There has never been a better time to take inventory with your customers. By asking them if you can help them assess their software investments to turn dormant “shelf-ware” into “productive-ware, you will begin to discover new business, and new opportunities to sell services that support the entire software lifecycle.

Every customer wants to be as effective with the software investments they make and wants to quickly realize the return on their investments. Your work to discover activation opportunities or adoption and usage increases is just the beginning of adding value to your customers!

There are a lot of reasons why this is important – but here are my top three: Read More »

Tags: adoption services, channel, Cisco, collaboration, lifecycle services, partner, partner tools, richard mcleod, software

Customers’ expectations have never been higher. They want choice and flexibility. They require intelligent networks and infrastructure that’s intuitive, secure, easy to use and manage, and able to adapt to the specific requirements of their applications.

Today we’re excited to announce Cisco ONE Software, which offers a simplified solution to the most relevant, frequently-used customer scenarios in the data center, wide area network and local access networks. Cisco ONE is a big deal, and it’s an important piece of our larger software strategy in a world where value is increasingly delivered to customers through software.

Think about the technology disruptions and market transitions our customers are experiencing today. Cloud, virtualization, big data, software-defined networking, software-as-a-service (SaaS), the Internet of Everything – software is the enabling mechanism at the heart of each. In recent years, software has played an increasingly key role in our technology and solutions. Today, we are the fifth-largest software company in terms of software revenues, and the third-largest SaaS provider.

Read More »

Tags: analytics, Cisco ONE, cloud, Enterprise Networking, software

By Kevin Bloch, Cisco Chief Technology Officer, Australia and New Zealand

One of the best parts about my job is that I get to spend a lot of time listening to some very smart people, both internally within Cisco and externally. As we touch so many parts of the global technology industry and market, it puts me in a fantastic position to see what’s coming down the track. So, each year around this time, I take the opportunity to offer some predictions for the year ahead (which, incidentally, is Cisco’s 30th birthday).

It will probably come as no surprise that the biggest theme you’ll hear about this year is digital transformation, which is essentially underpinned by the Internet of Everything (IoE). In the next twelve months, enterprises will spend more than $40 billion globally, designing, implementing and operating the Internet of Things (IoT). Already thirty-eight percent of technology spend is outside of IT.

Read the full Top 10 ICT Trends in 2015 blog and feel free to provide any feedback.

Tags: cloud, Hybrid Cloud, IoE, IoT, mobile, NFV, SDN, security, software, video, wifi

In our previous big data blogs, a number of my Cisco associates have talked about the right infrastructure, the right sizing, the right integrated infrastructure management and the right provisioning and orchestration for your clusters. But, to gain the benefits of pervasive use of big data,  you’ll need to accelerate your big data deployments and make a seamless pivot of your “back of the data center” science experiment into the standard data center operational processes to speed delivery of the value of these new analytics workloads.

If you are using a “free” (hint: nothing’s free), or open source workload scheduler, or even a solution that can manage day-to-day batch jobs, you may run into problems right off the bat. Limitations may come in the form of dependency management, calendaring, error recovery, role-based access control and SLA management.

And really, this is just the start of your needs for full-scale, enterprise-grade workload automation for Big Data environments! As the number of your mission-critical big data workloads increases, predictable execution and performance will become essential.

Lucky for you Cisco has exactly what you need! Read More »

Tags: Big Data, Cisco IT, Cisco Unified Management, inside cisco it, software, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, UCS, unified management, unlock big data, workload automation

The North American IPv6 Summit is the largest annual IPv6 event in North America, designed to educate about IPv6 and the current state of IPv6 adoption. We were honored to receive industry recognition of the Cisco’s IPv6 leadership and continued innovation with the Best of Show Award of Product and Service for the Cisco Wireless Controller.

As you read about earlier this summer, Wireless Release 8.0 added a cornucopia of features to our wireless offering, many of which are targeted specifically for upcoming technologies, including IPv6. Let’s look back to see how far we’ve come:

Anticipating the growing demand of the next generation IP and eyeing the arrival of World IPv6 day, Cisco released the first support for IPv6 in its’ Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) software version 7.0 in 2011. There has been a steady progression of feature support ever since. Client mobility appeared in version 7.2 a year later in time to celebrate the launch of IPv6 on the global Internet.Then came the release of 7.4 and it’s support of First Hop Security tools, enabling organization’s to go beyond the lab and deploy IPv6 in a safe, secure manner. Read More »

Tags: 802.11, battery life, Cisco, controller, feature support, hot spot, Hotspot, internet, IPv6, LAN, mobile, mobility, multicast, network, protocol, retail, Revolution, social media, software, wi-fi, wifi, wireless, wireless LAN, wlan, WLC