As the Internet of Everything (IoE) continues to drive innovation and create unprecedented business opportunities, IT leaders have continued to improve their business operations through the use of cloud computing. But in order to reduce costs, minimize risks and increase agility – all benefits of cloud implementation – IT leaders must carefully select the type of cloud that’s best for their business. Leaders have a variety of cloud platforms to choose from, including private or public cloud. The control, security and performance of private clouds are desirable, as are the cost, flexibility and speed that public clouds offer. Our OpenStack   solution is an open source platform for not only private and public clouds, but hybrid ones as well. Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud is now available all over the world after our 2014 acquisition of Metacloud . And with it, we’re empowering our customers with next-generation cloud builder technology that they can operate themselves, with our on-premises solutions or through cloud providers in our Cloud Services ecosystem. As OpenStack continues to gain popularity , the upcoming OpenStack Summit 2015 couldn’t have come at a better or more exciting time! The “must-attend” five-day event will welcome developers, users and CloudStack administrators to Vancouver to collaborate, meet and learn from industry experts – including many of Cisco’s own. “Demystifying Logs in OpenStack Clouds”, “OpenStack as a Strategy for Future Growth” and ” Choosing a Managed OpenStack Solution: Three Use Cases” are just a few of the opportunities attendees will have to learn more about Cisco technologies and our cutting-edge solutions made possible through the power of OpenStack.  You can find the full list of speaker sessions and all the info here. In the spirit of real-time collaboration and discussion, we’ll be hosting a live #CiscoChat at the OpenStack Summit and invite you to join us in the Expo Hall (Booth P10) on Monday, May 18 from 6 to 8 p.m. PST or online, using the hashtag #CiscoChat . From the hot topics and events on your OpenStack Summit agenda to your thoughts on the future of OpenStack – we’ll discuss all things OpenStack, including why vendors are often just looked at as just sales and marketing sources. Niki Acosta , OpenStack Evangelist and Scott Sanchez , Director will participate in this #CiscoChat, moderated by Cisco’s Data Center Twitter channel (@CiscoDC). Will you be in Vancouver? Be sure drop by the booth or join the conversation online on Monday, May 18 from 6 to 8 p.m. PST using the hashtag #CiscoChat .  We’ll also be hosting an OpenStack Summit scavenger hunt with a Nest Pack daily winner and Apple Watch grand prize giveaway so be sure to drop by booth P10 for all the details. ... View more

Today, it is hard to throw a virtual stick in the social media world and not hit something about video. Everyone is talking about it: The Cisco Channel blog starts with a video in every post, Flip Video promotes video submission by fans on Facebook, No Jitter talks about video-conferencing, and Robb over at TechWiseTV blogged about how to do video better. Everyone is talking about it and doing it so video must be simple. In concept it is: Old adage: "A picture is worth a thousand words" UCLA study shows 55% of how we understand something is from non-verbal (visual) cues Research shows we remember up to 60% more of content when visuals are added (vs. audio alone) The problem is taking the concept and making it reality. There is a difference between capturing video of your dog playing on the beach and sending an all-hands update to the 125 team members in your organization. What is the difference? AUDIENCE. That adorable video of your dog frollicking on the beach was made for you. You love your dog and you want to share that video with all your family. They may not want to see it, but you are gonna try to share it anyway. At the end of the day though, it doesn't make or break anything if they don't see this video (though it may hurt your feelings). However, with the video update to your organization, things could be made or broken if your employees don't receive your message. You need strong audience attendence and you need them to absorb the information. So how do you make this happen? One of the key things about video is you MUST know and understand how your audience wants to be engaged. Do they prefer live-streaming video so they can ask questions? Do they want on-demand so they can watch it later in the evening? Will they sit through a 3 minute video? 10 minutes? An hour? More importantly - one size isn't going to fit all, so think about how your video can be provided to different audiences. Here is an example of how to get the most out of one video event: Live-streaming video provides the value of asking questions live for the attendees. Packaging up live the video afterwards and provide it on-demand for those who had schedule conflicts. Use technology like the MXE (Media Experience Engine) and Cisco Pulse to tag the video, make it searchable and provide a good experience no matter what end-device from which they watch. Write about it. On TechWiseTV we provide the show notes to the broadcast along with a few of the key visuals (usually slides) on our blog. If your team is still dependant on email, advertise your video event using a communication method they use frequently. So I'm betting a few people are reading this and thinking this is all great for one-way video updates, video blogs, internet TV and so on but doesn't apply to video-conferencing when there are 2 or more parties interacting. After all, it is a meeting and everyone is participating, right? Right? Wrong. Same rules apply for video-conferencing, whether it is desktop video calls, WebEx video and web meetings or a high-end immersive experience like TelePresence. Are your co-workers comfortable on video? How do you capture the meeting for someone who didn't attend? Were you all so worried about how you look on video that no one took notes? Did you communicate (in email or in the meeting invite) that this was a video event? In a video meeting, it is still about your audience - the people you invite to your meeting. In the end, it is always about the audience. Now - who wants to see a video of my dog running on the beach? :-) ... View more

