This year we launched the first annual Research Symposium at the IoT World Forum in Chicago. This Symposium brought together scholars, industry leaders and visionaries from across the world to discuss how academia and industry can partner to address the challenges and the opportunities that IoT presents.

We were delighted to be joined by impressive speakers. CEO of Enduring Hydro and former Undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Energy Dr. Kristina Johnson,  Stanford University Professor Balaji Prabakar, and World Bank Senior Transport Specialist Dr. Shomik Mehndiratta offered their perspectives on how IoT can improve our cities and societies by transforming how we approach everything from transportation to energy. Purdue University Professor Douglas Comer helped us understand what is required to make IoT interoperable. Read More »

Tags: academia, innovation, IoT, IoTWF, research, university

Arguably 2014 is already turning out to be a big year for cloud. Some have even called it “The Year of the Cloud.” Cloud implementation continues to play an essential role in overall IT strategy:

• A recent report says 80% of cloud adopters saw improvements within 6 months of moving to the cloud.

• According to the recent Future of Cloud Computing Survey, “organizations average 52% current use of applications that advance business priorities – underscoring the increasing value placed by organizations on facilitating the delivery of services beyond IT via the cloud.”

• More than half of respondents in the same survey cited business agility (54.5%) and scalability (54.3%) as the main drivers for cloud adoption.

In today’s business landscape, a variety of organizations and industries are embracing cloud as a way to make a real difference in their business.

Cisco is committed to helping our customers evolve their business and take advantage of the latest transformations in IT.  We are starting to see the results of that commitment. This is evident by the way that our customers have embraced UCS, as proved by being named #1 in blade server market share, and recently with Synergy Research naming Cisco #1 in cloud infrastructure equipment market share to deploy their cloud strategy.

So, what does Cisco being named the #1 cloud infrastructure provider mean for you?

Read More »

Tags: Bryan Glick, Cisco, Cisco UCS, CiscoCloud, cloud, Cloud Computing, Computer Weekly, Converged Infrastructure, Giuliano Di Vitantonio, Integrated infrastructure, Jack Woods, Michael Skok, Northbridge, research, SiliconANGLE, Synergy, synergy research, Synergy Research Group, Thomas Cloyd, UCS

As I described in my previous blog How the Mobile Industry Will Make Money in the Future, the history of the mobile industry has involved huge and successful waves of revenue growth.  Lucrative revenues from the first wave of voice and the second messaging wave have crested and are now in decline.  Mobile data access has taken up much of the shortfall, comprising well over one-half of the total revenue of most MNOs.  However, the crest of this third growth wave is visible on the horizon as critical industry disruptors begin to shape a new mobile world.

The question for mobile operators everywhere is, what is this fourth, or next, wave of mobile growth?

Unfortunately there is no obvious tsunami-size fourth monetization wave cresting on the horizon for mobile operators. Unlike the preceding three waves, there will be no gold rush created by a single killer app, such as voice, messaging, or data. A lot of gold still remains in the mobile business, but it is going to come from multiple sources and require some sophisticated mining techniques.

Cisco believes that there are four key strategic thrusts, or monetization areas, for operators to create new value from their mobile business.

1. Cost Optimization Read More »

Tags: Cisco, mobile, mobility, monetization, research, Service Provider

The mobile market continues to evolve at a blindingly fast pace. It seems as though new faster, sleeker, and more powerful mobile devices are launched every day. And new categories of mobile devices are created almost overnight. The number of applications available to run on these revolutionary new mobile devices is staggering, numbering in the millions. The insatiable demand for mobile devices and new bandwidth-hungry applications is generating enormous amounts of mobile data. The Cisco Visual Networking Index™ (Cisco VNI™) predicts that these trends will cause global mobile data traffic to increase 11-fold from 2013 to 2018, surpassing 15 exabytes per month by 2018.

In spite of this phenomenal growth and insatiable consumer demand, many MNOs are struggling to profit from this mobile gold rush. Mobile operators are watching as their average revenue per customer (ARPU) flattens or declines. Despite increasing customer appetite for mobile data, minutes of use in their cash-cow voice business are falling off sharply, and usage of text messaging is peaking. In fact, Ovum predicts that 2018 will mark the first year of revenue contraction in the history of the global mobile market. Following four years of less than 1 percent growth between 2012 and 2017, revenues will decline by 1 percent in 2018, ending the year $7.8 billion lower than in 2017.

This mobile paradox – huge growth and customer demand, yet Read More »

Tags: Cisco, mobile, monetization, research, Service Provider

This post is co-authored by Martin Lee, Armin Pelkmann, and Preetham Raghunanda.

Cyber security analysts tend to redundantly perform the same attack queries with different input data. Unfortunately, the search for useful meta-data correlation across proprietary and open source data sets may be laborious and time consuming with relational databases as multiple tables are joined, queried, and the results inevitably take too long to return. Enter the graph database, a fundamentally improved database technology for specific threat analysis functions. Representing information as a graph allows the discovery of associations and connection that are otherwise not immediately apparent.

Within basic security analysis, we represent domains, IP addresses, and DNS information as nodes, and represent the relationships between them as edges connecting the nodes. In the following example, domains A and B are connected through a shared name server and MX record despite being hosted on different servers. Domain C is linked to domain B through a shared host, but has no direct association with domain A.

This ability to quickly identify domain-host associations brings attention to further network assets that may have been compromised, or assets that will be used in future attacks.

Read More »

Tags: analysis, Big Data, correlation, D3, Domain, edge, fast, Graph, Gremlin, IE, Intelligence, internet explorer, IP address, name server, node, relationships, research, threat, Titan, TRAC, vertex, visual, zero-day