NETWORKING

Editor’s note: To learn more about securing the manufacturing cell, check out the latest episode of our Manufacturing Leader’s podcast, available now. Take a listen below or listen on our site. A growing problem As we’ve been seeing in many headlines and articles, there is a clear awareness that the manufacturing floor is under attack. There’s a great debate on the tools and methods that should be used in order to protect the manufacturing processes…

One of my favorite sayings from a dear friend of mine is “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes – that way you can begin to understand their experience.” Most of us have heard a simpler version of this idiom, but I think it’s especially poignant today, International Day of Persons with Disabilities – a day to not only increase awareness of what people with disabilities experience, but to honor their experiences and achievements. One…

Since the launch of Business Critical Services (BCS) 3.0 earlier this year, Cisco has continued to expand and enhance the value and monetization of the offer for partners. For example, Cisco has been working closely with partners to build a lifecycle practice that extends their own services on top of BCS 3.0 and creating joint BCS customer opportunities. While I’ve blogged about this initiative in previous posts (A New Paradigm for our Partners with Business…

I’ve always been passionate about building better customer experiences and transforming the relationship between suppliers and customers has been at the heart of the last 20 years of my career. The advent of Cloud and “As a Service” offerings has put Customer Experience (CX) firmly on the map and raised the expectations that customers have of their vendors. And rightly so. With customers no longer being locked into long-term contracts or having to commit to…

What was your dream job when you were little? For me, it wasn’t so much the position – I just knew that I had to help people and have an impact on my community. I thought, perhaps, this would lead me to working in healthcare or with a non-profit. Little did I know – being an employee at Cisco would provide me the opportunities I was looking for to make a positive impact on my…

New Pressures on Higher Education The education and training sector has felt the full force of COVID-19’s impact. The pandemic has created immense revenue shortfalls which will persist through 2021, at least, and created downstream pressure on business and operating models. Institutions were forced to stand up distance learning and remote working arrangements in a matter of weeks and have recently shifted their focus to the medium term. The big question for most institutions is:…

The challenges of 2020 have pushed the reset button on nearly every aspect of business, including the way you work, operate, and deliver products and services. As organizations work toward recovery and growth, there needs to be a focus on creating an adaptive IT environment. Why adaptive IT? New research tells us adaptive organizations enjoy three times’ faster revenue growth than their competition. Given that 80% of revenue growth could depend on digital offerings and…

SUSE’s acquisition of Rancher Labs puts the Germany-based open-source software company in a much stronger position to offer flexible, edge-based services to its customers, according to an analyst at IDC. The deal—which was originally announced this summer—essentially makes Rancher Labs into SUSE’s containerization “innovation center,” said IDC research director Gary Chen. Any customer working on digital transformation and rapid development is likely to appreciate the improved support for containerization—letting workloads function on whatever hardware is…

To continue Cisco’s celebration of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary, we hosted the second part to Cisco’s annual sustainability speaker series for Cisco employees and contractors, called SustainX. This second part focused entirely on Environmental Justice. To kick off the session, Dr. Danielle Spurlock, Asst. Professor at the University of North Carolina defined environmental justice (EJ) as a social movement focused on the fair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. Dr. Spurlock said, “The unequal risk…

If it weren’t for wide-area networks (WAN) it wouldn’t be possible to telecommute, to create unified networks for organizations with far-flung locations, or to do online anything. But WANs do exist and have for decades, constantly evolving to carry more and more traffic faster as demands increase and technology becomes more powerful. What is a WAN? A WAN is a network that uses various links—private lines, Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), virtual private networks (VPNs), wireless…