There is immense parental pride in seeing your child receive her University diploma. As I watched my daughter walk across the stage on the campus quad last year, bittersweet thoughts floated by – she’ll be leaving the family nest, striking out on her own, facing the challenges of finding a job, moving into her own apartment, paying bills. It was sad to think of innocence lost, and the real world barking at her door. With these thoughts I embraced her, and then she said “Dad, guess what, I’ve decided that I’m gonna do a gap year in New Zealand and Australia!”

A “gap year” is a way to defer all those serious milestones I was imagining for my daughter by taking a year off to travel and do fun things. Oh, and could I also take care of her cat, her car, and start making her college loan payments while she was gone? Oh well, I was actually very happy – and envious – about her quest for self-discovery.

So we shifted focus to new challenges, like getting travel medical insurance, selecting the right backpack, managing money needs, where to find jobs along the way, getting temporary work visas. And what about keeping in touch? I looked at my mobile operator’s roaming rates, and saw that Read More »

Tags: applications, data, data quotas, MMS, mobility, operators, ott, Plans, Roaming Data Plans, service providers, services, sms, subscribers

Following on our previous discussion surveying the projects supporting applications within OpenStack, let’s continue our review with an in-depth look at the OpenStack-native Application Catalog: Murano, currently an incubation status project, having seen its functionality and core services integration advanced over the past few OpenStack releases.

What is it?

An application catalog developed by Mirantis, HP and others (now Cisco), that allows application developers and cloud administrators to publish applications in a categorized catalog to be perused and deployed by application consumers. The selection of applications available within the catalog is intended to be that of released versions (ready-state) of applications (cloud-native or enterprise-architected), not application versions that are mid-development. Ideally, these are applications ready to be consumed and run by application users. Read More »

Tags: applications, cisco intercloud, cloud-based applications, enterprise applications, OpenStack

Infrastructure matters. It’s the foundation on which everything else in IT is built. The purpose of data center infrastructure is to run applications, yet the relationship between infrastructure admins and application developers is often dismal.

Are you an infrastructure admin? When’s the last time  Read More »

Tags: application development, applications, Cisco, cloud, Cloud Computing, containers, data center, IT Operations, virtualization

Although Latin America is a developing region, the area is making strides towards becoming more efficient, cleaner and more innovative—characteristics of smart cities and the Internet of Everything (IoE) are making it possible. Many people now beg the question, “Are smart cities real?” Wim Elfrink answers the question with a firm yes, referring to smart cities as tangible and necessary to foster economic and developmental growth.

With more and more people flocking to urban areas, cities that don’t embrace the digital economy will lag behind. Leading cities are reinventing themselves with real-time, networked applications to improve everything from traffic flow and parking to water usage and city-wide energy consumption. In some, passersby can instantly find nearby restaurants, shopping deals, mass transit and more at their fingertips through connected mobile devices.

Internet of Everything Enabling Connected Cities
Recently, Cisco partnered with AGT to develop an upcoming Internet of Things-enabled traffic management system that Read More »

Tags: applications, digital, Internet of Everything, internet of things, IoE, IoT, latin america, Smart Cities

For years, many IT organizations have been addressing slow application performance by adding more bandwidth. With broadband speeds available at over 100 Mbps, and the future of Fiber-optic at 1 Gbps, you would think bandwidth would solve all our application problems. However, many organizations are quickly learning that bandwidth on its own is not the answer, especially when it comes to the branch office.

So what is the problem? While connections are getting faster, branch offices still need high reliability. We all know downtime can be very costly. The Aberdeen group estimates that downtime can cost a company, on average, over $160,000 per hour.  And, some hours are more costly than others. For example, if your CEO is talking to shareholders during an earnings call and the network goes out – I would imagine that would cost someone their job.

There are several factors to consider on why “throwing bandwidth at the problem” is not enough. First, let’s consider the impact of data center virtualization. Over the past decade, organizations have been consolidating applications to their data centers. While IT has benefitted from cost savings, applications have moved further away from users. This has resulted in a delay in application response times, which is felt strongest by branch users. Read More »

Tags: #IWANWed, applications, bandwidth, Intelligent WAN, IWAN