2015 - Page 91 of 217

July 23, 2015 Leave a Comment

Evolution of Smart Net Total Care – Unique Opportunities for Our Partners

The Internet of Everything (IoE) completely reinvents the way we operate. It makes us more productive and competitive, and opens new opportunities for business.

At the heart of this innovation is the NETWORK.

The IoE puts new demands on the way the network is managed and operated. The network must securely support apps, devices, clouds, and enable personal experiences. As a result, customers must become more proactive to prevent network problems before they occur. The best way to do this is to:

Improve accuracy in network inventory management
Deploy proactive diagnostics
Eliminate service coverage gaps

A real-world example is iYogi, a global technical support provider. By taking a closer look at their network performance, their operations team was able to reduce time spent on updating the network inventory each week. They saw a significant difference and what used to take two to three hours to accomplish now only takes a few minutes.

As I indicated in a previous post , we have evolved our portfolio so you can better address customer needs and care-abouts. We listened to and understood your requirements, and have updated our services accordingly, so you can better support your customers.

Cisco SMARTnet® Service is merging with Cisco® Smart Net Total Care.

This new service keeps the Smart Net Total Care name and combines the award-winning technical service capabilities of SMARTnet with smart capabilities. We took the best of both, and combined them into one.

Our customer Pella, for example, didn’t have visibility it into each network device. It was difficult to identify end-of-life devices, or support contract renewal dates. They manually combed through hundreds of known security bugs to determine which was relevant to one of their devices.

With Smart Net Total Care, our customers can quickly solve a network problem, reduce overall operating cost, and manage support risk better. This allows more time to focus on business innovation while proactively supporting their infrastructure. According to Rajiv Kumar, Managing Director and CEO, Proactive Data Systems: Continue reading “Evolution of Smart Net Total Care – Unique Opportunities for Our Partners”

Authors

Raja Sundaram

Vice President

Services Partners and Alliances

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Intercloud Fabric – TechWiseTV and 15 minutes (or less) of Fame

John McDonough

TechWiseTV Episode 174 — Talking Intercloud Fabric on TechWiseTV

In middle school in the late 70s I took a test that was supposed to indicate my future career. The suggested careers were given a probability ranking. The top two results, by far were Entertainer at number 1 and Scientist at number 2, with the difference in probability between them almost imperceptible. Every other career was so less probable they barely registered.

Continue reading “Intercloud Fabric – TechWiseTV and 15 minutes (or less) of Fame”

Authors

John McDonough

Developer Advocate

DevNet

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Reduce Costs and Increase User Adoption of Video

Angela Murphy

Yesterday I took my car to get a dent fixed. It was one of those dents that, while barely visible, required a lot of time and expense to fix. (In fact, you had to kind of crouch down and look very closely at the underside of one panel to see it.) But given that it cut all the way through the paint, I couldn’t ignore it!

When I collected the car in the evening, I was glad to see no evidence of the time when car met kerb a couple of weeks before.

The mechanic’s quality of work was marked by the fact that there was no evidence that anything had happened at all. He told me that the most enjoyable part of his job is meeting his customers – and making sure that they are happy with his work.

We’ve recently been spoilt with opportunities to talk directly to our customers and partners, with two shows in quick succession: Cisco Live and Infocomm. The enthusiasm of people who attended demos, talks and presentations was palpable. It was a great opportunity to learn first-hand about the issues people are facing, and how new capabilities of our solutions are helping to address them.

The main themes customers shared with me were: Continue reading “Reduce Costs and Increase User Adoption of Video”

Authors

Angela Murphy

Senior Product Marketing Manager

Cisco IoT

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Cisco Modeling Labs on TechWiseTV

Robb Boyd

Test & Verify. How often is this ‘really’ be done in networking?

After learning more about what can be done here, I really feel like more people should be taking advantage of this.

The idea of building a fully virtualized version of your existing or desired network so you can see how your applications (and the network itself) will act and react in various situations, is like a wonderful dream of ‘never leave the chair’ goodness. This is immensely helpful and cost effective when compared to the amount of equipment historically required.

Watch the show: TechWiseTV 172 Cisco Modeling Labs

More information at their cisco.com/go/cml website.

