Year: 2017

June 14, 2017 1 Comment
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Live #CiscoChat on June 21st — How IT is a Superpower for Solving the World’s Problems

The challenges facing our connected world are immense: access to clean water, effective response to crises, and economic empowerment just to name a few. Resolving these issues seems like it would take a superpower.

IT can be that superpower

Join us Wednesday, June 21 at 10:30 am PT for a Twitter chat to discuss real-world instances where technology has been an integral part of accelerating global problem solving, how global problem solvers are using IT and digital skills to do good, and how you can take a bigger role in the world of IT.

Add your voice to the conversation and hear from those who are already at the forefront of solving huge problems through the superpower of IT. Our participants include Zoe Rose, Cyber Security Analyst and former Cisco Networking Academy student, Ron Buell, Chief Technology Officer of Tribal Planet, and Alan Donald, Director of Technology for Development at Mercy Corps.

To participate in the chat:

  • Make sure you’re logged into your Twitter account.
  • Search for the #CiscoChat hashtag and click on the Live tab.
  • The chat will be moderated by the Cisco Corporate Social Responsibility team on Twitter (@CiscoCSR). Be sure to follow this account to participate.
  • The chat will begin welcoming guests and posting questions for discussion at 10:30 a.m. PT (1:30 p.m. ET).
  • Be sure to use the #CiscoChat hashtag at the end of each tweet so that others can find your contributions to the discussion.

Remember to bring your own questions to participate in the #CiscoChat. We look forward to hearing from you on June 21st!

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Austin Belisle

No Longer with Cisco

June 13, 2017 Leave a Comment
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Digital Manufacturing at Cisco Live 2017

Are you an Embedded IT manufacturing professional (An IT person who also works in operations) and you’re headed to Cisco Live in Las Vegas June 25-29, 2017 at Mandalay Bay?  You need to swing by the Manufacturing demos in the IoT and Industry District in the World of Solutions to learn how Cisco can help enable your Digital Factory Core.  If you are not attending, it’s not too late to join us by registering now.

Even though the Industrial IoT (IIoT), Industry 4.0, and smart manufacturing concepts have been around for years, thought leaders are now agreeing that manufacturing is at an inflection point.  Visit the IoT & Industries District to learn more about Connected Factory for Industrie 4.0, a suite of new products and solutions including Connected Asset Manager or CAM for IoT Intelligence, Industrial Network Director, and Time Sensitive networking.  These solutions can truly help manufacturing customers on their digital transformation sprint:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUzQ547BF-E

This new portfolio of products, solutions, services, design guides, and industry standards bring the full power of Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture (DNA) to manufacturing.  Check out some of the demos we will be showcasing:

  • Cisco Connected Asset Manager for IoT Intelligence: see how a unified KPI dashboard can track high value manufacturing assets to enable technicians to monitor and boost operational efficiency by identifying and optimizing under-performing machines, production lines, or sites. Also see how you can employ advanced video analytics to tie critical video information to other plant data for powerful insights into your operations.
  • Time Sensitive Networking (TSN): learn how time critical applications can be handled with determinism over Industrial Ethernet.
  • Industrial Network Director: empower your Operations team with an operations focused user experience for a fast path to simplified network management. Picture comprehensive visibility into your automation network and how that can make your job easier.
  • Collaboration in Manufacturing: you can help drive efficiency with one platform to display alarms, share & store data, and communicate effectively & securely with remote teams using industrial collaboration solutions, including Cisco Spark. Learn how Cisco remote expert solutions allow you to oversee more facilities, in more places, with a smaller team of experts.
  • Industrial Security: meet with our security experts in the booth and learn how industrial networks are the #1 targeted industry for cyber-attacks and security breaches. See how Cisco’s IoT Threat Defense can help provide comprehensive security from the enterprise to end devices to lower your costs, improve safety, and reduce downtime.

