The ushering in of the app era has resulted in an increased focus on User Experience (UX) in practically every product, including those, like (say) networking products, that were traditionally considered as too technical to be simplified. The “Consumerisation” of IT has led users, who are used to intuitive, simple and beautiful experiences in the apps that they use in their personal lives, demanding those same capabilities in their enterprise applications. Indeed, simplicity, ease of use, supportability and manageability are increasingly being touted as competitive differentiators even for the most complex products.
Monday 30 April 2018
Thursday 26 April 2018
Cisco Small and Medium Business Switch Portfolio Refresh
Big Game tonight with the Boston Bruins and the Toronto Maple Leafs square off for the final game, Game 7, in Boston Garden! Always a great time of year with Basketball and Hockey Playoffs, Baseball Season is in high gear, tennis is happening in Barcelona, with Roland Garros waiting patiently next month, and for golf, we have the US Open in June. Indeed, it’s a great time for sports!
Wednesday 25 April 2018
A New Type of WAN that Grows with Your Business
Wide Area Networking has seen disruption like never before in the past 5 years. The use of technology to transform how businesses interact with their customers and partners combined with the changing behavior of how employees connect and use the network is challenging existing WAN architectures. For those of us keeping score, there have been multiple disruptions impacting the WAN simultaneously:
Sunday 22 April 2018
Cisco Spark and Webex Platform Convergence: More than a Rebrand
The convergence of the Webex and Spark platforms is far more than just a rebrand. Significant technical work has gone into combining these platforms, and I wanted to highlight several of the key customer benefits that come as a result.
Thursday 19 April 2018
New Partner Program Opportunities to Recognize Expertise and Reward for Success
This week we are in the Bahamas at Partner Connection Week, Cisco’s flagship mid-year partner event focused on partner technology enablement. Today we are sharing our progress on the partner programs we announced at last year’s Partner Summit. I am excited to announce a few new programs updates that will help you not only increase your ability to differentiate and showcase your expertise in intent-based networking capabilities, but to also augment the areas where we recognize your industry expertise.
Wednesday 18 April 2018
New Cisco and ConnectWise Solution Helps MSPs Capitalize on the Growing Managed Security Services Opportunity
It’s a great time to be a managed service provider (MSP). Small businesses and enterprises alike are embracing managed services, and spending is expected to grow to $257.84 billionin 2022 with a CAGR of 11.1 percent.
Tuesday 17 April 2018
Increase Your Cross-Selling with the 3 P’s for Extended Enterprise
It doesn’t matter if you are an account manager or a customer success manager, you want to be a trusted advisor as your customer embarks on their digital journey. Customers want personalized engagement with trusted partners, and it is important to be able to solve your customers’ business problems by recommending or suggesting related technology solutions. When I was in the field, I was sometimes nervous about cross-selling unfamiliar products. However, as I share what I know about the Cisco Ruggedized portfolio, I think you will agree that cross-selling Extended Enterprise use cases for this portfolio provides a simple way to leverage your current network knowledge and account relationships to generate additional revenue and solve top-of-mind customer concerns.
Sunday 15 April 2018
ACI loves KVM and Red Hat Virtualization
Cisco ACI has provided integration with KVM in OpenStack environments quite for some time now. OpenStack is a great technology to implement Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) with uses cases for Private, Public and Telco clouds. But indeed Openstack provides a cloud platform, tailored to “cattle-type” of workloads, as opposed to “pet-type” workloads.
Wednesday 11 April 2018
Redefining Security for the Modern Data Center in a Multicloud World
Global security challenges are ever-growing, especially with the rise of sophisticated threats. A growing concern for many of our customers is around security for today’s complex data centers. How do you keep data safe while you’re running applications in both on-prem data centers and in public, private, and hybrid clouds?
Friday 6 April 2018
IcedID Banking Trojan teams up with Rovnix for distribution
In November 2017 security researchers reported a new banking Trojan known as “IcedID”. At the time of discovery IcedID was being distributed by Emotet. In late February and throughout March 2018 Cisco noticed an increase in IcedID infections being detected throughout the AMP ecosystem. Like in November 2017, some of the infections could be traced to Emotet, but this time, many detections could instead be traced to emails with attached malicious Microsoft Word documents containing macros. When the malicious documents are opened and the macros are enabled, Rovnix would be downloaded and executed, which subsequently downloads IcedID. In addition to Rovnix, many of the samples downloaded a second payload, a Bytecoin miner (Bytecoin is a crypto currency similar to Bitcoin).
Thursday 5 April 2018
How to Deploy a UCS Manager Environment with Far Less Python Code
A co-worker sent me some infrastructure code to check out and get my opinion. The code was fine, but it was a lot of code… I mean a lot of code. Looking at the thousands of lines of purpose written code I started thinking that there could be a better way. The code was Python and used the UCS Python SDK to deploy a UCS Manager environment and it worked, it did everything it was supposed to do, but it did only those things.
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