Year: 2015

August 19, 2015 2 Comments
Avatar

#CiscoChampion Radio S2|Ep 32: What Is Tropo? What Can You Do with Tropo APIs?

CiscoChampion200PXbadge#CiscoChampion Radio is a podcast series by Cisco Champions as technologists. Today we’re talking about Tropo with Jose de Castro, CTO, Tropo Business Unit, and Kevin Chatow, Director of Product Management, Tropo Business Unit.

Tropo APIs let you automate communications, connecting your code to the phone network with both voice and messaging. Use the web technologies you already know and Tropo’s cloud API to intergrate new capabilities and real-time communications to your applications.

Get the Podcast
Listen to this episode
Download this episode (right-click on the episode’s download button)
View this episode in iTunes

Today’s Guests from Cisco
Jose de Castro, CTO, Tropo Business Unit
Kevin Chatow, Director of Product Management, Tropo Business Unit

Moderator
Kim Austin @ciscokima

Highlights
Overview of Tropo and its benefits
What you can do with Tropo APIs
How companies are using Tropo today
Where Tropo and Cisco come together
Tropo transcriptions and Voicebase
Advantages of Tropo
Quote of the day: “APIs are the way the web opens itself up to innovation.” Jose de Santos
Continue reading “#CiscoChampion Radio S2|Ep 32: What Is Tropo? What Can You Do with Tropo APIs?”

Authors

Avatar

Rachel Bakker

Social Media Advocacy Manager

Digital and Social

Leave a Comment
Avatar

Designing and Deploying Scalable SAN using Cisco MDS 9396S

Data is the lifeblood of your business, and it continues to multiply exponentially, creating big challenges for today’s storage area network managers. Accessing that data quickly and cost-effectively 24 hours a day, 7 days a week requires a SAN architecture that can scale easily and economically while supporting a wide variety of protocols and storage methods.

Attend this Webinar:  August 25th 8:00 PST.  Learn how to design and deploy a next-generation storage area network that scales easily yet cost-effectively using the new Cisco MDS 9396 16G Multilayer Fabric Switch.

This live 60-minute webcast will show you how the innovative new Cisco MDS 9396S 16G Multilayer Fabric Switch can help you overcome your SAN design challenges. See how this next-generation solution delivers enterprise-class performance, pay-as-you-grow scale options, and true plug-and-play installation at a remarkably affordable price.

Webinar topics to be discussed include:

  • Introduction to the new Cisco MDS 9396S
  • Architectural innovations
  • Enterprise-class features and scale options
  • Design and deployment scenarios
  • Best practices for implementation
  • Q&A

REGISTER NOW:  Webinar Aug 25th :  8:00 PST

Continue reading “Designing and Deploying Scalable SAN using Cisco MDS 9396S”

Authors

Avatar

Tony Antony

Marketing

Solutions

7 Comments
Avatar

Are you a Talent Magnet or a Micromanager?

I care passionately about good leadership and adore discovering new books or hearing leaders speak.   I have recently discovered and met Liz Wiseman, author of Multipliers, a book on leadership I highly recommend. Liz’s book is based on research of 150 leaders across Europe , Middle East and Asia and studies how some leaders can get twice as much productivity from their teams as other leaders. In her book Liz shares with you a secret and that is that good leadership starts with the intelligence of your team. At its highest level good leaders are genius makers, they make everyone smart and in doing so gain twice as much productivity as others. Twice as much productivity! Let’s think about that for a second. Do you have access to all of the intelligence in your team? Do you amplify the intelligence? Is your team getting smarter?

Further research from Liz shows that on average, managers utilize just 66% of their people’s capability. In other words 34% of their team’s capability is wasted! What’s even worse, people who are underutilised describe their experience and frustrating and exhausting.   The most talented team members quit and the less confident “quit and stay” leaving you with a morale problem that infects the culture.

Liz Wiseman describes the managers that double the productivity of their team, as “Multipliers”. Multipliers are hard-edged leaders who ask you to do the really hard things and then step back and let you struggle a bit. They are demanding and intolerant of mediocrity. Multipliers provide an intense environment because they challenge, use the intelligence of the whole team and give you permission to think and fail – after all, who wants a job they are qualified for but with nothing to learn? For these reasons people love working for a Multiplier, they are a talent magnet.

