2015 - Page 8 of 217 - Cisco Blogs

December 9, 2015 1 Comment

Cisco Collaboration Summit: Notes from Day 2

It was a busy day in San Francisco. OK, it’s probably always a busy day in San Francisco. But the second day of Cisco Collaboration Summit was definitely a busy one. Consultants and analysts toured centers of innovation, partners dug deeper into the announcements from Tuesday, and customers grilled executives. All in all, there was plenty of activity.

Sessions started as early as 8 a.m. and carried through the day. The day’s events closed out for the evening with a reception in the Collaboration Experience Showcase, where attendees could get their hands on the products from Cisco and some of our collaboration partners. (Oh, and there was food. There’s always plenty of food at these things.)

Customer Forum
Where yesterday’s discussions in Customer Forum focused on some of the more lofty concepts around leadership and employee engagement, today’s topics got more into the technology. Discussions dug into the business challenges they’re hoping to solve and how they’re using collaboration technology now. There were sessions on connecting with remote employees, developing strategy with end customers, and securing the collaboration environment. Continue reading “Cisco Collaboration Summit: Notes from Day 2”

Authors

Kim Austin

No Longer with Cisco

Tech Field Day Extra at ONUG – ACI, Docker, and OpenStack Group-Based Policy

Breana Jordan

A few weeks ago at the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) conference, Cisco hosted a session on ACI, Docker, and Group Based Policy for Tech Field Day Extra. ONUG is a two day conference which includes keynotes and panels providing opinions on open infrastructure deployment from IT business leaders.

And for those of you who haven’t heard of or seen the Tech Field Day sessions, a quick breakdown: Delegates (bloggers, speakers, podcasters, and influential leaders) come in for a session on Cisco technologies in which they are allowed to ask questions freely throughout the presentation. Usually these presentations consist of a demo and/or a white boarding session.

For Tech Field Day Extra (#TFDx) at ONUG one of our principal engineers, Lucien Avramov, gave an hour presentation to 11 delegates at New York University.

In his first session Lucien discusses Cisco Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and demonstrates the integration between ACI and OpenStack with F5 and Palo Alto components:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QFz2iqrvvk Continue reading “Tech Field Day Extra at ONUG – ACI, Docker, and OpenStack Group-Based Policy”

Authors

Breana Jordan

Product Marketing Specialist

Products and Solutions Marketing

#CiscoChampion Radio, S2|Ep. 46. Meraki

Lindsay Hamilton

#CiscoChampion Radio is a podcast series by Cisco Champions as technologists. Today we’re talking about Meraki with Cisco Subject Matter Experts Joe Aronow and Simon Tompson.

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Cisco SME

Joe Aronow, Product Marketing Manager for Meraki
Simon Tompson (@MerakiSimon), Marketing Manager for Meraki

Cisco Champion Guest Hosts

Ed Walsh (@vEddieW), CTO Evangelist
Chris Brown (@ChrisKnowsIT), Senior Network Operations Manager
Samuel Clements (@samuel_clements), Mobility Practice Manager

Moderator

Breana Jordan (@breanajordan12)

Continue reading “#CiscoChampion Radio, S2|Ep. 46. Meraki”

Authors

Lindsay Hamilton

Social Media Blog Program Manager

Global Social Media Marketing

3 Comments

Microsegmentation with Cisco ACI

Harry Petty

Modern data centers are under unrelenting attack. East-west traffic security breaches are happening every day. According to Cisco, 75 percent of all attacks take only minutes to begin stealing data but take longer to detect. Once discovered, several weeks may pass before full containment and remediation are achieved. Today’s data centers require a variety of “tools” to deal with sophisticated attack vectors. Network segmentation is a proven tool deployed in data centers.

While the broad constructs of segmentation are relevant, today’s application and security requirements mandate increasingly granular methods that are more secure and operationally simpler. This has led to the evolution of “microsegmentation” to address the following:

Programmatically define segments on an increasingly granular basis allowing greater flexibility using attributes
Automatically program segment and policy management across the entire application lifecycle (deployment to de-commissioning)
Quarantine compromised endpoints and limit lateral propagation of threats
Enhance security and scale by enabling a Zero-Trust approach for physical, virtual and container workloads.

Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) takes a very elegant approach to microsegmentation with policy definition separating segments from the broadcast domain.

Figure 1

Continue reading “Microsegmentation with Cisco ACI”

Authors

Harry Petty

Director

Data Center and Cloud Marketing

#WednesdayWalkabout Series: The Smart City Revolution

Cecile Willems

Co-authored with Munish Khetrapal

Upping Your Livability Index

As cities and countries around the globe are facing an onslaught of new and confusing challenges such as urban sprawl, safety and security, traffic congestion, and transportation accessibility, it is increasingly becoming important for public sector leaders to provide smart solutions. And as leaders further embrace the smart city narrative, the main question remains as to how these digital technology solutions will help their citizens and communities.

Motivations for adopting smart city initiatives vary, but one primary reason that has emerged is the desire to enhance ‘livability’. Livability plays an important role in how cities compete with other cities for tax dollars, jobs, residents, employers, investment, and positive perceptions. Improving livability can be seen both as a strategic asset that contributes to growth, and as a key ingredient to happier, healthier citizens. And when push comes to shove, technology is an enabler, not the end game. Putting people in the forefront is key.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnyrUhPwd70

Smart City Walking Tour

Throughout this series, we’ve taken you through a whirlwind of important industry trends, smart technologies, and places of digital transformation. At the Internet of Things World Forum that took place in Dubai this week, many of our spotlighted topics converged and took center stage to demonstrate the cross-vertical impact of IoT. In this week’s post, our digital citizen is participating in our IoT World Forum Smart City Experience tour.

