The theme will be sharing regional and global approaches to justice administration.
These global IACA conferences and journal provides an excellent forum for sharing best practices with Court Presidents, Court Managers, Registrars, Judges, Judicial Officers, Solicitors, Barristers, Security Advisors, Representatives from Ministries of Justice Administration, Policy makers and other experts from related fields from Europe and around the world.
If you’re thinking of incorporating a flexible workspace—where employees are not assigned to one particular desk—consider what London’s RSA Group accomplished with a little help from Cisco.
As one of the world’s largest insurance company, RSA Group was looking to cut back on real estate costs in London by consolidating three offices into one. Out of its 18,500 employees, only about 1,000 workers call one of the three London offices their home. By restructuring their largest property into a flexible workspace, RSA found the answer. But how will their employees plug into their network without a defined workspace?
The answer was by combining the wired and wireless network into one. Using Cisco Aironet Access Points and Cisco Catalyst 3850 Series Switches the insurance company was able to create the infrastructure to combine their networks. Cisco management software such as Cisco Prime Infrastructure and Cisco ISE made sure that any employee’s device—whether personal or corporate—was brought into the office was recognizable and automatically connected to the VLAN.
This solution provided one overall answer that allowed employees to work anywhere in the building without fear of losing a Wi-Fi signal. Even when roaming from floor-to-floor the employees were still connected.
Not only did this model cut real estate costs, but according to James Sandall, Group IT Delivery Director, RSA Group, the IT department has realized a huge savings too. And not just in cost, the saving manifest in his employees’ time.
“Management is simpler because network administrators use just one interface,” he explained. “The help desk receives almost no calls about Wi-Fi because it’s so reliable. And IT no longer needs to spend time reconnecting network cables when employees move.”
To read the rest of the case study and view the video, please click here.
The Industrial Revolution was a time when the world was transitioning to new manufacturing processes from the 1700’s to approximately 1820. This transition moved manufacturing from hand to machine production and literally changed just about every aspect of daily life. This was followed by a second revolution that scaled machine production into large-scale production with the creation of steam (and later coal) powered factories.
We are in the midst of another industrial revolution and companies of all types and sizes are being affected. This revolution is revolving around digital technology, which has changed our expectations for service delivery as well as how we want to do business. This revolution is all about automation, scalability and speed and delivering complex services without human intervention — within minutes.
This new industrial revolution goes by two different names: digital disruption or digital transformation. This revolution is all about the interconnected nature of digital technology and tech-savvy consumers who no longer want to wait weeks for resources, applications or services.
Smarter and smarter devices as well as an explosion of business services have only increased complexity for IT professionals. It is no longer viable to stand up resources or services through manual processes — which take on average 196 tickets to complete. It’s time for your business to automate.
If you have not done so already, now is the perfect time to promote automation. Budgets are tight, technology components are increasing and qualified workers have become scarce.
Replacing manual services with standardized service delivery results in significant cost reductions, enables IT to meet their service level agreements (thereby gaining back the trust of their customers) as well as deliver services at amazingly faster speeds. Automation also allows organizations to reallocate budget spent from maintenance and support to funding new strategic initiatives. Lastly, at a time when the Fed is paying 1% interest, doesn’t 10% growth in revenue sound great?
As cyberattack prevention becomes an increasingly critical focus of homeland security efforts, industry observers are taking a closer look at the readiness of the nation’s critical infrastructure. Some believe there is reason to worry. Researchers recently revealed that many industrial systems, including some used in public utilities, come with default passwords that are readily available and could be used by hackers to gain remote root access and disrupt services or cause damage. Just last December, at least three of Ukraine’s energy providers suffered cyber attacks that took them offline for about six hours – the first time that a power outage has been directly tied to cybercrime.
On Wednesday, February 3, The Energy Times presented a webcast on this topic, sponsored by Cisco. I was privileged to join a panel of speakers representing the key utility and government leaders responsible for protecting the grid and the American public in a discussion on security challenges in the energy industry and what can be done to further enhance the security of our nation’s power grid.
Mobile World Congress (MWC) continues to set records for attendance with 101,000 people through the doors according to GSMA. At our Cisco booth we hosted over 450 meetings with Service Providers, and as usual the discussions were frank and insightful.
The “smorgasbord” of topics covered with our customers ranged from the immediate business challenge to profitability from OpEx growth and service erosion to OTT, to the future and how to grab a slice of IoT pie, plus evolve networks to a post 2020 “5G” era. These discussions are always food for thought, especially with so many diverse SPs in such a short period of time. So after digesting all this on the flights home, here is what’s in my doggy bag of takeaways to start getting my teeth into: Continue reading “MWC16 takeaways”
This month marks the one-year anniversary of our social chat program, #CiscoChat. To date, we’ve had over 2,500 participants to our 35 chats. With a viewership of potentially 144 million impressions, and our hashtag trending nationally several times, we are excited about the level of engagement and attention the program has received.
So what’s in store for the next year of #CiscoChat, and beyond? Well, first, we want to thank all of you who have helped make this program a success. Without active participation from the community every week, we wouldn’t still be going. So we’ll be recognizing some of our past participants with shout-outs and thank yous on Twitter. We’ll also be discussing opportunities to become a speaker, as well as ways you can help steer the conversation.
As for future topics, here’s a list of some of the discussions we have planned over the next couple of months, including data centers, retail technology, service provider video, and more.
