Year: 2015

January 28, 2015 8 Comments
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4 Ways Video Conferencing Makes a Difference

4 Ways Video BenefitsIt’s not an industry-specific thing. Video conferencing can provide business benefits no matter the industry. Retailers and financial institutions are employing video to interact with customers. Medical professionals are consulting with one another across distance. Manufacturers are addressing production issues more quickly and thoroughly.

Where the need for interaction exists, so does the potential for video conferencing to add value. Once upon a time, suggesting a meeting over video was folly. It was too complicated, expensive, and it required equipment housed in the hallowed halls of the executive wing (and maybe an IT guru).

Now it’s on my smartphone, tablet, and laptop. My kid can figure it out. Hurdles cleared. Check.

A recent Forbes Insight article, “Boost Innovation with Video Communications,” outlines eight ways video can provide business advantages. Here’s my take on four of them.

1. Reduce travel costs.
Making video conferencing available up and down the org chart not only reduces travel, but it removes distance as an impediment to collaboration. Although I’ve decreased my personal business travel, I work with far more people outside of my primary work location than I ever have before. And our collaboration is more successful.

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Kim Austin

No Longer with Cisco

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Cisco’s Software Strategy and Cisco ONE Offering: Helping Rewrite the Rules of IT

Customers’ expectations have never been higher. They want choice and flexibility. They require intelligent networks and infrastructure that’s intuitive, secure, easy to use and manage, and able to adapt to the specific requirements of their applications.

Today we’re excited to announce Cisco ONE Software, which offers a simplified solution to the most relevant, frequently-used customer scenarios in the data center, wide area network and local access networks. Cisco ONE is a big deal, and it’s an important piece of our larger software strategy in a world where value is increasingly delivered to customers through software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sCTjsnpuMc

Think about the technology disruptions and market transitions our customers are experiencing today. Cloud, virtualization, big data, software-defined networking, software-as-a-service (SaaS), the Internet of Everything – software is the enabling mechanism at the heart of each. In recent years, software has played an increasingly key role in our technology and solutions. Today, we are the fifth-largest software company in terms of software revenues, and the third-largest SaaS provider.

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John Brigden

Senior Vice President

Offer Monetization Office

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Cloud Managed Networking is the “Easy Button” for the Network

Let me start with a few ideas that should be pretty uncontroversial:

  • Digitization is transforming even the most old-school industries. Who would have thought the taxi cab business would get turned on its head by an app?
  • The old way of doing IT—where every company builds and maintains its own vast infrastructure—is going to change. For decades, survey after survey has said that companies spend 70 or 80 percent of their IT resources just to keep the lights on.
  • Companies want to shift their IT risk onto IT companies. They want to press the proverbial “big red ‘easy’ button” on their networks so they just work.

Cisco Meraki Cloud misconceptions 800x800 v2 (2)

Cisco is taking a giant step in that direction with Cisco-Meraki cloud managed IT. The idea—which should be pretty uncontroversial—is to make the network as easy to operate as your iPhone.

When Cisco acquired Meraki a couple of years ago, people thought of it as a company that supplied wireless networks to midsized businesses. But it’s never been just about Wi-Fi or small and medium-sized businesses.

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Rob Soderbery

Former Senior Vice President

No Longer with Cisco

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Cisco ONE Software & Meraki Drive Opportunities for the Cisco Partner Ecosystem

As the Cisco Partner Ecosystem continues its growth, and customers transform IT to increase business outcomes, we want to create opportunity for our partners so they can choose what makes sense for their business, and pick the roles they want to play in the marketplace.  A priority is driving partner success around new consumption models and software, as well as cloud.

Today at the Cisco Live event in Milan, Italy, we are announcing an expansion of our offers into infrastructure software with the launch of Cisco ONE Software, which presents a large opportunity for partners.  You can learn more reading John Brigden’s blog also posted today.

We are also announcing the re-launch of Cisco Meraki as an enterprise class, cloud-managed IT solution.  When Meraki was acquired, it was identified as an excellent area within Cisco for growth in the midmarket and predominantly for wireless. However, with more than 20 hardware product updates and more than 40 software releases in two years, we are not only seeing Meraki succeed in midmarket, but in the enterprise space as well. Our customers are not only deploying Meraki for Wi-Fi but as a broader network, security, and mobility management solution. Cisco’s Rob Soderbery provides more details in his blog here.

We realize that software is core to this new era of business, and I want you to know that software is core to Cisco. Let me delve into the details of what this means to partners. Continue reading “Cisco ONE Software & Meraki Drive Opportunities for the Cisco Partner Ecosystem”

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Bruce Klein

Senior Vice President

Worldwide Partner Organization

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Introducing Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite

Forrester research indicates that private cloud has entered into the formal IT portfolio by becoming a core part of data center strategy.   I have been writing about the sea change underway in private cloud.  This sea change means that automating the provisioning of virtual machines and their infrastructure is inadequate in a world where your users  expect continuous delivery.

Application developers want to accelerate application stack design and deployment.  Your customers expect to consume applications and their supporting infrastructures on-demand and take delivery within minutes.

Doubt this fact?  I consistently hear from senior executives about the growth of shadow IT within their organizations simply because the data center cannot meet delivery expectations.

