From Data Center to Cloud, Guidance for Managing Data Everywhere

As enterprises react to rapid changes in business models driven by macro-events, digital transformation, and redistribution of both the workforce and the workloads, agility and resiliency in IT solutions and services are a key differentiator for success. Whether application workloads reside in the cloud, at the edge, or on-prem, the data center needs to be optimized for performance, reliability, and user experience as business and operational needs evolve.

Data center and cloud networking agility provide the ability to react quickly to changes and goes way beyond traditional measurements of speeds and feeds. Agility depends on being able to manage the network fabric holistically with emphasis on higher-level infrastructure orchestration platforms, automation tools, programmability through APIs, and end-to-end visibility through deep analytics with machine learning.

With the many permutations of cloud and data center infrastructures that exist in the global market, IT has a wealth of vendor options to evaluate for network solutions that match the needs of their enterprise and cloud data centers. Fortunately, there are analysts and technology journalists to help sift through the flood of data with independent research. What are the critical capabilities that set leaders of network infrastructure and management apart from followers? Let’s look at some of the capabilities that Gartner uses to evaluate data center and cloud networking solutions.

2020 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Data Center and Cloud Networking

The capabilities for optimizing data center and cloud networking—from hardware to network operating systems to management solutions—are all drivers of agility and business resiliency. In particular, Gartner highlights three use cases that are top of mind for many enterprise IT teams for evaluating data center networking solutions:

1. Enterprise Refresh/Build-Out Use Case. Includes switch hardware, Network Operating System (NOS), management, and automation integrations.

2. Agility Boost Use Case. Based on management platform independence, automation, hyper-converged infrastructure integrations, and public cloud integrations.

3. DevOps Driven Organization Use Case. Day 1 and Day 2 automation and data center platform integrations.

These capabilities, among others, build a foundation for managing data center resources for modern enterprises facing continuous change. For example, Gartner predicts that “by 2023, 10% of enterprises will fully integrate data center networking activities into CI/CD pipelines, up from nearly zero in early 2020”, with DevOps driving the development of applications critical to business. For these applications to run successfully under high demand, organizations will need increased insight and automation into managing Day 2 operations for data center and hybrid-cloud operations. In the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Data Center and Cloud Networking report, Gartner highlights Cisco’s strengths and cautions as a Magic Quadrant Leader.

◉ With solid products and a large and global installed base, Cisco offers depth and breadth of features that covers nearly all usage scenarios, including advanced routing and ultra-low-latency switching.

◉ Cisco has a roadmap to deliver increasing levels of analytics and automation to satisfy emerging customer requirements for a more autonomous and self-healing network.

◉ Cisco Network Insights improves Day 2 operational activities such as troubleshooting, reporting, and bug scrubs, and integrates with both Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Data Center Network Management (DCNM) controllers.

Six Years of Positioning as a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader in Data Center and Cloud Networking

2020 marks the 6th consecutive year that Gartner positions Cisco in the Leaders Quadrant for Data Center and Cloud Networking. This year Gartner included Cloud Networking in addition to the traditional on-prem data center offerings and we believe Cisco was named a Leader given our proven multi-cloud architecture. Gartner evaluated Cisco data center and cloud switches, NOS as well as Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Data Center Network Management (DCNM), and Data Center Network Assurance and Insights Suite.

*Source: Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center and Cloud Networking, June 30, 2020

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Get Started with IoT and Prepare for DEVIOT Certification

“To do, or not to do.” That is the question. Do you find you are asking yourself this question often? Well, while I can’t speak about your other dilemmas, let me help you with any confusion you might have regarding how to get started on your IoT journey. My July 21st webinar will be a great place for you to start.

Where do you even start with IoT?

Chances are if you have come this far reading this blog, you have made up your mind to embark upon the journey to equip your arsenal with more skills and knowledge regarding IoT.

You certainly own a smart device, don’t you? Great! Then you are already a part of the IoT world. How? If you are using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, then you are already into IoT as these are some of the fundamental protocols that apply to IoT. There are many other protocols and standards which you should know about while deep-diving into the IoT world. Since IoT is adapted in so many different markets, each market or application has its own suitable IoT protocol that aligns to their requirements.

