2016 - Page 218 of 221

January 12, 2016 Leave a Comment

SON Isn’t Just Network KPI Improvements (Part 2)

In the first part of this blog series (SON Isn’t Just Network KPI Improvements-Part 1), we discussed the need for automation and simplification to address growing challenges in network complexity. This part will discuss 3 areas that are good starting points for any MNO considering a SON deployment and why RF engineers eagerly embrace this new solution.

1. Parameter Auditing

Today, cell configuration auditing is extremely difficult, time intensive, and subject to human error. Engineers go through an exhaustive process of defining and updating audit profiles then matching cells with the profiles. Many MNOs use one “golden” profile to audit all cells against, with the focus on general consistency and identifying the easiest problems to fix. A typical audit takes two-to-four hours per audit and is performed every two-to-three weeks. The RF engineer simply has no time to perform an in-depth analysis to determine if anything other than the standard parameters are incorrectly set.

RF engineers immediately see the benefit of a SON solution that enables the creation and enforcement of RF parameter profiles. It removes configuration errors in the network, reduces deployment timeline by automating the configuration of new cells, and audits against an unlimited number of “golden profiles” for cells in different RF environments (for example, urban, suburban, rural) areas.

2. Load Balancing

An engineer can Continue reading “SON Isn’t Just Network KPI Improvements (Part 2)”

Authors

Matt Ungerleider

Director of Sales Operations

Service Provider Sales

1 Comment

Communications and IT Services – It’s Personal This Time

Sidney Kriger

Cisco MOI Forecasts the Opportunity

I think most of us take for granted how mobile data services have evolved over the past decade. From simply being able to access email to now watching live video streaming on our personal devices, the pace has been dramatic. Our service providers have also evolved. Now we can log into our accounts and see near real-time information on our calls, texts, and data usage. I can adjust my plan online by myself – add or remove services, alter my data quota, etc.

Our expectation for easy access to and control of our personal services is creeping into our professional lives, as well. For example, I want to customize the metrics I see for activity on web pages to show what matters most to me or my organization. Also, I want to have those results tallied, visualized, and delivered automatically. This is not a one size fits all world anymore. Orchestration, automation, and virtualization, using NFV and SDN technologies, open the door to new possibilities for service providers to bring similar flexibility to their business customers’ experiences.

Service providers have offered Continue reading “Communications and IT Services – It’s Personal This Time”

Authors

Sidney Kriger

Senior Manager of Business & Technology Architectures

Worldwide Service Provider Marketing

4 Comments

Making a Difference One Bike at a Time

Jason Liu

Build a bike — Enjoying the fruits of my labor before handing the bikes off to the kids. (Photo credit Linas Dauska)

“Do a good turn daily.”

I was in the 6^th grade when I first confidently recited the Scout Slogan in front of my troop. My uniform swallowed the frame of my entire body, but the words left my mouth with sound conviction as I accepted the challenge to perform a kind deed daily—big or small.

8 years later (and after successfully achieving the Eagle Scout Rank), I have continued to give back to the community by participating in volunteering efforts with the San Francisco Food Bank and Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, as well as pro bono consulting with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. I have realized that the words “do a good turn daily” have changed the way I work, live, play, and learn. This ongoing commitment to give back to the community is a challenge I am proud to tackle every day, with or without the uniform or rank.

Most recently, I went to a Build a Bike event held by the Cisco Enterprise Product Solutions and Marketing (PSM) team.

NOTE: I’ve built IKEA furniture and complex LEGO metropolises, but never a bike.

Nevertheless, by the end of the day, I was able to cross this off my bucket list thanks to some quality Cisco teamwork, and mini assembly lines that involved attaching the training wheels, inserting the handlebar, putting on the pedals, and decorating the bike with streamers and personalized license plates. In total, we built 36 bikes for the Marine Toys for Tots foundation and as you can see from the pictures, I was pretty excited – and I’m so happy for the children who will soon be proud bike owners! I thought back to how happy I was to ride my first bike and it warmed my heart to be able to provide that experience for a deserving child.

Team bike building — The PSM team hard at work building bikes. (Photo credit Linas Dauska)

It was truly special (but not surprising) that 40 people, on the day after Thanksgiving weekend, were all willing to volunteer their time for a good cause, while having a great time and collaborating for a total team effort. This is why I chose Cisco – a company that not only has the culture, breadth, and capabilities to make a significant impact on the community, but a company where the employees have dedication and share my passion for making a difference and delivering awesome.

Want to join a great team that cares about great causes? Apply at Cisco.

Authors

Jason Liu

Product Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networking and Mobility

4 Comments

Cisco SDN, the Disruptive ACI Technology, Leads to an Avalanche of Opportunities

Praveen Jain

Wishing you all a very Happy New Year and thanks to you all for considering ACI as your SDN solution to simplify your data center operation and automation. This is a follow on to my last blog to provide details on how we have delivered a true disruption in networking and opened the gate for agility of your applications where-ever they are.

The ACI’s policy model allows a consistent way of managing your infrastructure. For people new to ACI, let me step back and describe what I mean by policy model.

