Year: 2015

December 16, 2015 1 Comment
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Miercom Report: Out in Front with Wave 2

In case you haven’t heard, 802.11ac Wave 2 is here. We’ve been shipping our first 802.11ac Wave 2 access points, the Aironet 1850 and 1830 since the the middle of 2015 and the list of 802.11ac Wave 2 client devices is growing almost daily. The most important enhancement to 802.11ac Wave 2 is multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO). MU-MIMO gives access points the ability to transmit to multiple clients at the same time, instead of one after amiercomnother.  For a more in-depth look at MU-MIMO, check out our 802.11ac White Paper.

At Cisco we pride ourselves on high-performing hardware, as well as an unparalleled software feature set. So to back this up, we asked Miercom, a leading independent testing company, to help us verify the performance of our 802.11ac Wave 2 access points against the competition. For Cisco, the contenders were:



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Wes Purvis

Technical Marketing Engineer

Cisco’s Enterprise Networking Group

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Cisco, Greenlight for Girls Inspire Women to Pursue STEM Careers

This blog was originally published on the Cisco Learning Network.

I’m not an engineer. I’m not technical. I didn’t pursue STEM studies in university, either.  So, why am I making so much noise and effort around getting more girls and women into STEM? Simply put, I’m an “advocate” and a “voice” willing to amplify my belief in the growing need to get more girls and women involved in STEM fields.

The bug bit me five years ago when I joined Cisco as a Technical Services Manager. Prior to working at Cisco, I was a people manager at MasterCard. I had little exposure to the technical side of the business, but shortly after starting, I found myself managing engineers for the first time. It was quite an experience, and a positive one at that! I had the chance to realize and break down all the stereotypes about engineers. I came to see each one as an incredible, intelligent, unique person that I was lucky to work with.

My teams were about 15 to 20% women, which was the complete opposite of what I was used to before my time at Cisco. Hiring women into the roles proved a frequent challenge at the time, with both a lack of female candidates and a very non-diverse team of interviewers. I began working with engineers in the Middle East and learned about their challenges in pursuing STEM studies. Some were discouraged by their family and friends, while others had trouble enrolling in classes at their local universities.

Hearing their stories fueled my interest and drive to make a difference. It was just too obvious; something had to be done, and I wanted to be part of that “something!” Not all of these women were willing or comfortable to speak up about the challenges they were facing so, I was ready to be their “voice.”

Continue reading “Cisco, Greenlight for Girls Inspire Women to Pursue STEM Careers”



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Aurelia Takacs

Global Delivery Partner Manager

Cisco Services

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5 Predictions for Customer Care in 2016, and Beyond

Who likes Tomorrowland?

Some people go to the futuristic part of Disney’s theme parks for the rides. The rides are certainly fun, but I go because it makes me think of the future. Perhaps that’s why people post so many predictions blogs every December: We like to dream about possibilities.

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Photo courtesy of Disney Wiki

In my role, I have the privilege of helping our team shape the future of Cisco’s Customer Care solutions. We always start by listening. We talk to customers and partners to hear what they want. We try to understand what is driving and shaping their thoughts. And we think a lot about how we can help businesses better serve their own customers.

Here’s what our team sees for Customer Care in 2016.

5 Predictions: Continue reading “5 Predictions for Customer Care in 2016, and Beyond”



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Chris Botting

No Longer with Cisco

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The Internet of Things: Hype or Reality?

Having spent several days last week at the Internet of Things World Forum in Dubai, I am more convinced than ever that the Internet of Things (IoT) is not some hyped-up futuristic vision of what could be, but a present-day reality that is transforming businesses and industries here and now.

In this blog series over the past six months, I have touched on many of the technology and business factors to consider while planning an Internet of Things (IoT) deployment—from access technologies to emerging standards and the convergence of IT and organizational technology (OT) . I spent three blogs discussing fog computing, analytics, and applications, and was happy to be part of the announcement of the OpenFog Consortium last month. All of this focus on IoT culminated last week, when the IoT World Forum highlighted both well-established IoT solutions and numerous IoT startups that are gearing up to change the future.

Successful IoT deployments integrate operational control systems with enterprise information systems for greater visibility, efficiency, and security.
Successful IoT deployments integrate operational control systems with enterprise information systems for greater visibility, efficiency, and security.

Continue reading “The Internet of Things: Hype or Reality?”



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Maciej Kranz

Vice President and General Manager

Corporate Strategic Innovation Group

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Trends for Data & Analytics

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One of my favorite things to do is to talk to Cisco customers, partners and industry analysts about common trends they are seeing in their business and the overall market. We look at trends similarly to why we conduct analytics, not only to see what is happening now but to also help predict what will happen next. This ability to “see around the corner” helps us be more agile as we adjust data and analytics strategies, and therefore our business.

As we head into 2016, today I’d like to share a few the top trends I consistently see and hear about data and analytics.

Continue reading “Trends for Data & Analytics”



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Mike Flannagan

No Longer with Cisco

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4 Ways to Use the Force in Your Job Search

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Luuuuuke, I am your Faaather. And also, I need coffee.

Cisco employees are really excited about the upcoming Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens. Especially me. Opening night. I’m there.

Which got me thinking, maybe I could channel Yoda by imparting some “Do or do not, there is no try” wisdom about how to use the Force in a job search.

  1. Express your interest.

Remember this famous The Empire Strikes Back scene?

Princess Lea: “I love you.”

Han Solo: “I know.”

Don’t be Han when you’re looking for a job. Say “I’m interested” if you’re interested in a position. You don’t want to pretend to be nonchalant. You want to make sure that the company knows you want to work for them. And why.

