to double checking that we turned the oven off before we left home, even run an airliner’s engines at peak efficiency as it flies around the world.

These smart tools – whether it’s wearable, drivable, sitting in our homes and/or in our bodies – are going to change absolutely every aspect of the way we think about, and use, information and technology.  Yet at the same time, this is going to make new demands on the way we plan for security and privacy.  And, the key to building the new, safe and secure IoE is going to be a deep understanding of a very old concept: that of “identity.” Continue reading “Partner Voices: Identity, Security and the Internet of Everything”

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David Durham

Content Strategist

Channels

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The Connected Life: The Art of the Possible in Insurance

Gathering and Harvesting New Data through “The Connected Life”

The Connected Life, the digital life is steadily emerging. Today’s insurance consumers are increasingly tech savvy and want services on demand and expect them to be readily accessible anywhere, anytime. Because of this, the insurance industry and more specifically, the personal property and casualty insurance sector, is experiencing a significant period of change and opportunity. The primary change agent in this disruption is the significant amount of specific data that an insurance organization can gain for individual policyholders or prospective policyholders in this era of the Internet of Everything.

An industry steeped in tradition, legacy systems, conservative business practices and risk avoidance is now faced with the need for significant, rapid adoption of new technology accompanied by new data analytics models. This change is in-progress and data from the connected car, connected home and connected person is being gathered. The challenge facing the Insurance organization is not the data gathering, but the management, mining and “harvesting” of this expansive data. In fact, Cisco acknowledges five pillars in this space: Connect, Collect, Analyze, Decide and Apply. Focusing only on the first two areas of Connect and Collect will not provide an advantage over competitors. The key focus areas that will bring true value to insurers are Analyze, Decide, and Apply.

Put simply, a competitive advantage can be achieved by those organizations who effectively “harvest” newly gathered data from connected life solutions. Virtually all property and casualty insurance organizations with a top 100 ranking are investigating, testing, piloting or commercially deploying “Big Data” initiatives. These data gathering initiatives include connected vehicle/telematics, connected home and connected health of the individual, and further include value-added offerings for the consumer, while providing the opportunity for insurers to learn a lot about the policyholder or a prospective policyholder. Continue reading “The Connected Life: The Art of the Possible in Insurance”

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Brent Boxell

Practice Advisor – Insurance

Financial Services, Business Transformation, Cisco Systems, Inc.

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Bringing Up a New Branch Site the Easy Way with Prime Infrastructure – Part 1

If you have a need to set up networking for a new satellite clinic, a bank branch, a retail store or any other branch site, you probably have a lot of pressure to do it fast. After all, branches are where business actions take place. Did you know that branch locations and users consume 70% ~ 90% of a typical company’s business resources? Anything you can do to speed up the deployment and to reduce resource consumption is a big plus for your company’s topline growth and bottom line savings. In this 5-part blog series, I will share with you how to do so easily with Cisco Prime Infrastructure. I’ll use weekly blogs to accomplish it, and here’s the plan.

WAN deployment – blog 1 (This blog)
Converged wired and wireless deployment – blog 2
Application performance – blog 3
Troubleshooting – blog 4
Network health – blog 5		  Steve Song Blog pic 1

 

Let’s get started right away. The first thing for any remote site networking is WAN connectivity. That’s our focus of this blog. Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN) solution is an ideal way to go that provides transport flexibility and intelligent path control, plus support for high performance applications and security. But first thing first. We need to think about how to bring a new branch router into production. Continue reading “Bringing Up a New Branch Site the Easy Way with Prime Infrastructure – Part 1”

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Steven Song

Business Manager