Continue reading “#WednesdayWalkabout Series: The Smart City Revolution”

Authors

Cecile Willems

Director, Global Public Sector

Global Sales Organization

20 Comments

A Defining Moment for IoT and Digitization

John Chambers

In the next few years we will reflect on the third annual Internet of Things World Forum (IoTWF) this week and realize that 2015 was the inflection point for the Internet of Things (IoT) and digitization. Leaders from around the world convened in Dubai this week, all witnessed real solutions that are now fundamentally changing the way we will live and do business. It’s a dramatic change that will touch everyone.

Digital transformation – the connection of cities, companies, and countries to the Internet – has emerged as the most transformative means to ignite sustainable growth and improve society. Those countries and companies that get ahead and embrace the digital transformation will uncover limitless possibilities to drive innovation, growth and jobs of the future.

However, only 1 in 4 leaders* say they are being sufficiently proactive about digitization. And while 75% of businesses will become digital by 2020, only 30% of digitization efforts will be successful. The number one reason companies don’t succeed? They fail to innovate or reinvent. Those that don’t will be left behind.

It is fitting that this defining moment in the future of digitization is taking place here, in the Middle East. My discussions with its leaders on the future of the digital and the global landscape have only strengthened my admiration for their visionary approach but also the speed of change that comes through aligning all government smart initiatives together under one smart-city ambition.

His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s vision for Dubai to be the ‘Smartest City in the World by 2017’ is well under way. Sensors embedded throughout the city will connect everything from utilities to urban transportation, from entertainment to energy, and from policing to politics. All of it developed to improve the lives of citizens, reduce energy consumption and to capture the potential added value of US$ 4.87 billion (AED 17.9 billion) by 2019.

Continue reading “A Defining Moment for IoT and Digitization”

Authors

John Chambers

No Longer with Cisco

1 Comment

2015 Cisco Corporate Social Responsibility Report: Our People

Austin Belisle

Cisco Corporate Social Responsibility strategy prioritizes the issues that are most important to our business and to our stakeholders, identified through a formal CSR materiality assessment. We use the Cisco CSR Report to communicate our approach, objectives, progress, and challenges around five high-level priorities. This morning, we’ll focus on Our People:

A culture of empowerment, engagement, and innovation makes Cisco one of the most admired companies in the world and one of the best places to work. Our success depends on our people — their engagement, their talent, their innovation, and their desire to continue to learn and grow. We are going to give them a flexible work environments where they will be safe and healthy, where they can be their authentic selves, where they can get training and improve themselves, and where they will be rewarded for their hard work.

Francine Katsoudas, Senior Vice President and Chief People Officer at Cisco, emphasized the importance of our people in this year’s Cisco Corporate Social Responsibility report:

“At the core of our success is our people, and they are our focus. We want to attract and keep the best people and develop the best leaders today for tomorrow — leaders who have impact and are building the most incredible teams.”

Continue reading “2015 Cisco Corporate Social Responsibility Report: Our People”

Authors

Austin Belisle

No Longer with Cisco

1 Comment

SX10 and Spark: A Connection in the Cloud

Snorre Kjesbu

Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about a Wainhouse review that evaluated the ease of use and deployment, and cost efficiency of the Cisco SX10 Quick Set for small group video meetings. I wouldn’t have thought when we introduced the SX10 a few years back that we would be able to do even more to reduce cost and simplify deployment, but we have. And we’ve done it with a connection in the cloud.

At our annual Collaboration Summit this week, we announced the new Cisco Spark Service, which will deliver messaging, meetings and call capabilities hosted in the Cisco Collaboration Cloud. As part of this development, the SX10 will be the first endpoint to be cloud-registered. It will also debut new intelligent software – the Spark Room OS software platform – to make the SX10 and other video endpoints even easier to install, use and maintain. Spark Room OS will be the operating system software for all video endpoints that connect to the Cisco Spark service in the cloud.

The SX10, together with Spark Service, will allow us to make another leap in bringing business class video to growing businesses by significantly lowering the threshold and cost of video adoption as well as improving the user experience. If you didn’t get a chance to see Rowan’s keynote at Collaboration Summit, I invite you to view it for an impressive demo of the SX10 registered to Spark.

Lowering threshold and cost of video adoption. Today, less than 7% of conference rooms are video enabled. This is because Continue reading “SX10 and Spark: A Connection in the Cloud”

Authors

Snorre Kjesbu

Senior Vice President/General Manager of Webex Devices

Meeting Room Systems

December 8, 2015 2 Comments

Cisco Collaboration Summit: Notes from Day 1

Kim Austin

It’s always nice to have your CEO stop by your event’s opening keynote. So it’s safe to say that Cisco’s Rowan Trollope had a pretty good day after CEO Chuck Robbins joined him on stage to say, “I fundamentally believe that you can’t build a digital business without collaboration.” And it’s a good way to kick things into high gear for this year’s Cisco Collaboration Summit.

And apparently the right shoes help, as Rowan pointed out: “I’m not wearing Converse, I’m wearing actual shoes — so something big must be happening today.” The something big is all about Cisco Spark.

Spark Services Announcement
The new Cisco Spark Services deliver all the capabilities of the Cisco collaboration portfolio directly from the cloud, bringing together messaging, meetings, and calling – and connecting with our phones and video conferencing systems. Continue reading “Cisco Collaboration Summit: Notes from Day 1”