Consider the MQTT protocol. It has gained popularity in industries such as Supply Chain & Logistics, and Healthcare because of its lightweight properties and simplicity. Check out Cisco DevNet Intro to IoT Technologies – Protocols, Tools, and Software Module to learn about this protocol with a  hands-on DevNet Learning Lab!

There are many resources you can find by visiting the DevNet IoT Dev Center to get you started with IoT. You’ll find introductory topics such as:

◉ how to develop applications using Cisco IOx
◉ getting started with Cisco Kinetics Gateway Management Module (GMM)

You can take advantage of these resources and more to get familiar with cutting edge Cisco IoT technologies.

Get prepared for an IoT professional certification

In the webinar, you’ll get an overview of the Cisco Certified DevNet Specialist, IoT Certification Exam. We’ll cover some ground on the topics the exam enlists, and what percentage of questions are to be expected from each module. We will also talk about some resources which will be useful to help you prepare for this certification exam.

See what my fellow Dev Advocate Jock Reed has to say about this certification, along with a short breakdown of the exam topics here.

There has never been a better time to get certified

Online, proctored exams are now delivered in most countries around the globe now. Thus, now is the ideal time to prepare for and earn your professional certification.

Please join me for the webinar on July 21st at 8:00 AM PDT.  Register Now!

See you all there!

Source: cisco.com

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Energy efficiency of Cisco products

Improving product energy efficiency is more than just a regulatory requirement for Cisco. It’s an opportunity for us to help customers save on energy costs, lower GHG emissions, and reduce global energy demand. It also makes our products more competitive.1 Recent literature from 2015 has seen GHG emissions from the ICT industry leveling off, with the total energy footprint stabilizing at around 3.6 percent of global electricity consumption. 2 While it’s a good start that the ICT energy footprint is not growing, we believe success will ultimately be measured by a decreasing ICT energy footprint and decreasing global energy consumption. That’s why improving product energy efficiency and decreasing energy consumption are important factors in our product development.

We track how much total energy our products use as a Scope 3 Use of Sold Products GHG emission. To calculate this, we first created a manual database of our existing products and listed their typical power rate. When that was unknown, we identified the max power output on the products’ power supply and de-rated that value, providing an approximation of their power rate. We then calculated how many of each product we sold in the previous fiscal year and added that to our database. With those factors, we multiplied the typical power rate by the number of units shipped to determine the total energy consumed by our products sold in that fiscal year. To account for products sold in a previous year, we assumed an average life of five years. We scaled that number using past hardware revenue to determine total energy used by all of our products potentially in use. About 80 percent of emissions were calculated using primary data.

To better calculate this number, we’re exploring ways to create a database to track our products’ energy consumption. Our goal is to automate this process as much as possible to allow for easier energy calculations and more consistent data year over year. By the end of FY20, we plan to have our initial database ready to help calculate our GHG emissions from use of sold products.

Customers and regulators have rising expectations that our products minimize energy costs and GHG emissions. Every year, the number of inquiries related to environmental sustainability we receive from analysts, customers, shareholders, and nongovernmental organizations rises. We track applicable energy-use regulations and certification programs to review compliance needs as requested by our customers.

Improving product energy efficiency

Improving product energy efficiency addresses two key challenges for Cisco. First, to achieve the projected, and required, product performance specifications for the next five to 10 years, Cisco products need an architecture with “energy scalability.” This is one that can provide energy- efficient service for variable traffic types, traffic demands, customer usage, and installs. Second, product use is by far our largest GHG emissions source. To address these challenges, Cisco is investing in five primary product energy efficiency engineering initiatives. These initiatives were chosen as they allow us to have the largest impact on improving our products’ energy consumption.

◉ Power initiative. We are improving product efficiency of our products from plug to port and set a product power efficiency goal in early FY18. This goal is to improve large rack-mounted- equipment system power efficiency—as measured from the input power from the facility to the board-mounted ASICs, memory, and other chip devices—from 77 percent to 87 percent by FY22 (FY16 baseline). Read more about this goal in our goal announcement blog post. Such a goal drives Cisco to design new power systems that result in a net positive gain in overall product efficiency.

◉ Thermal initiative. We are exploring alternative methods of cooling (air flow, liquid, and refrigerant cooling) to reduce operating temperatures and facility cooling requirements. Forced air cooling systems in wide use today have limitations in cooling concentrated areas of high power from next-generation packet processing engines. To cool these higher-power components, we must deploy more efficient and effective systems. These advanced cooling systems, targeted towards 2023, will use multiphase cooling techniques to transfer expected thermal output of next- generation switches and routers.