According to ARC Advisory Group, Cisco is now the #1 supplier of industrial managed switches – find out how our Connected Factory solution is the network backbone that can handle the demands and unleash the possibilities of digital manufacturing. Learn how adopting a tested and validated architecture, including factory wireless, will allow your manufacturing processes to securely operate at higher levels of performance, efficiency, and up time.   And, see how edge computing, together with partner products can turn your Cisco Factory Network infrastructure into data protocol translators to get at data in legacy, silo’d systems.  We will also have demos on Location-based services, and partner Rockwell Automation will show ThinManager, a platform that provides centralized content delivery and device management within your factory.

There are also over a dozen interesting manufacturing educational sessions you may want to attend.  Check out the Cisco Live Session Catalogue to search for Manufacturing focused sessions.

We have a lot going on – Hope to see you in Vegas!

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Scot Wlodarczak

No Longer with Cisco

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IoT Brings New Value, New Risks

My first blog post! Let me take a minute to introduce myself, I’m an engineer inside our Federal Group, and mostly help our customers with networking design and deployment, with a huge focus on security. I live in the Washington, DC area, with my wife, kid, and dog. More about the dog in a moment.

These days, my focus is on the Internet of Things, and for good reason. The Cisco Visual Networking Forecast (get it here) predicts over 12 billion machine-to-machine connections by 2021, and nearly a billion wearable devices in the next three years.

Mike Harttree's dog
Frisky the Corgi is ready to drive the next shift.

Even pets will get wearable devices. At my house, we use a product from a company called Whistle to track our dog, letting us know how much the dog has run around that day, and more importantly, where to find him if he gets out. It has 4G, GPS, Bluetooth, and Wifi connections. This sounds like a Cisco household: Our Corgi connects to multiple networks.

Even when I’m traveling, I can tell if the dog gets walked after school, and who does it. Here’s a cool feature of the Internet of Corgis – the Bluetooth of your phone identifies which owner was with the dog. I can open the Whistle app on my mobile phone to find out who walked the dog that day.

In all seriousness, there are tremendous benefits to be had by connecting people, processes and things and analyzing the data. I believe that there will be tremendous leaps in productivity, safety, and health over the next couple of years. Just as the rise of the Internet created both value and risk, the same goes for the Internet of Things.

The German Federal Office for Information Security released a report detailing a 2014 spear phishing campaign against a steel mill that allowed hackers access to the industrial control systems. Multiple systems fell under the hackers’ control, until enough failures accumulated that the blast furnace could no longer be shut down “in a regulated manner.” Massive damage occurred.

Read press coverage about the attack here.

Fortunately, the attack caused only property damage in this case; no one died. The most chilling aspect is the technical sophistication the attackers displayed. Not only did they have sharp social engineering skills, they also had expert knowledge of industrial systems. This, combined with months for them to work undetected, is a truly dangerous combination. The German industrial site might not have suspected it would be the target of a sophisticated attack, but U.S. federal agencies certainly know that they are.

Modernizing outdated equipment, patching, secure access, segmentation, visibility – these are all common practices in information technology (IT), and need to become the norm in operations technology (OT) as well. If we can design machine-to-machine communication with security in mind, we can get back to all the opportunity before us.

Get the Cisco 2017 Cybersecurity Report here. 

 

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Michael Harttree

Vertical Solutions Architect

US PS - Federal Area SSED

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday – June 2017

Today, Microsoft has release their monthly set of security updates designed to address vulnerabilities. This month’s release addresses 92 vulnerabilities with 17 of them rated critical and 75 rated important. Impacted products include Edge, Internet Explorer, Office, Sharepoint, Skype for Business, Lync, and Windows.

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Talos Group

Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group

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Quality and Our Thousand-Step Journey

I was at a survival training team activity recently. My biggest insight (besides the fact that Darwin would have written me off!) was how many different ways a wooden plank could be used to aid in survival. The plank truly became the foundation for a series of innovative use cases that could potentially aid my chances of survival. If I were to apply this analogy to the world of business – enterprises are still comprehending the onslaught of digitization, the network is the plank that enterprises could learn to utilize in order to aid their transformation and growth.