Give Us Your Feedback
Do you have an idea for a topic you’d like to see covered? Or ideas on how we can improve the format or experience? Let us know using the #CiscoChat hashtag! We’ll respond to all topic suggestions. We’re always on the lookout for new areas to delve into, and particularly want to keep abreast of what topics our participants care about.
If you’re one of the ones who has joined in a #CiscoChat over the last year, or even just followed the hashtag, then it’s thanks to you that we’ve come this far. And if you’re new to #CiscoChat, we hope you’ll join us for some of our upcoming discussions. Here’s to the next year being even better!
Cisco is an established leader in data center convergence: bringing together the people, process and technology of IT, but no single vendor can do this alone. Our spectrum of partnerships across the technology ecosystem and with solution providers has been essential our success and the success of our customers.
Our entry into the hyperconverged infrastructure category drafts off the momentum and power of Cisco’s partnerships, creating an unmatched architectural play that will help accelerate the adoption of this technology in mainstream IT.
Industry reaction so far has been extremely positive and several of our partners shared their thoughts with us in San Diego. We’re very grateful for the support and the warm welcome they’ve given HyperFlex. Many also took to the blogosphere with their thoughts and we’ve assembled their perspectives here in this post.
It’s an exciting time to be at Cisco. The pace of innovation and change is astounding, and we’re barely beginning to scratch the surface. And I’m saying this coming from a fast-moving startup environment just 10 months ago.
Many of you are already using Cisco Spark and Tropo APIs to spin up amazing ideas that utilize our communications services in a transformative way. These ideas have the power to shift how people work together in a variety of functions and industries – from sales and marketing, to financial services and education, to IOT.
This week at Enterprise Connect we announced the $150M Spark Innovation Fund. The fund will aim to foster even more innovation on Spark and Tropo within our developer community, through equity and non-equity investing.
https://youtu.be/UDbOSQk0iwo
The collective power of these agile business ventures with the Cisco Spark platform and the global reach and scale of our customer and partner base will be astounding. Together, we’ll no doubt unlock the innovation that can change the way teams work together anytime, anywhere around the globe. Continue reading “$150M New Reasons to Explore Cisco Spark”
Everything about the data center today has changed, driven by the applications that run in it. Today’s data center apps have undergone a fundamental architecture shift from monolithic, shrink-wrapped packages to a collection of microservices that are assembled and reassembled in a continuous development cycle. The people who rely on and even manage these apps have diversified too, from just the IT organizations to many different lines of businesses and users who are exerting both influence and budget toward self-determination and self-service models.
Even where the apps reside has changed. They are no longer confined to single, fixed locations and are instead distributed across both on-premise data centers as well as public and hybrid clouds. For enterprises, this trend not only increases management complexity but also makes it more challenging to mitigate real-time security threats.
The good news for enterprises and our partners is that Cisco is ahead of this curve as the only company capable of delivering a comprehensive architecture with breakthrough innovation at all levels of the data center stack – from infrastructure resources, policy-based management/automation, and best-of-breed hybrid cloud orchestration. A summary of our Partner Summit announcements includes:
Cisco HyperFlex™ Systems: Based on UCS, Cisco is unveiling the next generation of the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), which simplifies policy-based automation across network, compute and storage. HyperFlex offers the utmost in flexibility and simplicity, giving customers the ability to stand up a system from ground up and add scale/performance in less than an hour versus days or weeks;
New Cisco Nexus 9000 Switches: Next-generation data center switches from the Nexus 9k family that deliver cloud scale and give Cisco customers a two-year innovation advantage over competitive technology in terms of performance, scale and security;
Hybrid Cloud orchestration: comprehensive yet simplified, orchestration for both on-premise as well as hybrid cloud workloads along with complete application lifecycle management. By combining Cisco ACI and UCS platforms with storage solutions from industry leaders, the Cisco Cloud Center, has created an industry-leading solution that automates and optimizes end-to-end provisioning for hybrid clouds from a single pane of glass.
Market disruption through continued innovation
These announcements will be an integral part of another technology transition that Cisco is driving in the enterprise and data center landscape through disruptive innovation.
This began with voice/video/data convergence over IP networks, which established new benchmarks for IT cost savings and resource utilization. Cisco then led to the convergence of the virtualized IT compute/network/ storage stack, driving new levels of agility and creating new IT operating models. Following this, Cisco paved the way toward the Application Economy using the scale, security and programmability of the Cisco ACI and other software-defined solutions.
With this latest technology transition, Cisco is enabling enterprises to future-proof their data centers and hybrid cloud environments through real-time analytics, hyperconverged platforms, and cloud-scale capacity that give them the freedom to dynamically choose any combination of on-premise data centers, public or hybrid cloud environments to run their apps.
For our partners, the message is simple: we cannot achieve success without you. The quality of our “better together” partnerships are key to helping Cisco stand out among our peers and competitors. In turn, our partners have access to highly differentiated innovations that only Cisco can deliver including the broadest portfolio of industry-leading compute, network, storage, software and orchestration solutions available today. Partners also have access to Cisco’s unique ability to drive common policies and intelligent automation wherever data center apps reside, which eliminates customers having to make difficult and binary “on-prem or cloud” decisions. This is the core value proposition of our announcements today.
Joining us in this journey will further help you, our partners, create new revenue streams and stand out from competitors. Just as importantly though, this will prepare you to give your customers great service as you help them pave their way into the next decade toward the seamless adoption of hybrid cloud-enabled data centers.
Cisco is proud to sponsor the 11th International Association for Court Administration (IACA) conference that will be held in The Hague, The Netherlands, May 18-20, 2016 at the World Trade Centre.
ing and qualified workers have become scarce.
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