◉ High-speed interconnects initiative. High- speed silicon-to-silicon or optics-to-silicon interconnects are an integral part of routing and switching systems. These interconnects consume a significant portion of the total system power. We are exploring ways to increase the interconnect speed, driving the gigabits per second per watt (Gbps/W) consumed metric as high as possible. This will increase performance and reduce energy use. By the end of 2020, increasing traffic bandwidth demand will require interconnect speed efficiency to be discussed in terms of Tbps/W of traffic transmitted or received. By 2022, ASIC packet processing technology will likely consume more than 1,000 watts in a 4-inch by 4-inch area, using hundreds of transmit and receive channels and thousands of power connections. This initiative drives optimization in the high-speed signaling interconnect to allow more physical space and effective methods of delivering power to the ASIC.

◉ Customer facilities initiative. We are working with customers to reduce the amount of energy required to operate IT facilities with power solutions that increase the efficiency of overhead power, avoid step-down transformers, and provide integrated cooling strategies. These end-to-end solutions reduce hardware requirements and energy consumption while providing a more integrated method for managing IT infrastructures. This initiative includes developing power supplies with wide-ranging AC and DC inputs, and Power over Ethernet (PoE) and Pulsed Power systems integrated into connected building applications that reduce the buildout of future electrical infrastructure.

◉ Power Supply Initiative. Power supplies play a critical role in managing product energy efficiencies, as they are the first step where energy is lost. To overcome this loss, we are working to offer more energy-efficient options for power supplies, giving customers the option of platinum or titanium 80+ rated power supplies whenever possible. This provides cost-sensitive customers the option of selecting lower-rated power supplies, such as gold or silver, while allowing customers concerned about reducing their total energy use to select the higher-rated supplies. For external power supplies, we ship products that are DOE6 compliant, aligning with the latest U.S. energy efficiency standards.

When we evaluate product energy efficiency, we consider the power performance of the entire system. We measure the percent efficiency as electricity passes through each component or function. This can include, for example, the external power supply units (PSU), intermediate bus converter (IBC), point of load (POL), and ASIC, memory, or other chips.

Reducing product energy consumption

Increasing energy efficiency is key to Cisco’s strategy for managing the total amount of energy used by our products, but it is only one part. Cisco produces a wide variety of products ranging in size from access points (APs) to LNE. This means we must take a multifaceted approach to managing energy consumption. Our products fall into three categories in which we report revenue: Infrastructure Platforms, Applications, and Security. Each product segment requires a different approach.

Infrastructure platforms make up the backbone of the network and consume the most energy. The total energy footprint of each of our products is determined mainly by which components we use. As components, such as the ASICs, CPUs, PHYs, and DIMMs, continue to consume more energy, our products will, too. To offset this energy increase, we continue to push the bps/W ratio of our products higher to get superior performance for the additional energy they use.

Our wireless portfolio, which includes APs, also falls under this segment. These products are primarily powered through PoE, making energy consumption a high priority. Each product must fit into the desired PoE standard, ranging from the 802.3af standard of max power at 15.4 W to the 802.3bt max power rating of 90 W. Due to the use case of these products, we design them to minimize their energy consumption during low use periods, such as overnight. Our latest products support the new Wi-Fi 6 standard power-saving feature called Target Wake Time (TWT). TWT allows the AP and client to schedule target wake-up times to exchange data.

Our collaboration portfolio is made up primarily of our IP Phones and telepresence products. Like APs, IP Phones can spend an even greater amount of their lifetime not in use. It’s critical for these products to be designed to efficiently power up for use, then switch into a standby mode to minimize their energy footprint. It is also a priority for our IP Phones to be designed to meet ENERGY STAR standards.

Telepresence products help customers reduce their GHG emissions from business air travel and commuting. When designing these products, we prioritize efficient switching between product use and standby modes. Whenever possible, we design our telepresence line of products to support three modes to minimize energy consumption: off, standby, and networked standby. Products can then be set to transition to either of the two standby modes if no input signals are detected for a predetermined time.