The opposite type of leader is described as the “Diminisher”. As micro managers they drain the intelligence of their team and are only focussed on their own ideas and capability. Diminishers believe that as the leader, they have all of the answers and consequently shut down the intelligence of their team and do not instil accountability.

What type of manager are you? A Multiplier or a Diminisher?

Recommendation: think about your team members, is there any evidence the team is getting smarter? Are they growing in their capacity, what role have you had to play? Think about how you could become more of a Multiplier.  If you’re a Multiplier, share your best practice with your peers! If you report to a Diminisher, call them out on their behaviour and let them know you are underutilised and want to increase your capability.

“Leaders do not create followers, they create more leaders”

Nelson Mandela.              micro-manager

Authors

Avatar

Emma Roffey

Vice President

EMEAR Marketing & Global Advocacy

1 Comment
Avatar

An Enduring Commitment to Strengthening Cisco’s Communities

It started one day with a quiet knock on a classroom door where I was volunteering. A student at Joseph George middle-school in East San Jose asked if she could continue building her solar car at lunch time. Soon, she was joined by a one friend, then another. Pretty soon, they would come three or four at a time during snack, lunch, and after school to perfect their vehicles and get them ready for the street.

The students thought they were having fun; but in reality, they were learning the fundamentals of engineering – friction, gear ratios, motors, solar energy and wind resistance. These students, several of whom faced significant struggles early on in their solar car classes, had found a place they could succeed. They approached their solar cars work with a newfound dedication and focus that blew their teachers and parents away.

This opportunity was facilitated by Citizen Schools, a nonprofit organization that works with working professionals to teach volunteer apprenticeships to middle school students in low-income communities. Citizen Schools is one of 92 nonprofit / nongovernmental organizations around the globe that received funding this year through the Cisco Foundation’s signature community granting program, called Community Impact Cash Grants, or CICG for short. One of the core values at Cisco is building strong relationships with partners in the communities in which we operate, and the CICG program is at the heart of those efforts.

Cisco support helps Citizen Schools encourage students to stay in school
Cisco Foundation grant support helps Citizen Schools expand the learning day for underserved middle school students by offering apprenticeships that get them excited about learning and encourage them to stay in school.

Continue reading “An Enduring Commitment to Strengthening Cisco’s Communities”

Authors

Avatar

Ricardo Benavidez

Senior Community Relations Manager

August 18, 2015 Leave a Comment
Avatar

Microsoft Internet Explorer Out of Band Advisory

Today an out of band advisory was released by Microsoft to address CVE-2015-2502. This vulnerability is addressed by MS15-093.

MS15-093 address a memory corruption vulnerability in Internet Explorer versions 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. This affects all currently supported versions of Windows, including Windows 10.

This advisory is rated critical. An attacker can craft a web page designed to exploit this vulnerability and lure a user into visiting it.  The compromise will result in remote code execution at the permission level of the affected user. The use of proper user access controls can limit the severity of the compromise.

As with most out of band releases, it has been reported that this attack is being exploited in the wild. Users should patch immediately.

Continue reading “Microsoft Internet Explorer Out of Band Advisory”

Authors

Avatar

Talos Group

Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group

11 Comments
Avatar

Old Boys? Meet the New Girls!

If you look at the numbers, the picture is bleak for women working in technology.

According to new research conducted by The Wall Street Journal, there is still a huge gender gap worldwide. Of the eight technology companies profiled, (ebay, Apple, LinkedIn, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter) ebay leads the pack with only 24% of women in technology roles; Twitter trails with 10%.

Is the outlook really that bleak? Here’s a look at several promising initiatives aimed at closing the tech gender gap:

1. Starting early

We’ve finally realised that getting more women working in tech involves getting them interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths) at a young age. The UK-based organisation WISE (Women In Science and Engineering) has a mission to get 1 million more women in the UK STEM workforce. They offer programs designed to “boost the talent pool from classroom to boardroom” – including an initiative that gives teenage girls funding and support to launch their own science or tech-based businesses.