With traditional networks, application teams put in requirements for their infrastructure teams who then translate it into networking constructs like VLANs, subnets, ports, and routes often times using spreadsheets. The following picture depicts a very simple case for a three tier application. As you can see, the workflow for how application requirements get translated which can be slow, labor intensive, and vulnerable to manual errors.

Continue reading “Cisco SDN, the Disruptive ACI Technology, Leads to an Avalanche of Opportunities”

Authors

Praveen Jain

No Longer with Cisco

Service Providers are on a Digital Journey

Kelly Ahuja

The Internet is the lifeblood of the digital economy. And in the digital economy, there is no growth, no life without the connectivity delivered by service providers across the globe.

Every country, city, industry, and organization is undergoing a digital transformation. Service providers are leading this transformation in their own networks: no longer are they simply connecting places, but now they are connecting things. And not only are they connecting things on the traditional outdoor network, they are expanding to connect things indoors, like in venues, shopping malls, and airports, where traditional approaches to connectivity may not make economic sense.

Whether leveraging technology to enable, differentiate, or even define their digital transformations and business strategies, service providers worldwide are partnering with Cisco for solutions along every stage in the journey. Here are a few examples:

Continue reading “Service Providers are on a Digital Journey”

Authors

Kelly Ahuja

Senior Vice President

Service Provider Business, Products, and Solutions

2 Comments

Beginning Your Hybrid Cloud Digital Transformation

Xander Uyleman

Moving to cloud has compelling value to organizations of all types and sizes. With benefits such as lower CAPEX, flexible scalability, and global access to enterprise-class IT resources, many businesses are able to increase their agility with public cloud services. As a consequence, they can act upon market opportunities faster and with great efficiency.

The cloud, however, is evolving just as fast as the organizations taking advantage of it are. Traditional public cloud services provide businesses with applications that run outside their data center. New “hybrid” cloud technology actually extends the capacity of data centers without capital investment. With a hybrid cloud you’ll be able to seamlessly access IT resources and other services located in the cloud – even from different service providers – as if they are part of your on-premises data center.

What does this mean for your organization? For Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, moving to hybrid cloud has completely changed how they think about their network. Brent Olson, Director and Chief Architect at Holtzbrinck, says “Our strategic direction is not to buy infrastructure anymore.”

Olson shares more about Holtzbrinck’s hybrid cloud digital transformation in this video. His story begins with a need to expand the production environment for an e-learning platform to be launched in Europe. After teaming with cloud provider iland, Olson discovered that the hybrid cloud had so much more to offer than he realized.

“With Cisco’s Intercloud Fabric and iland as a partner, we were able to give the business units the agility and ability that they needed to spin up their own infrastructure. It’s great that we have more control. We also have choice on where we want to be able to move our workloads. It’s definitely more efficient to use a cloud provider than for us to provision hardware on our own.”

With hybrid cloud, Holtzbrinck can extend its data center across the world. They now have a diverse range of providers, environments and clouds to choose from. And with access to Intercloud Fabric and a broad portfolio of Cisco Powered services, Holtzbrinck has confidence that their hybrid cloud will provide enterprise-class performance, reliability, and security no matter where in the world they are located.

With hybrid cloud, Holtzbrinck has transformed from an old-world publisher into a digital company of the future.

Learn what Cisco Powered, Intercloud Fabric, and hybrid cloud technology can do for your organization.

Authors

Xander Uyleman

Senior Manager

Global Partner Marketing

4 Comments

When Is a Car Not a Car?

John Brigden

In my last post I talked about companies that are digitizing themselves, and the critically important role of software. When we think about IT and software, we often think of large enterprises and software that resides on servers. But in this new age of the software-centric company, software can live anywhere.

Software is enabling companies to innovate rapidly, and deliver new features and capabilities to customers quickly and cost effectively. Silicon Valley automaker Tesla is widely recognized for transforming the automotive world with its game changing electric cars. But according to the company’s CEO, Tesla isn’t just a car company. It’s a software company.

“Tesla is a software company as much as it is a hardware company. A huge part of what Tesla is, is a Silicon Valley software company.” – Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Bloomberg Business, Oct. 2014

And the Tesla Model S is much more than a car. Continue reading “When Is a Car Not a Car?”

Authors

John Brigden

Senior Vice President

Offer Monetization Office

Announcing Data Virtualization Release; Increased Support for Cloud, SaaS and Social Media Data Sources

Kevin Ott

Cisco continues to make significant investments in our Data and Analytics offerings, including our industry-leading Data Virtualization software. The latest release of the Cisco Information Server, version 7.0.3, reflects the healthy collaboration that we have with our valued customers, and our talented engineering team.

Two forces driving the evolution of data management for analytics are the overarching move to cloud and SaaS solutions, and the rise of NoSQL databases as inputs to reporting and analytics. Responding to these trends takes agility, but it also takes resources—and at Cisco, we have both. We are making a major push to support new cloud, SaaS and Big Data sources out of the box, keeping data virtualization relevant to customers’ new IT landscapes and shortening time to value.

Continue reading “Announcing Data Virtualization Release; Increased Support for Cloud, SaaS and Social Media Data Sources”