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IDC White Paper shows ROI of 462% for Cisco SD-Access and Assurance

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new IDC white paper, sponsored by Cisco, that examines the business value realized by customers who have adopted Cisco’s Software-Defined Access (SD-Access) and Assurance solutions. The study showed some very impressive results, such as an average projected five-year return on investment (ROI) of 462%.

Cisco DNA Assurance and Cisco SD-Access are two major components of Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture, and are implemented using the Cisco DNA Center management platform. Together, these enable organizations to apply business intent to the network, creating unprecedented levels of visibility and control across the entire enterprise network.

Real customers sharing real experiences

For anyone who has been skeptical about our claims about the benefits of Assurance and SD-Access, this report should help sway your opinion.  There are many firsthand accounts from customers who are using these solutions in their networks, not just as demos or proof of concepts, but to actually run their IT operations. Participants in the study represented a range of business sizes and industry verticals, making it even more impressive that the results were so positive across the board.

Cisco DNA provides real benefits

According to the IDC authors, customers initially turned to SD-Access and Assurance to make managing complex operations easier, prepare for anticipated growth, and become more proactive in their approach to network management. What they discovered was that as network management becomes easier and performance improves, staff productivity increases and greater innovation company-wide becomes possible.

Some highlights of the results

◉ Average annual benefits of $3.18 million on a per organization basis
◉ 462% five-year ROI
◉ 9-month payback period
◉ 49% more efficient network management staff
◉ 35% more efficient network security teams
◉ 86% reduction in unplanned downtime

A key reason that the measured ROI was so high is that the time savings is compounded across all areas of network management and extends to non-IT personnel as well. Customers reported a wide range of positive benefits. With Cisco SD-Access, security is both more effective and easier to deploy and maintain. With Cisco Assurance, service issues are easier to track down and are detected earlier. These improvements lead to reduced downtime and improved application performance.

Source: IDC 2020

Cisco DNA solves real problems

Legacy network processes are inefficient and do not scale to the number of clients and devices now in use today. As the scale of the network increases, the friction inherent in manual processes for onboarding and managing connectivity cause a cascade of difficulties such as:

◉ Less than optimum experience for network users.
◉ Policy enforcement becomes more and more complex and inefficient.
◉ Holes open up in security policies.
◉ Network operators do not have visibility into what is happening in the network at any given moment.
◉ Problems take time to identify and solve, making users frustrated and slowing productivity across the company.

We believe this report helps prove that SD-Access and Assurance aren’t just shiny new toys. These solve real problems experienced by most network operators. With these solutions, you can proactively solve problems. You can match policy to the user, not the machine. You can automate routine tasks and roll out changes more quickly, making your network and your business more agile and able to respond to changing conditions.

Here is a concrete example that one of the customers in the study shared about their experience with SD-Access that illustrates this point about time savings:

A big thing for us is the rapid deployment or moving of different segmented networking groups. For example, right in the middle of one of our projects we had one of the labs moved. But it took 4 hours instead of what would have been about a month prior to SD-Access.

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Industrial NetDevOps Enables Your Industrial Network with Programmability and Automation

Industrial NetDevOps solves real-world problems 

◉ Breaking down the barriers and building a closer alignment between the IT and OT departments ◉ Increase network change management, incident management and security
◉ Lower OT expenses and downtime while increasing your network effectiveness and agility

These crucial and well-desired subjects are exactly what Industrial NetDevOps is trying to solve. And DevNet has the tools and learning resources to help you start with that journey right away:

◉ Free Webinar, July 14th — Register Now
◉ New Learning Labs
◉ New Scripts on Code Exchange

What is Industrial NetDevOps?

Industrial NetDevOps brings the culture, tools, technical methods and best practices from DevOps to Industrial Networks.

Instead of using SNMP and CLI, you configure, manage and monitor industrial network devices via standardized network device APIs and software automation tools. Industrial NetDevOps workflows use Open Source, standards and Python scripts alongside commercial devices and tools to deliver fast-responsive and secure industrial networks.

DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). Similar to DevOps, in the industrial space are industrial operations professionals who understand and control the equipment (OT/Dev), but need support from their IT colleagues to make OT-data meaningful, OT-devices accessible and better aligned with other business systems (IT/Ops).

The vision of Industrial NetDevOps is taking the full advantage of both teams by working together: Creating a single source of truth for network configurations (e.g. with Git), making small but well tested changes to the network, deploy configuration changes though APIs, use automation to save time and costs, enable automated IT network services for operations professionals, get real-time health data of your network and OT devices and many more.