At CiscoLive Milan today, the Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite was introduced.  I can hear your response now…..What another cloud management platform? So I will respond:  no way!

Many of today’s solutions are simple toolkits that require IT administrators to customize and maintain integrations between tools, processes, applications and teams.  IT needs to become software and infrastructure engineers.  End users have expectations of simplicity and out-of-box operation and these tools simply frustrate meeting end users expectations.

Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite is an engineered software solution not a platform. It delivers a hybrid-ready private cloud software solution that contains out-of-box installation and content.  There are out-of-box utensils designed specifically to accelerate the design and deployment of your existing and cloud-first applications – across private and hybrid environments.  Learn more by watching this video.

https://youtu.be/mwaNpDNrvho

Continue reading “Introducing Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite”

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Joann Starke

No Longer with Cisco

January 27, 2015 Leave a Comment
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#CiscoChampion Radio S2|Ep 3. Giving Back to the IT Community

CiscoChampion2015200PX#CiscoChampion Radio is a podcast series by Cisco Champions as technologists. Today we’ll be talking with Cisco Champions about giving back to the IT community. Rachel Bakker (@rbakker) is this week’s moderator.

Listen to the Podcast.

Learn about the Cisco Champions Program HERE.
See a list of all #CiscoChampion Radio podcasts HERE.

Cisco Champion SMEs
Priscilla Oppenheimer, @priscillaoppy, Network Consultant
Anas Tarsha, @anastarsha, Solutions Architect
Chris Partsenidis, @firewallcx, Network Engineer

Cisco Champion Guest Hosts
Noah Jaehnert, @njaehner, Security Architecture Program Manager

Highlights
Benefits of giving back
Ideas on how to give back to the IT community
How you can leverage your IT skills to give back to your local community
The positive impact of mentorship
Sharing your knowledge and expertise in your local colleges and schools
How to get kids excited about IT Continue reading “#CiscoChampion Radio S2|Ep 3. Giving Back to the IT Community”

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Rachel Bakker

Social Media Advocacy Manager

Digital and Social

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Cisco Cloud Security Architecture: Un-Cloaking Invisible Threats

In the more than ten years, I have worked in developing security solutions, I have witnessed the steady evolution of security threats and the incredible strides made to combat them. Recent high profile security breaches have shown that a breach in security can have serious consequences.. It can lead to loss or destruction of business assets, bad publicity and its associated effect on a company’s brand, hefty regulatory fines, disruption of services and costs associated with numerous lawsuits. The main task of a hacker is to access business assets through the network without being detected. The threats are normally cloaked within ubiquitous traffic flows such as web or email. Whatever the nature of a threat, an attack leaves signatures behind that can be used to “un-cloak” the threat. Threat defense and visibility is the watchword.

It has been exhausting to many of us, to be constantly engaged in the never ending cat and mouse game we play to manage and detect cyber threats. When it comes to securing private and public clouds, a new generation of Continue reading “Cisco Cloud Security Architecture: Un-Cloaking Invisible Threats”

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Alex Nadimi

Solutions Architect

Systems Development Unit, Cisco Systems

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John Chambers: “What does the Internet of Everything Mean for Security?”

Last week, Cisco CEO John Chambers attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. A major theme of the week was security and the implications of the Internet of Everything…the topic which John focused on in his contributed article to the WEF blog, Agenda. You can read the full article here.

In the article he stated:

WEF graphic - John Chambers on Security 2014
WEF graphic – John Chambers on Security 2015

Additionally, last week, Cisco issued our Annual Security Report which includes data about the number of breaches, attacks and how to mitigate these increasing threats. Cisco SVP and Chief Security Officer John Stewart blogged on this report here. A key call to action of the report is for corporate boards to take a more active role and focus on security as they help run their companies. He also talked to BloombergWest’s Cory Johnson. You can view that interview here.

In Davos, John Chambers talked to a few reporters about the implications of more things being connected…overall, of course, the impact will be very positive. As we move from 14B connected devices to 50B by 2020, John argues that each of those end points cannot be trusted to be secure, therefore you need to focus on security from an architectural approach…something, of course, where the network has a distinct advantage.

See John’s interview with USAToday Editor-in-Chief Dave Callaway.

See John’s interview with New York Times reporter David Gelles.

And, see here, for how many devices are connected to the Internet. Right. Now.

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John Earnhardt

No Longer at Cisco

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“Who Can it Be Now?” is No Longer a Legitimate Question in the Call Center

blog image ZT call center 1_2015In 1982, the Australian group Men at Work reached the #1 spot on the Billboard music charts with a song titled “Who Can it Be Now?” The accompanying early MTV-era video proved to be extremely popular, portraying a visitor to an apartment peering through a keyhole. And it didn’t hurt that lead singer Colin Hay had a very interesting set of eyes to feature in the short. In case you haven’t seen this classic, check it out here:

Unfortunately, the very same paradigm hinders today’s customer-experience strategies. We invite customers to our businesses, and when they arrive we often ask the equivalent question: “Who are you?” This is still true in today’s contact centers, where customers are asked to self-identify through any number of authentication processes.

What’s difficult to grasp is that many Continue reading ““Who Can it Be Now?” is No Longer a Legitimate Question in the Call Center”

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Zack Taylor

Director

Cisco Global Collaboration