  1. Make it a 2-sided process.

In The Phantom Menace there’s a scene about how the negotiations with the Trade Federation are one-sided. Basically, there is NO negotiation.

A job search shouldn’t be one-sided, either. You need to take control over your own destiny. Did you make sure the company is a good fit for YOU, as well as you being a good fit for the company? Did you get to meet the people or stakeholders you wanted to meet with during the interview?

  1. Don’t play games.

In Return of the Jedi Luke tries to use Jedi Mind Tricks on Jabba the Hut. Jabba just laughs and says those tricks won’t work on him. It’s the same with recruiters and hiring managers. We’ve seen it all folks. We’ve learned to cut through the mind tricks. We’re not just looking for skills, but also for team fit. Playing games just makes us think you wouldn’t be a good co-worker.

  1. Be you, and communicate who you are.

Sometimes, a role isn’t just what the job description is. Things can change. This opportunity may not be right, but there’s another coming along that is. Great companies can look at great people and evolve roles.

Sometimes, you’ve just got to be you. Just like when Luke turned off his targeting computer in his T65 X-Wing Starfighter, and relied on the Force within himself to know how to hit his target. You’ve got to be true to your inner self.

We have some of the best people in the business working at Cisco. If you use these tips, and visit our careers site, you could be one of them.

May the Force be with you.



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Kevin Blair

Senior Director

Strategic Talent Acquisition

December 15, 2015 10 Comments
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Devops Means “No, you cannot operate my cloud”

One of the things I really believe strongly is that modern SaaS software development – both the practices and code it produces – are significantly different from traditional enterprise premises-based software development. Yet, I find that for people who have never built and operated a modern SaaS platform, these differences are difficult to grasp. Let me replay for you a conversation I’ve had many times.

Jonathan: “We’ve built this awesome new Cisco Spark cloud platform, which powers the Cisco Spark app. We do continuous delivery, pushing new updates every day. Our engineers operate the platform – a.k.a. devops – and they track a bunch of metrics on quality and engagement that they use every day to make improvements in the code.”

Customer/Partner: “That sounds great! I’ve got a question though – do you have a packaged version that I can operate on premises?”

The answer is – of course not.

When I tell customers/partners this, they are surprised. The reason for this is NOT that we don’t want their money (trust me that’s not it), or that we have some kind of policy or strategic reason that we don’t want to do it. The reason is that it’s technically infeasible. And doing so would mean we’d have to destroy many of the benefits that we’ve built for our customers in the first place.

The reason ultimately comes down to Continue reading “Devops Means “No, you cannot operate my cloud””



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Jonathan Rosenberg

Cisco Fellow and Vice President

CTO for Cisco's Collaboration Business

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Moving Beyond the Cloud to Hybrid Cloud

Over the last few years, I’ve watched cloud technology evolve beyond the cloud. Today, many of the companies I work with need flexible access to IT resources and services outside their on-premises data center. With “hybrid” cloud technology, IT can extend the data center without capital investment to reach seamlessly across multiple clouds from different providers around the world.

Hybrid cloud, if done right, enables many different kinds of choice. Choice of a wide range of providers. Choice of enterprise-class performance, reliability, and security. Choice of where to place workloads. With so much choice, however, comes the challenge of finding a way to easily bring it all together in a way that meets your organization’s specific needs.

To help you get the most out of cloud, we here at Cisco have created Intercloud Fabric. Intercloud Fabric simplifies your access to the hybrid cloud, providing a consistent way for you to take advantage of your growing number of choices. If you consider that the cloud is changing how we think about, deploy, and manage infrastructure and services, Intercloud Fabric changes the underlying mechanisms through which we access and consume these services.

To understand how Intercloud Fabric achieves this, consider the partnership between Sungard Availability Services and Presidio. Sungard AS is a leading provider of Cisco Powered cloud services. Presidio is one of Sungard AS’ largest channel partners.

Continue reading “Moving Beyond the Cloud to Hybrid Cloud”



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Deepu Rathi

Senior Director,l Business Development and Cloud Go-to-Market

Cloud and Managed Services Organization

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Snort your way to PCI compliance

When organizations look to secure their retail stores, branches, or points-of-sale, meeting the required mandates for Payment Card Industry (PCI) security compliance quickly becomes the number one prioritized focus area.  In fact, the 2015 Verizon PCI compliance report demonstrates this when it states that the number of companies that fully complied with the payment card industry (PCI) security standards during 2014 rose to 20 percent from about 11% in 2013. While this standalone increase in compliance is great, Verizon also notes that less than a third of the companies were fully compliant a year later after successful validation. The major takeaway here is that it is unfortunately easy to fall out of compliance if organizations don’t take the appropriate steps to maintain their security.  With 69% of consumers admitting that they will be less inclined to do business with a breached company, it is increasingly important for reaching and maintaining PCI compliance to be one of the highest priorities for organizations.

PCI Requirement 11 demands that organizations have a sustainable network and application vulnerability management program and that evaluates the overall effectiveness of security measures in place across the organization.  In a very telling sign, most organizations that suffered a breach were not compliant with Requirement 11.  Intrusion detection and prevention systems (hereafter, “IPS”) technology play a critical role in helping meet PCI compliance by monitoring all traffic in the cardholder data environment and issuing timely alerts to suspected compromises. Of course, simply having the technology is not enough.  Considering many organizations fall out of compliance due to maintenance, it is absolutely critical that IPS engines are updated with new signatures and rule sets to ensure that new threats are stopped.

Snortpig_professor2

Here, at Cisco, we’re happy to announce that our Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR) 4000 Series  now come equipped with Snort IPS to help customers meet these PCI-compliance requirements at the branch. Continue reading “Snort your way to PCI compliance”



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Elisa Caredio

Product Manager

Enterprise Routing