What has changed? Why move now?

Operations leaders recognize that operational data they use to support real-time decision making could create additional value for the company. The vision of a fully connected factory is real, the transformation is happening right now. Therefore, the industrial network needs to be as responsive, agile and secure as it has ever been.

Cisco realized this movement and is leading it: The industrial switch series IE3x00, the embedded switch ESS3300 and the industrial router IR1101 are running IOS XE (same as on the Catalyst 9000 Series) which enables model-driven programmability with open APIs and data models such as NETCONF/RESTCONF & YANG. Also, the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controller supports model-driven programmability along with traditional APIs.

Furthermore, the network controller and orchestration software Cisco DNA Center supports an extensive REST-API as well as the industrial security software Cisco Cyber Vision. As you can see, Cisco’s industrial software and hardware is ready for the transformation!

What are the Use-Cases which you can start right now?

To give you a better understand of how powerful Industrial NetDevOps can be with our Cisco industrial solutions, here are some use-cases which will get you started. However, there are many more!

◉ Enable or disable remote access with just one REST-API Call: By simply defying a service as a python script which will execute pre-defined NETCONF commands to create, enable and disable ACLs on specific industrial hardware, for example the IE3400.

◉ Deploy your desired IOS configuration for hundreds or thousands Cisco IE switches automated with the software automation tool Ansible and just one command. For example, configure the IND bootstrap-, specific ISE-, PROFINET-, CIP-, PTP-configuration and so on with one centralized tool or even application of yours.

◉ Get fully automated and tailored reports about the health of your network and IT/OT devices via the REST APIs of Cisco Cyber Vision and Cisco Industrial Network Director. In the same process-chain, analyze the report with other Cisco tools: Check each DNS query what has been made in your industrial network with the Cisco Umbrella Investigate API to see if some requests were malicious and highlight the originators.

◉ Enable ChatOps in your Industrial Environment: Operations professionals can easily change the network configuration and many other application settings via simple text messages on Cisco Webex Teams (see the example below with the IR1101). What changes the OT worker is allowed to make will be pre-defined by the IT team.

How does the Toolset of Industrial NetDevOps look like?

It depends on your use-cases and requirements what skills are important – you do not need to know them all! Here is breakdown of which technologies and tools will help you further to enable Industrial NetDevOps:

◉ Programmability Basics: Understanding REST-APIs and Python (or any other programming language) are the basics for programmability which will help you automating your tasks and can solve specific IT/OT challenges.

◉ Device Level: In order to leverage the APIs directly on your industrial device (e.g. IE3400) for a single configuration change or getting device operational data, get started with NETCONF/RESTCONF and YANG.

◉ Controller & Orchestrator Level: If you manage your industrial hardware with Cisco DNA Center, Industrial Network Director, Kinetic GMM or vManage, you can simply do that with the REST-APIs and automate your tasks with Python for example.

◉ Configuration Management: If you want to change the IOS configuration on hundreds or thousands of devices, get started with the software automation tools Ansible, Puppet, Chef or others.

◉ Network Verification: If you want to know if your IOS configuration on which of your IE3400s has changed in the last weeks or months or want to test your IOS configuration, definitely get started with the Cisco framework pyATS.

◉ Security: Especially in an industrial environment network security is highly important. Together with the industrial security software Cisco Cyber Vision (REST-API capable), Cisco Firepower & FirePower Threat Defense (REST-API capable), the ruggedized Cisco Industrial Security Appliance ISA3000, Cisco Stealthwatch (REST-API capable) and Cisco Identity Services Engine (pxGrid API) enable your network to talk to these security tools and the other way round.

◉ Telemetry and Monitoring: To visualize your collected data from your industrial device (e.g. IR1101 in the image below), get started with streaming telemetry and the TIG-stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana), ELK-stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) or any other preferred databases and dashboards.

Where should I deploy the Industrial NetDevOps tools?

As usual, this depends on your architecture, devices, and industry. However, if we look at the Converged Plantwide Ethernet (CPwE) Architecture, it makes sense to include these tools in the Industrial Zone as seen in the image below.

