How is Cisco Digitally Transforming its Support?

Customers are now demanding much more from support services, and that is leading to a change in the support landscape. Customers want unified interactions using voice, video and email that helps to increase efficiency. They are looking for near time issue resolution to reduce costs, and they want to proactively detect and mitigate issues to minimize risk.

Cisco is transforming its support services to provide better customer satisfaction by making it connected, collaborative, and cognitive.

Continue reading

The 5 Critical Components of a Secure Store

We discussed how the Cisco SAFE methodology can help you to implement a reliable security solution for your store. This approach can help you define and address each threat to the retail branch with corresponding security capabilities, architectures, and designs – guiding you to a complete security solution against everything from worms to ransomware attacks.

Continue reading

The Innovation Funding Board Process in Action

I shared the key components needed for an Innovation Funding Board (IFB) to function effectively, including the importance of establishing what success will look like at the outset. Now, I’ll break down the innovation process itself—and the key stages needed to take a great idea from initial inception through to full implementation.

There are many ways that the innovation process can be approached, depending on the ultimate goals of those involved. The method described in this blog uses a build/test/learn approach to encourage a lean startup mentality amongst project teams. There are four main phases involved: Ideas; Rapid Evaluation; Incubation; and, finally, if a project is successful, Implementation.

Continue reading

Managing the Complexities of Multicloud

Many of you are already working in multicloud environments – a combination of public and private clouds (i.e., AWS, Azure, Google, and on-premise IT). In fact, IDC found that 84% of IT executives surveyed expect to use multiple clouds from multiple cloud providers. Organizations are pursuing multicloud for a variety of reasons including increasing revenue, reducing costs, decreasing time to market, or simplifying IT infrastructure. While a mulitcloud approach can deliver tremendous benefits, it can also create complexity, exposing a gap between the business need for digitization and what IT can reliably and confidently support.

Continue reading

Cisco ACI and Fortinet Joint Solution Enables Business Agility at Axians AB

Introduction: 

I am covering a customer success story featuring the Cisco ACI and Fortinet joint solution. Axians AB is a leading Swedish IT sourcing company, with multiple offices in the Nordics and employees across the globe. Axians offers hybrid IT services from datacenters and the public cloud to a diverse set of customers spanning private, government and service providers.

Axians’ Requirements:

With a rapidly growing customer base, Axians had a pressing need for a scalable and flexible infrastructure, one that would provide high utilization rates, simplified management and reduced costs. In particular for networking, Axians required an SDN architecture with programmability, accelerated application security delivery and time-to-market advantages. Further, Axians’ Service Provider business needed support for multi-tenancy and hybrid-cloud integration.

Continue reading

Lessons from Hannover Messe: 5 Ways to Leverage IT for Your Industrial Ops

Our customers are already connecting thousands of intelligent devices and demanding new transparency from their vendors: They want to liberate plant floor data from operational silos and proprietary technologies. Only by doing this will they be able to adapt to the latest advances in automation, sensor technology, and machine learning… not to mention the economic imperative to get in front of tightening competition due to globalization.

Continue reading