The network that we once took for granted as being the conveyor belt for inter-enterprise and intra-enterprise connectivity is now morphing into the lifeblood of enterprises. At a recent customer event, I heard of how hospitals use Cisco’s BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) based product and solution to track mission critical equipment like heart monitors to locate them easily whenever they are needed across emergency rooms and operation theaters. Likewise, another customer told me about the network controlling the physical perimeter of their building including doors, lights and security cameras. These use cases are not isolated. We take this responsibility of powering complete businesses very seriously. Not just in terms of product breadth, scalability and security but a more fundamental aspect – quality.

This translates into three key focus areas for the software engineering team at Cisco. First, we attempt to understand customers and their use cases, deployment scenarios, development environments and constraints better. This allows us to build better quality products ground-up that hopefully require less customization and handholding once placed within a customer’s ecosystem. We partner with our customers across several high-touch, active listening modes including engineer-engineer connect programs and co-development initiatives. This enables our engineers and designers to understand how the products they build are used in a customer’s environment. We also have several low-touch listening mechanisms including various telemetry methods, surveys, instant feedback mechanisms that provide us with data.

The second principle of quality we follow is reducing the underlying complexity of our software without compromising on functionality. Cisco has a legacy of building and buying its engineering horsepower. This sometimes translates to disparate systems. Improving the quality and customer experience of our products has meant creating operational simplicity. Our effort to consolidate our operating systems across 15+ product families to one operating system is already showing early signs of success. Other architectural improvements include efforts towards creating software patches rather than full-scale upgrades, improved serviceability levels and providing solution support rather than just stand-alone product support.

The final pillar that holds our quality strategy together is how we measure ourselves, and the metrics we actively track. While we continue to keep our eye on post-release metrics, we are beginning to now build advanced predictive intelligence into our in-process quality monitoring. We use algorithmic functions to study patterns of quality escapes, which in turn enable us to predict future hot spots. With this effort, we are attempting to shift our quality mindset to early intervention rather than the traditional approach of hyper-reliance on downstream testing.

Our quality journey is far from perfect or complete. However, we approach every quality intervention – immediate or foundational – with a sense of awe and humility at the sheer impact our products have on our customers and in turn their consumers. The effort with this blog was to share a behind-the-scenes view to how Cisco engineering is continuously chipping away at quality. We hope this conveys our primary sentiment that we have your back.

Would love to continue the conversation in the comments section below. Stay tuned for further updates.

 

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Venky Nanniyur

Vice President, Engineering

Enterprise Networking Business

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60,000 Cisco UCS Customers and Counting

They said we were crazy.

Back in 2009, when we unveiled the Cisco Unified Computing System, industry pundits – namely our competitors in the server market – said we’d overreached in a technology arena we knew little about.

What we introduced was an innovative solution that unified compute, network, storage access, management and virtualization into one integrated platform designed to fundamentally eliminate complexity and increase business agility. We changed the game by engineering a high-performance, highly secure and flexible computing system, not just another server like everyone else.

Today, we are pleased to announce that we now have 60,000 active UCS customers. Starting from almost nothing just eight years ago, we’ve built a business that is now consistently ranked in the top-two in blade server shipments worldwide, nearly doubling the number of customers over the past three years alone.

UCS has become a primary building block in the world’s most advanced data centers, delivering the benefits of a converged infrastructure in ready-to-deploy stacks.  Consider these achievements:

To this day, no other technology solution has been able to match the architectural superiority and sustainable differentiation of UCS. We have continuously added innovations to the portfolio and will be introducing our fifth-generation UCS next month.