The great debate still rages: are smartphones killing the desktop phone? Are companies going to keep paying for hardware when softphones are readily available? The recent blog on NoJitter.com, Future of the Phone: Bring Your Own, started me thinking about this topic again. “Cell phones kill industries ranging from printed calendaring/diaries to pay phones, and there are plenty of reasons to believe the enterprise desktop phone is next.” This quote strikes me up – I don’t know that I agree cell phones kill industries, but they most certainly make them evolve. I remember the days of not having a cell phone and now, if I leave the house without my phone, I will turn around and go back. I cannot imagine not having it with me at all times. How did we go on international trips without them? How did you find your spouse when you lost him/her in the grocery store without the ability to text them and say “I’m in Aisle 5, do you want whole wheat bread or white?” How did you manage without waking up restless at 2am and being able to reach over, grab your cell phone and check your email ? Cell phones are an integrated part of our life BUT… I have a deskphone. Actually, I have two. One in my home office and one at the office-office. Both have the same extension and until recently, the phone in the San Jose campus was the “cool” phone. I had a color, touchscreen phone when no one else around me did for years. Now everyone around me has the seriously cool, new 8900 phones. And I’m jealous. We had an entire conversation recently on a conference call about this (we were waiting for the late arrivals to join the call). As people predict the death of the deskphone, are you actually going to tell people they don’t need a phone on their desk? March into your executives’ offices and let them know they need to wait for their PC to boot up before they can make a call, or they have to depend on the battery life of their cell phone to last more than a couple of hours and see how well it goes over. And don’t get me started on dropped calls or dead zones inside buildings. With the current mobile phone technology, it isn’t going to happen. The NoJitter article calls out outbound CallerID as a major barrier to people moving completely away from deskphones – but this isn’t a barrier if you have technology in place like Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator. I also use features every day like single-number reach and the ability to hand-off a call from my deskphone to my cell and back again. The new WebEx app on the iPhone lets you move the call and the meeting from phone to phone. The trend I see is integrating the two, not the death of one or the other. I do believe certain types of employees, such as mobile employees and temporary workers, will become fully dependant on softphones and cell phones and will trend to not having a deskphone. As companies are forced to cut costs in IT and Telecom, this is no-brainer. And I also see cell phones as the realistic back-up plan for enterprises – in other words, if the phone system should go down for any reason, use your cell phone. No need to pay for expensive back-up analog lines when everyone has another phone available. Finally, events like the AT&T announcement today that they will no longer offer unlimited data plans set back the advancements of the smartphone. When data is unlimited and you can do as you please, the smartphone is a great tool. If I have to suddenly start worrying about how much it will cost me to see my WebEx meeting slides on my cell phone, I may think twice and just take the call from my deskphone. For all these reasons, I don’t believe deskphones are going to die a horrible death in 2010 or even 2011. I do believe the need to integrate and make the deskphone and the mobile phone a seamless experience is going to drive what we see developed in Unified Communications over the next few years. ... View more

Here at Cisco, we’ve been living and breathing this stuff for a long time and it is easy to forget our reality isn’t the reality everyone else sees.  I was selling IP Telephony to customers ten years ago. A few years later it was Unified Communications. Today it is Collaboration. But for those enterprises who have not made the leap, it is still all about basic IP Telephony: how do you move from a legacy system to an IP world? More importantly, how do you do this with possibly less budget and fewer resources than you had ten years ago? My gut reaction is there are many, many companies out there who have not been able to start the migration due to the economy, skill sets, perceived value or just trying to navigate which direction is the BEST direction for them? I like to back up my gut feelings with numbers and I am still hunting statistics – maybe someone out there can help me out. What percentage of desktop phones in the Enterprise are connected to legacy PBX’s? This would be an interesting piece of information as we build an upcoming TechWiseTV show on all the hottest IP communications technologies: SIP Trunking, Session Management and Session Border Control. For now, here is a great video by one of my favorite experts, Dan Keller, on how to start the migration process from a legacy PBX to an IP system. ... View more

We had a highly attended, very interactive TechWiseTV webcast this week! Over 1000 of you all joined us live to hear about SIP Trunking and we received over 300 questions during the webcast – thank you for attending! For those who didn’t attend, you can still catch the recording of the webcast. So what did we learn? We learned that SIP trunking is a pretty cool new frontier. But, like all frontiers (no Star Trek comments, please) it is a bit wild. Darryl Sladden (aka SIP Guru) netted out a few key components to think about when deploying SIP trunks from a carrier.   Three things that really stood out for me were: ·       If your connection provider (T1, DSL, whatever) is not your SIP provider, you are going to be hard-pressed to guarantee QoS. ·       Faxing can be done, but you should consider a Plan B when it comes to fax and modem connections. I’m also gonna go out on a limb here and suggest finding IP based solutions to replace those old analog fax and modem solutions. ·       What we consider basic features today in the IP world, such as putting a call on hold, get way more complex in a SIP world where there are multiple ways of implementing this feature. Where does that leave us? Do we boldly go where no one has gone before (ok, I did it to myself with the Star Trek reference)? I believe the answer is yes – but with caution, with lots of testing, with a good Plan B in mind and a sense of what REAL value is being provided to your company by your SIP carrier. HUGE Thanks goes to Jimmy Ray Purser for the demo (and hacks), to Darryl Sladden for the great insight on the real SIP world, and to Christina Hattingh for answering literally hundreds of questions on the webcast. For the slides from the show and on-going Q&A discussion, visit the discussion on Collaboration Community. ... View more

Wow – everyone is talking about SIP these days but SIP connections really come in three flavors: SIP trunking (carrier side) SIP connections between PBXs SIP line-side (PBX to phone) The buzz I’m hearing these days is all about SIP on the carrier side. I’ve been tracking industry articles and blogs on this topic and there are two distinct opinions out there – people who advocate for SIP trunks from your carrier due to the flexibility and cost savings Helping Organizations and those who tell the story of a lack of reliability, challenges with support and negligible cost savings SIP Trunks: A Call to the Wild. What do Jimmy Ray and I think? Tune in on June 25th to find out.  You can bet Jimmy Ray has a few thoughts on the security of SIP trunks! For those of you who really want to dive-in, check out the SIP Forum for lots of good details. After the show airs, I’ll post blog entries that will dive deeper into SIP connections between PBXs and SIP line-side and the pros and cons of each. If you have specific questions you want answered on these two areas – fire away now! ... View more