At Cisco we have a program called Girls Power Tech in support of International Girls in ICT Day, an initiative sponsored and supported by member states of the International Telecommunication Union, an agency of the United Nations, since 2010. Girls Power Tech is a global mentoring initiative which helps students learn about the opportunities that the technology sector holds and is fuelled by 1,000 Cisco employees who volunteer their time with 3,000 adolescent girls in more than 50 countries.

2. Challenging stereotypes

By now, you’ve probably heard about the hash tag #ILookLikeAnEngineer which aims to dispel myths about how women in STEM industries look. The campaign was started by Isis Wenger, a San Francisco-based software engineer who set out to show that appearance has no bearing on a person’s abilities or profession.

Women at Cisco heard her loud and clear. They’ve added their photos and voices to the chorus, demonstrating that tech leaders come in all shapes, sizes and – yes – genders. Check out #ILookLikeAnEngineer and #WeAreCisco on Twitter to see more posts from smart, skilled, engineers.

3. Jump starting tech careers
I recently had the pleasure of meeting Kathryn Parsons, multi-award winning entrepreneur and co-founder of London based tech start-up Decoded, which teaches people how to code in a day.

Notably, women make up more than half of Decoded’s staff – and the company is particularly keen on promoting the work of women in tech. As Parsons explains in a recent interview with Inspiring Fifty:   “We’ve had hundreds of women at Decoded and it’s a real 50:50 split between both sexes. It’s been an incredible experience witnessing the empowering effect that acquiring digital skills has on women at Decoded. We really are in the midst of a revolution, which is also an opportunity to break down some of the traditional hierarchies that rarely put women at the top.”

4. Moving toward a meritocracy

I’m also starting to hear more and more anecdotal evidence that women in tech are being judged by their contributions instead of their gender.

This sentiment is echoed by Donna Selapa, director of a digital agency, in an article in the Guardian entitled, “The digital industry isn’t a boys club, it’s all about meritocracy.” She argues: “Anything tech and digitally focused tends to be pigeonholed as being a ‘boys’ club’ when, in my experience, it has been anything but. As a very young industry, digital, especially digital creative, has managed to forge itself from a blank canvas. It doesn’t face deeply ingrained and historical gender inequality like other more established career paths. I believe this gives talented women and men equal opportunity to shine.”

5. Crossing the final frontier
What will be the tipping point for women in tech? When men care as deeply about gender equality as women do.

In Time Magazine, writer Alyce Lomax nails it on the head when she writes, “The truth is, if women start gaining more ground in the workforce, it doesn’t mean men have to lose out. The zero sum game mentality, implying someone always has to lose — which has also permeated our marketplace, in more areas than this — has got to go. If we tackle issues like diversity, innovation, businesses with strong, robust strategies, and overall value creation should skyrocket.”

Old boys – meet the new girls!

What do you think? Are times changing, despite what statistics show?

Authors

Avatar

Dr. Christine Bailey

Marketing Director

EMEAR

Leave a Comment
Avatar

Cut Your Risks & Costs By Reducing Redundant Cloud Services

How crazy is this? We’ve found that large organizations on average use 172 compute, 157 marketing and sales and 62 finance services from the cloud. Some organizations use nearly double these amounts!

Simply put, as businesses groups control more IT spend and purchase more cloud services, cloud sprawl is skyrocketing. A large organization now uses on average 730 individual cloud services (including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS).

So what are the top cloud services categories?

Slide1

Continue reading “Cut Your Risks & Costs By Reducing Redundant Cloud Services”

Authors

Avatar

Robert Dimicco

Senior Director

Advanced Services

Leave a Comment
Avatar

Protecting Innovation: Update on District Court and ITC Actions

Our legal action to stop Arista’s copying and use of Cisco’s intellectual property is proceeding according to schedule. With a number of important procedural steps about to take place, we feel now is a good time to provide an update.

Last December we brought two actions in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. All of the related patents cover features that were invented by individuals who worked for Cisco and who are now at Arista, or by individuals at Cisco who worked with executives who are now at Arista.