Source: cisco.com

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Get Back to a Safe Workspace Faster with Cisco CX Location-Based Analytics

The advent of COVID-19 has affected the way people live and conduct business. It has necessitated new business and epidemiological practices for ensuring business continuity. Many businesses and institutions around the world have moved from absorbing the effects that lead to most workspaces being shut by enabling their employees to work remotely and securely by leveraging video conferencing and VPN solutions. The return to normalcy requires the implementation of specific measures that will help businesses prepare to return to their usual physical workspaces. In some locations around the world, campuses that were closed are beginning to re-open, and employees are gradually returning to work through a phased approach. However, now more than ever, organizations need to ensure their workspaces offer the most secure and safe working environments, which strictly adhere to the COVID-19 guidelines for social and physical distancing.

Some of the most common questions emanating from customers in this situation include the following:

◉ “I want to see how my business is impacted by COVID-19. How can I ensure my campus is safe to re-open?”
◉ “How can I provide personalized customer experiences while ensuring social distancing?”
◉ “How can I ensure the number of employees attending work is within the safe threshold?”
◉ “How can I track and alert employees if the number of people within the campus at a given time poses a threat to the safety and health security of all in attendance?”

Get Help Safely Returning to Your Campus with the Cisco CX offer for Cisco DNA Spaces

Cisco offers a location-based analytics solution—Cisco® DNA Spaces—which digitizes physical spaces to provide you with insight about people throughout your workspaces, including how, where, and when they move through your location. It collects data from your existing Cisco Wi-Fi access points to provide information about people, including employees, customers, patrons and visitors, as well as things, such as assets and sensors, within your properties. Built with a variety of applications (apps), Cisco DNA Spaces sets up workplace density thresholds to monitor the number of employees in buildings across campus, provides notifications when thresholds are reached, shares safety information, and enables rapid response to incidents via proximity reporting.

In line with this, Cisco Customer Experience (CX) has introduced a new Service offer that helps you deploy and address your use cases with Cisco DNA Spaces. The Cisco CX offer for Cisco DNA Spaces delivers our new Advise and Implementation Service that helps with design, configuration, deployment and post-implementation support of Cisco DNA Spaces, which empowers businesses to analyze data from their workspaces and define actionable insights to accelerate office re-openings.

Our CX experts analyze your current environment and requirements, advise you on the best solution design and configuration for agreed upon use case(s), and tests and validates the desired functionality prior to production use. You’ll get expert help with right-fit use-case implementation, including a knowledge transfer session and post-implementation support to enable ongoing use of the solution and help you maintain essential business operations. We’ll make sure you can take full advantage of these location-based services to leverage critical visibility throughout your physical workspace locations, which plays a crucial role in managing the safe return of people to your workspaces.

Two levels of Advise and Implementation packages are available for Cisco DNA Spaces—small and large packages—based on the size of your organization. You’ll have the option to get support for up to five buildings (or 30 floors or shops) to cover your physical workspaces, smart captive portals for enhanced customer experience, CX post-deployment use assistance, and more.

How Cisco CX Simplifies and Accelerates Your Safe Workspaces

Next-generation sensing capabilities are already built into your Cisco Wi-Fi access points—such as Cisco Catalyst®, Aironet®, and Meraki®. However, they need to be turned on and aligned, and Cisco CX will do that for you. If you don’t already have them, Cisco CX can quickly deploy new Cisco Wi-Fi access points for you. We’ll take care of complete connectivity between your Cisco Wi-Fi access points, Cisco network, and the cloud-based Cisco DNA Spaces solution. Furthermore, the granular data collected by your Cisco Wi-Fi access points feeds the Cisco DNA Spaces apps. From this app data, you can then leverage advanced analytics to achieve powerful insights into end-user behavior​—how people use, move, and occupy spaces. The following apps are seamlessly bundled in our Cisco DNA Spaces solution:

◉ Right Now App​: Sets workplace density thresholds to monitor the number of employees in Wi-Fi enabled zones across campus.​

◉ Notification Trigger: Uses a rule engine to power an API, which triggers notifications when thresholds set by the Right Now App are crossed. Keep your teams updated at all times with automated notifications via Webex Teams™, SMS, or email.​​

◉ Impact Analysis App​: Helps you determine whether your operations need to be adjusted for the improved safety of your people by measuring the effectiveness of your back-to-safe-workspaces policies, including whether it’s safe to introduce more people into your physical workspaces.