And in the coming months, Cisco and our world-class data center partner ecosystem, which includes new partners like Docker and Turbonomic, will introduce a series of UCS innovations on multiple levels. At Cisco Live U.S. in Las Vegas, June 25-29, we will demonstrate new system, software, orchestration and management solutions that will allow our customers to foster innovation, reduce risk, and eliminate complexity within their data center environments.

Cisco has never been more committed to our UCS customers’ success. We will continue to innovate and create new value and business opportunities for UCS customers around the world.

While other vendors mimic our message while delivering their same tired technology, we want to thank our customers who’ve placed their confidence in Cisco’s “crazy” vision of a Unified Computing System.

 

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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Liz Centoni

Executive Vice President

Chief Customer Experience Officer

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Digital Business has Changed the Rules Bringing New Challenges and Expectations

At Cisco, we believe you’re the champions of configuration, the sultans of software, and the wizards of wireless. You’re the ones who can help turn business intent into business results.

Cisco Live US is a celebration of you. Of IT. And we’re thrilled to host you in Las Vegas at the end of the month.

This year’s theme, “You’re IT,” truly captures the importance of IT in today’s world: it’s no longer the big beating the small, but the fast beating the slow. In today’s digital era, applications are more far-reaching, and the emergence of new systems of engagement are revolutionizing the way you interact with your customers. Every transaction matters. These sophisticated consumers expect a flawless experience and, as a result, you must be able to ensure the health and performance of every single transaction. Failing here means losses to your business.

However, as digital experiences get simpler for consumers, they get more complex for those managing the underlying applications and IT environment. It requires managing the growing complexity as the new world comes together with the old world, driven by the rise of connected devices, distributed architectures, and multi-clouds environments. Organizations must evolve to keep pace with these new demands.

 “As business processes digitalize, infrastructure and operations professionals discover that their observations and analyses are increasingly relevant to other parts of IT and the business as a whole.” — Gartner, 2016

Today, in many ways, applications are the business. When you consider this, it becomes apparent that IT and business performance are inseparable. The two are blended together—so you need to understand how they relate and the associated impact IT has on business outcomes.

We can help. With Cisco IT Insights, you’re able to see more of the business, know more about what is happening and why, and be more proactive to prevent issues, optimize performance, and elevate your role in digital transformation. Cisco IT Insights offerings provide end-to-end visibility, contextual insights, and prescriptive guidance that turns business intent into business outcomes.

We’re excited to showcase these capabilities at Cisco Live US next week.

We have executive-led speaking sessions, and real-world demos in the solution showcase expo, featuring key technologies such as Cisco Tetration, Cisco Stealthwatch, and new analytics capabilities from Cisco DNA.

Register for the conference, stop by the Cisco IT Insights Zone in the Cisco Campus, and attend one of our speaking sessions to see more, know more, and be more with Cisco.

We look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas.

 Learn More 

Find additional details about our show presence here:

 

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Gino Palozzi

Marketing Manager

Analytics & Automation Platforms

1 Comment
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Discover the Power of the Liberated Learner

Close your eyes. Take a moment and think about the ways in which you learned when you were in primary school.

Did you collaborate with peers both in the classroom and outside of the school walls? Did you have unlimited access to resources, tools and knowledge sharing through your device?

Chances are, if you didn’t graduate from high school in the past few years, your experiences were completely different from those available to students today.

Education is changing fast, and students are demanding personalized learning that allows them to learn how they want, when they want and where they want.

In fact, 78% of students said that using technology contributes to the successful completion of their courses [1].

But, not all schools are able to keep up with the ever-increasing student demand.

According to a survey by Deloitte, only 26% of educators currently use technology to allow students to collaborate remotely, and 45% of teachers still use whiteboards to teach in their classrooms [2].

With student expectations rising, district budgets tightening and more technologies than ever hitting the education market, how can schools continue to drive the technologies that will have biggest impact on student achievement?

Collaboration tools like Cisco Spark, WebEx, and conferencing endpoints can facilitate the types of instruction, teamwork, and research that help students learn how they need to learn.

