Cisco – Page 19

Cisco to boost voice, video virtualization

Current virtualization technology lacks support for video and voice, said a Cisco executive who said his company has launched a virtualization architecture that can solve this issue.

In a telepresence session Tuesday from Cisco’s Bangalore office, Dinesh Malkani, managing director of collaboration in Asia-Pacific, said the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has been an industry standard for a long time. However, VDI has been “constrained” to the virtualization of data and applications and is not very effective for collaboration applications such as voice or video, he said.

Cisco hopes to fill this gap with the virtualization experience infrastructure (VXI). Malkani explained that VXI will sit on top of VDI and be able to provide a rich media experience for videoconferencing and voice communications over a fully virtualized environment.

The company is partnering with virtualization vendors Citrix and VMware, said Malkani.

With virtualization, enterprises will have better return on investment (ROI) as there is no need to purchase “heavy desktops” for users, he said. Users will also be able to access the information in the data center on any device, at any time, he added.

Changing face of collaboration
According to Malkani, collaboration tools in the enterprise are moving away from text-based communication such as e-mail and instant messaging, to other tools such as videoconferencing, social media, blogs, and voice messages.

“Users choose the way they want to collaborate…You cannot dictate to a user the way he needs to collaborate. Every CIO has to figure out how to put [different collaboration tools] together,” he said.

Malkani believes video will usurp voice as the collaboration channel of choice. Echoing Cisco CEO John Chambers’ statement that “video is the new voice”, Malkani said users will choose video over voice for collaboration once making a video call becomes as simple as that for a voice call.

In anticipation of video becoming pervasive, future products shipped by Cisco will all have video functionality, he added. With this, it will be possible for users to have videoconferences for collaboration on any device, at any location, and at any time, he said.

Company to tap on experience
Malkani deflected queries on whether the company views Microsoft Lync–Redmond’s rebranded unified communications suite–as a competitor. Instead, he pointed out Cisco’s “decades” of experience in voice communication and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), as well as the products’ ability to run on different operating systems.

He added that networks play an important part in promoting the use of collaboration tools, as users are unlikely to use the tools if they have a bad experience.

Malkani also emphasized that collaboration is moving toward video and not just text-based communications. With broadband being ubiquitous and 4G networks just around the corner, videoconferencing will also be moving to mobile devices, he added.

Cisco Sustainable Business Barometer shows positive trend

The Trust Barometer, which has been developed to act as a measure of current year twice the levels of commitment and confidence to sustainable business strategies, based on a survey of 500 organizations from more than 1,000 full-time employees .

The main conclusions are:

* Over 90% of respondents believe their CEO to consider sustainability important to only 3% who reads it as not important

* Most large organizations surveyed (63.3%) have a dedicated budget sustainability

* Of these, less than 10% saw a reduction in the budget of sustainability, while more than 30% was an increase in 2010

* The majority expected to increase investment in energy and carbon management
Management, areas that are perceived to have the greatest impact on operations

* Over 90% of respondents are confident that their business sustainability strategy will be implemented successfully in the future

The Cisco 2degrees Sustainable Business Confidence Barometer next issue will be published in January 2011, when they identify the state of management-level support, budgets and optimism about sustainable business.

Cisco extends the original theory of the Beatles

I just returned from a long weekend at Dartmouth (with many thanks to the Harbour Master’s office for secure Internet access not WLAN) and sank back into the crazy world, virtual IT one of the crabs landing was the essential ingredient of life (and eating, of course, and for this I recommend the Beesands Cricket Armas, from where the crabs are home – the sea is not the bar).

Therefore, I was happy to be released back into the deep end and see that Cisco has turned the volume up to 11 IT folly to say that in 2013, telecommunications operators to offer at least 48 hours of Internet access in a single day. What does 14 days a week, actually – beating the previous record of the Beatles for six days.

This, it says, will be achieved by performing multiple tasks and assignments in the background. Cisco obviously has not seen what happens when Windows Vista tries as seemingly trivial tasks … In addition, women may argue that – by the same metric – therefore can provide 72 days time and have been doing for centuries.

In fact, Cisco says that we are witnessing days.I 36 hours had not been noted. Undoubtedly explain rail services in the UK yet … But if Cisco is serious about this and took advantage of my client DBAM WAN acceleration technology (where we have seen up to 10,000 x acceleration previously compressed files – scary, but true), then I could get a whole life covered in 24 hours. It provides a great solution to the question “if only I could live my life again” and we are not so much a revolutionary moment as a moment of breaking Groundhog Day.

Cisco SocialMiner

Cisco SocialMiner is a social media customer care solution that can help you proactively respond to customers and prospects communicating through public social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, or other public forums or blogging sites. By providing social media monitoring, queuing, and workflow to organize customer posts on social media networks and deliver them to your social media customer care team, your company can respond to customers in real time using the same social network they are using.

Cisco to acquire LineSider for cloud tech

Muscle up tag technology, Cisco Systems is in the process of acquisition of network management software vendor LineSider Technologies, the company announced Wednesday.

Cisco is interested in LineSider technology for rapid provisioning of network software and to its workforce of engineers. Both will help in the search for Cisco in the emerging market tag, the company said.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“With the acquisition of LineSider, Cisco will gain a key component to help our customers [the] change in” cloud computing, “said Jesper Andersen, senior vice president of Cisco networking, Group Technology Management in a statement.

“Advanced LineSider software integrates network management services, physical and virtual network with a policy-based approach and makes the networks more flexible and responsive to change,” he said.

Logo LineSider OverDrive software provides an abstraction layer that allows users to easily organize and reorganize the network components. Using the policy approach based on software, organizations can create a set of rules that can reconfigure virtual networks, depending on demand.

In 2008, 3Com, Cisco partnered with LineSider competitor to offer a version of the OverDrive software to work with 3Com routers, which enable customers to virtualize their networks more easily.

Headquartered in Danvers, Massachusetts, founded in 2005, LineSider has also partnered with VMware, EMC and Cisco itself.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, Cisco expects to close the deal before April 2011. LineSider employees will join Cisco Technology Network Management Group.