NETWORKING

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…

Recently I joined the Cisco DevNet team as a Content Developer Engineer. This is exciting for me, because I have an opportunity to merge the two things that I love most: learning more about network automation and helping the IT community grow within their skills. This year marks 20 years that I have been in information technology. I’ve seen the industry change multiple times, and right now we are in the middle of another major…

As a global citizen, I’m sure you came here to read about Genève (French) or Geneva (English), the city situated in the western part of Switzerland. It’s a city or region famous for many reasons including the presence of a Cisco R&D Center in the heart of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). While this is an exciting success story, the GENEVE I want to tell you about is a different one….

Azure Arc for servers, a centralized management tool that provides visibility into Azure data services, Kubernetes clusters, and servers running Windows or Linux, has been generally available since September, helping fulfill Microsoft’s stated intent to support enterprise hybrid-cloud architectures. By extending Azure Resource Manager (ARM), Azure Arc can help streamline the management of technical resources on premises and in other clouds. ARM is a foundational management service used by a host of Azure tools to…