District Court: Networking Features Case

  • This case will be overseen by Judge White in Oakland, and relates to Arista’s copying and infringement of key features covered by 12 Cisco patents.
  • Because the case addresses many areas being covered in the International Trade Commission (ITC), it has been “stayed” or put on hold pending resolution in the ITC. Cisco anticipated and consented to the stay requested by Arista to ensure efforts are not duplicated.
  • Much of the discovery completed as part of the ITC action will be directly applicable when this case proceeds to trial.

District Court: Operating System and Interface Features Case

  • This case will be overseen by Judge Freeman in San Jose, and relates to Arista’s use of Cisco’s proprietary and unique interface for which Cisco owns copyrights and two patents.
  • The trial is scheduled to begin on August 1, 2016.
  • After Cisco brought this action, Arista introduced its EOS+ product, which they claim added new features and functionality related to the interface. Because Arista knew of our action and EOS+ adds new ways to use Cisco technology, we amended our filing to demand extra penalties for “willfulness.”
  • Judge Freeman recently asked Cisco to further amend our complaint to make clearer that EOS+ was a new product. We submitted a second amended complaint as Judge Freeman requested and Arista did not move to dismiss its revised allegations about EOS+. Despite recent reports describing this as a setback for Cisco, all of our claims, including willfulness, will be heard by the Court as we proceed to trial.

In order to expedite resolution of these matters, Cisco requested that the International Trade Commission in Washington, D.C. commence two investigations into Arista’s infringement in importing products into the United States. The ITC typically resolves patent cases more quickly than the district courts, and has the power to block the importation of products that infringe US intellectual property. This will allow us to stop Arista from importing products based on copied technology, which are today manufactured abroad, into the US.

ITC Investigation: ‘944 Case

  • Key Dates:
    • September 9, 2015 – Hearing begins this week.
    • January 27, 2016 – Final Initial Determination, subject to review by the full ITC. May include an “exclusion order” if infringement is found.
    • May 27, 2016 – Target date for completion of investigation and issuance of final determination, subject to a 60-day Presidential Review if infringement is found.
  • This investigation is being held before Administrative Law Judge Shaw, who has standing rules to streamline cases by limiting the number of asserted patents and claims. To comply with these routine procedures, Cisco plans to reduce the number of patents pursued in this investigation.
  • The decision to drop one or more patents covering overlapping technologies will be made with the benefit of discovery, knowing that they can and will be pursued in the District Court networking features case.

ITC Investigation: ‘945 Case

  • Key Dates:
    • November 9, 2015 – Hearing begins this week.
    • April 26, 2016 – Final Initial Determination, subject to review by the full ITC. May include an “exclusion order” if infringement is found.
    • August 26, 2016 – Target date for completion of investigation and issuance of final determination, subject to a 60-day Presidential Review if infringement is found.
  • This investigation was originally assigned to Administrative Law Judge Pender, who held a claim construction hearing in June to determine the definition of 17 terms (out of hundreds in the patents) to be used at hearing.
  • We now look forward to having our claims heard before Administrative Law Judge McNamara.

We will continue to provide updates on any significant developments.

Authors

Avatar

Mark Chandler

Retired | Executive Vice President

Chief Legal and Compliance Officer

8 Comments
Avatar

5 Top Challenges of SAN Design: View from our SAN Design Experts – Part 1

SAN Engineer
Look after your SAN experts!

One of the aspects I really enjoy about my job is that I get to learn from some of the world’s top network and data center design engineers, and I get to hear about technology adoption challenges across the world. If there is a complex network or data center design being worked by our customers, if our customers are under time pressure, or if our customers are facing key business or technical challenges, Cisco Services’ consultants are often called in to help.  Globally then, they experience first hand the challenges of deploying advanced technologies.  In this blog, in the same spirit as my OpenStack Deployment Challenges blog, I’d like to share their experiences on some of the most common challenges and misconceptions faced by our customers when building Storage Area Networks (SAN).  I’ll publish this in 2 parts – so look out for the concluding part next week.

Before continuing, I’d like to thank two of our SAN expert consultants, Barbara Ledda and Wolfgang Lang, for sharing their experiences and challenges.

Continue reading “5 Top Challenges of SAN Design: View from our SAN Design Experts – Part 1”

Authors

Avatar

Stephen Speirs

No Longer at Cisco