Guest Expert: Nour Abu Sheik

Engineering Expert, Craig Brown, first introduced me to this software/service at Cisco Live Milan…but was stuck in Australia when we taped this…

Simulation vs. Emulation. Different of course. Emulation is a ‘pretender’ whereas ‘simulation’ is full on re-creation. CML is a simulation of the environment that you create so your experience is as realistic as it can be.

Cisco Modeling Labs uses the same IOS code running on your hardware, but built to run in a simulated environment. Using OS images such as IOS, IOS XR, IOS XE, NX-OS, and L2 switching, you can design, build, visualize, and launch a network simulation in a matter of minutes rather than days.

Why do we care?

Continue reading “Cisco Modeling Labs on TechWiseTV”

Authors

Robb Boyd

Producer, Writer, Host

July 22, 2015 Leave a Comment

Preparing for Cisco’s Next Chapter

Chuck Robbins

Next week, I start my new role as Cisco’s CEO. The past 90 days of my transition period have been as intense and inspiring as I expected, and I am even more excited about our next chapter.

As I said I would, I have spent most of the last few months listening to our employees, customers, partners and shareholders around the world. It is clear to me that we have the right vision, strategy and assets to lead our customers and the market for the next decade. I also see where we can and will prioritize and accelerate areas that are critical to our future success, make changes where needed, drive greater simplification and clarity in our business, continue our focus on operational discipline, and invest in our exceptional culture. I talked about these as my four focus areas 90 days ago, and while we’ve already made several decisions that reflect our commitment to move with speed in these areas, you will see more from us in the days, weeks and months ahead.

Today, we announced the sale of our SP Video customer premise equipment (CPE) business to Technicolor. Our entry into this market almost 10 years ago moved us from a tactical vendor to a strategic partner to our service provider customers. This market is moving extremely fast, and now is the right time for the right company, Technicolor, to drive the future of the SP Video CPE business and deliver what our customers and partners need going forward. You can read more detail on this here. With this move, we are prioritizing our investments to deliver on our strategy of video in the cloud, and will partner with Technicolor to position the CPE business and its employees for future success. This is a win for us, a win for Technicolor, and a win for our customers, partners and employees.

Continue reading “Preparing for Cisco’s Next Chapter”

Authors

Chuck Robbins

Chair and Chief Executive Officer

Cisco Systems, Inc.

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Technicolor Acquires Cisco’s Connected Devices Division

Hilton Romanski

Today, Technicolor announced it has entered into an exclusive agreement with Cisco to acquire our service provider video customer premises equipment (CPE) business for $600 million (or €550 million equivalent) in cash and stock. The companies also signed a strategic partnership agreement to develop and deliver next generation video and broadband solutions and services. More on this announcement can be read in the Technicolor press release.

This transaction will bring together global leaders in networking, cloud, and the connected home to drive the future success of the service provider video CPE business and both companies’ next generation video strategies:

With a rapidly moving and consolidating market, our shared customers will experience a seamless and smooth transition, and benefit from the continued innovation, focus and support of both companies,
Our employees will help define the future of a successful, global organization with a 100-year history of innovation,
The Connected Devices business’ industry-leading video and modem technologies will allow Technicolor to continue to innovate, deliver scale, and provide enhanced customer service, and
Cisco will continue to refocus our investments in service provider video towards cloud and software-based services businesses.

Ten years ago we entered the set top box business because of the role it played in our service provider customers’ business. Connected devices have delivered $27 billion of aggregate revenue to Cisco since then. This technology continues to be critical for these customers. We are proud of the contribution this business and its people have made to Cisco over many years. This includes providing new innovations, expanding important markets, and deepening our service provider relationships. We now believe that the time is right, and Technicolor is the right partner, to take this business to the next stage of evolution and growth.