Take a look at the infographic below to see how Cisco Collaboration technologies free students, teachers and administrators from the constraints of the traditional classroom, liberating the learner.

 

[1] Educause Research Snapshot 2016

[2] Deloitte Education Survey

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Lyanne Paustenbach

No Longer with Cisco

1 Comment
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Changing Perceptions as Miss Silicon Valley

When someone uses the word “pageant” – your brain probably goes first to images of big hair and ball gowns. The last thing that you think of is “techie.”

But let me change your perceptions!

I work for Cisco as a Business Analyst, and I’m a proud techie, as well as the current Miss Silicon Valley. On July 1st, I compete for the title of Miss California, in the Miss America Organization. The Miss America Organization is the number one provider of scholarships for girls around the world. What makes this competition so unique is the talent portion of the competition. At Miss California, I am playing “The Greatest” by Sia as a reminder to everyone that is listening, to never give up on your dreams and passions.

I am a proud woman in tech, and participate in the Women in Science and Engineering employee resource organization (ERO). However, being crowned Miss Silicon Valley opened new opportunities for me to empower more women to raise their voice, whether it’s in technology or in life.

I even started using the word “Crownmunity!” It’s a community that I have built to champion equality, collaboration, and disrupting the perception that these competitions are not just about outter beauty, but inner beauty and self-confidence! Every woman wears an invisible crown as they follow their passions.

Here’s the great thing about being a Cisconian. My management supports me to wear my crown and make my mark, while still doing great work for my company. There are two slogans at Cisco that inspire me in pursuing my platform.

The first, is “There’s never been a better time to …” The slogan in Cisco terms encourages everyone at the company to waste no time in innovating, making a change in the world and do it NOW! When would it ever be convenient or easy? I want to lead by example, and be a role model to young girls. I am even the Director of the Miss CEO Ambassador program, to work with girls 12-18 to develop their leadership skills and look early towards their futures – perhaps to even be the next Cisconians! I want to show them that anything is possible by working hard and staying dedicated to rise up to the challenge.

The other is “Be you, with us. #WeAreCisco” I’ve been able to be an employee ambassador to the world about working at Cisco, and even our new Careers site has this front and center. Growing up, I was never able to categorize myself into one of the pre-defined boxes society tries to put us in. When I went to college, (University of California, Davis) I didn’t stick to one box, either. I majored in Management Economics, but I minored in Education, with an emphasis in Computer Science. I can work now for the Business Strategy-Global Infrastructure IT team and STILL pursue my passions. Cisco allows us to truly bring our uniqueness to work. And when you work with other unique skillsets, you can direct big change.

It’s not a “Cisco” life at Cisco and a “Sabina” life outside of work. I can also combine them! I am also part of the Early Career Leadership Team in San Jose, CA, where we provide resources and networking events for new hires to help them navigate the corporate structure. I am part of various Connected Women programs to help with mentorship and professional development. My day to day work at Cisco consists of fiscal year planning for our organization and making sure priorities align with our organization and the broader of IT. Through understanding the strategic process and mindset within Cisco, I have been able to apply these skills to everyday situations.

Every day when I walk out of the Cisco doors, I serve as a role model of millions of girls around the world who aspire to disrupt social perceptions and create change. I invite each and every one of you reading this article to start raising your voice and leading by example. You can achieve this by doing something you’re proud of, finding a mentor, and lending a helping hand.

 

Help me be your next Miss California by voting at https://www.misscalifornia.org/vote/ by June 30th!

To watch the state finals via live stream or TV, visit https://www.misscalifornia.org/live/

 

Interested in learning more? Visit www.sabinachaudhuri.com or follow me on social media!

Instagram/Facebook: @misssiliconvalley

Twitter: @MissSV2017

 

Want to work for a company that encourages you to be yourself? We’re hiring!

 

 

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Sabina Chaudhuri

Business Systems Analyst

Global Infrastructure Services IT -Business Strategy