Continue reading “Technicolor Acquires Cisco’s Connected Devices Division”

Authors

Hilton Romanski

No Longer with Cisco

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Cisco UCS delivers top TPC-H result for non-clustered systems at 3000-GB scale factor

Girish Kulkarni

The Cisco UCS® C460 M4 Rack Server continues its tradition of Industry leadership with the latest announcement of the best TPC-H benchmark result at the 3000GB scale factor in non-cluster category, in concert with Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Edition. This TPC-H result with Cisco UCS C460 M4 Rack Server is 57 percent faster than the HP DL580 and 47 percent less expensive, and it surpasses servers from other contenders, including Fujitsu and Lenovo as shown in the graphic below:

Results Comparisons (Source www.tpc.org as of 7/22/2015)

The Cisco UCS® C460 M4 Rack Server captured a performance of 725,686 QphH@3000GB and a price/performance ratio of $1.08 USD per QphH@3000GB. The Cisco UCS® C460 M4 Rack Server was equipped with four 2.5-GHz Intel Xeon processor E7-8890 v3 CPUs and 3 TB of memory (up to 6 TB supported). The system ran Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Edition and Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard Edition. Check out the Performance Brief for additional information on the benchmark configuration. The detailed official benchmark disclosure report is available at the TPC Results Page.

It is interesting to note that the Cisco UCS® C460 M4 Rack Server also has the top performance and price/performance record at the 1000GB scale factor. Cisco UCS C460 M4 with 588,831 QphH@1000GB and $0.97 USD per QphH@3000GB, available December 16, 2014.

The Cisco UCS C460 M4 delivers the balanced I/O, memory, and computing capacity needed for large-scale analytical and business intelligence applications. These benchmark results demonstrate the industry-leading performance you can expect when you choose Cisco UCS servers. For additional information on Cisco UCS and Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure solutions please visit Cisco Unified Computing & Servers web page.

Disclosure

About the TPC and TPCH

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) is a nonprofit corporation founded to define transaction processing and database benchmarks, and to disseminate objective and verifiable performance data to the industry. TPC membership includes major hardware and software companies.

TPC-H is an industry standard benchmark for decision support systems. It evaluates a composite performance metric (QphH@size) and a price-to-performance metric ($/ QphH@size) that measure the performance of various decision-support systems by running sets of queries against a standard database under controlled conditions.

The performance results described in this document are derived from detailed benchmark results available as of July 13, 2015, at http://www.tpc.org/tpch/default.asp.

Authors

Girish Kulkarni

Senior Marketing Manager

Data Center & Virtualization Marketing

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Digital Payments Lack the Framework for Success…And That Needs To Change

Jeff Kastelic

Co-authored with Mark Kovarski

In an era of constant technological evolution, our utilization of different technologies, including mobile devices, has had massive impact on the financial services industry. As a result, the industry is facing major disruption as new technology translates into new ways of exchanging value (money). In fact, digital payment concepts are constantly developing, with technology advances changing the payment universe as we know it. Disruptive innovations, such as Apple Pay, continue to gain scaled acceptance globally. Contactless payment solutions could take us a step further towards getting rid of the security and convenience shortfalls of traditional credit and debit cards, but it’s important that a capable, secure network is put in place before digital payments can truly flourish.

The Changing Payments Landscape

The first official currency was introduced in Turkey in 600vBC and, around 1661 AD, coins evolved into bank notes. In 1946, the first credit card was introduced and since the start of this century technology advances have disrupted the world of money more than once. In 1999, European banks started offering mobile banking while in 2008, contactless payment cards were issued in the UK for the first time. Now, driven by mobile and Internet technologies, we are in the early stages of fundamentally changing how we perceive the concept of money. Financial control is no longer only in the hands of the financial industry. Today, entrepreneurial minds are connecting us to our (and others) money in new and innovative ways.

Smartphones and tablets have recently become common devices with 79.4 million U.S. consumers who shop online. According to (source) 51% of U.S. digital buyers are expected to make purchases using a mobile device. New services like Apple Pay and mobile payments (M-payments) are becoming increasingly common in financial services. The questions we must begin to consider are, who will be the key providers in the financial services market in the future and what sort of payment ecosystem will emerge? Continue reading “Digital Payments Lack the Framework for Success…And That Needs To Change”

Authors

Jeff Kastelic

Practice Advisor

Financial Services, Business Transformation

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Converged Access Branch Design (MC over WAN)

Viten Patel

“Why can’t I have MC across a WAN boundary to manage multiple branch MA?”

I get this question a lot. I get asked if it isn’t logical to have the MC at a central location across a WAN boundary managing multiple MA at different branch locations. Sometimes it’s hard to comprehend this architectural construct for folks who are migrating from the centralized WiFi world and I totally get their confusion around this subject.

Continue reading “Converged Access Branch Design (MC over WAN)”