◉ Proximity Reporting App​: Delivers historical analytics, allowing you to trace the steps of your Wi-Fi connected people. This app reports the presence and path down to individual users, while also reporting who else was present, allowing you to investigate incident impact across employees and zones by tracing proximity.

◉ Engagements App​: Shares contextually triggered safety information with employees based on where
they are in any of your buildings. ​The rule engine drives dynamic engagements based on each building classification as well as individual employee personas for more relevant information.

With the data stream created by Cisco Wi-Fi access points and fed to the bundled Cisco DNA Spaces apps, you can gauge the effectiveness of your back-to-work policies, and determine when it’s safe to allow more people back into your office. This includes the ability to determine if there is an area in any of your workspace zones where people are clustering and breaking your distancing guidelines. The real-time analytics offered by Cisco DNA Spaces make it easy to monitor the number of people across campus, including the effectiveness of your distancing policies with workspace density thresholds throughout all your monitored zones and across points of ingress and egress. Notification triggers generated by policy breaks and proximity reporting help you take action to keep your people safe. Your employees can also receive safety information triggered contextually based on their presence in any of your monitored physical zones. All this can be managed through a single, cloud-based pane of glass to simplify how you consume and leverage location services to keep your people safe.

Safety Can’t Wait—Start Your Location-Based Analytics Today

If you plan to re-open your campus gradually, we’ll work at your pace, easing into a broader rollout and expanding to deploy more specific use cases when you’re ready. Regardless of your rollout scheme, you’ll enjoy easy procurement and fast deployment. Leverage the right expertise to get up and running quickly with Cisco DNA Spaces in days, versus weeks, all while prioritizing the safety of your people.

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5 Important Fundamentals of Your Account Based Marketing Program

Are you a B2B marketing professional looking to set up, or improve, your Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy? Perhaps you have a program up and running or are looking to implement one soon.

If you’re feeling the urgency behind ABM, it’s for good reason. This is a growth strategy that has been proven to deliver the highest ROI of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic (according to the ITSMA, who has been advocating for this approach for many years.)

You’re also not alone. In a recent study by SiriusDecisions, 93% of respondents stated that ABM is very or extremely important.

The benefits of ABM are numerous:

◉ Greater focus – ABM allows your Sales and Marketing teams to focus time, budget, and efforts on those accounts that are most likely to drive revenue for you. Think of it as a “zero waste” strategy.

◉ Larger deals – Deals generated through ABM tend to be larger, with better buy-in and executive support.

◉ Increased close rates – Companies report higher close rates with those accounts engaged through ABM.

◉ Faster deals – Because the right individuals within the right accounts are targeted, ABM deals tend to get stuck less, and move quicker.

◉ Integration – ABM by nature integrates your sales and marketing teams who now work together against the same account criteria list.

I believe B2B organizations with large and complex sales have a great deal to be gained by implementing an account-based approach. Some say this is always the way B2B was meant to be. I tend to agree.

Wherever you are in your journey, here are the most important fundamentals that can dictate success for your ABM programs:

1. ABM is strategic. Some mistakenly approach ABM as a tactic, failing to invest appropriately in resourcing, executive buy-in or change management to bring it to life. This should be a highly strategic growth initiative that combines people, processes, and technology.

What’s important is to realize that simply buying ABM technology is, itself, not enough to see results. Like any other core marketing technology, how you shift the behaviors of your team will truly make all the difference.

2. Leave lead-centric practices behind. While ABM can run simultaneously to traditional demand generation within a pilot program, it truly is a new mindset to adopt.

The lead-based marketing automation and lead management approaches popularized throughout the 2010’s have been a kind of “normal” for the B2B industry. In this approach:

– Deals are comprised of individual leads
– Deals are high-velocity, taking hours, days or weeks
– Deal sizes are low, and there’s a lot of them

But, for those organizations with large and complex deals, traditional lead-based demand gen is often not appropriate. This is where ABM is appropriate, as it involves:

– Many stakeholders
– Months-to-years time to close
– Low quantity, highly-defined universe of target accounts
– Large deal size

3. Marketing has a different role to play in ABM. Because ABM requires different motions than lead-based marketing, the resourcing and responsibilities for a marketing team deploying ABM will look different. For example, the way your team may spend their time will include working with Sales to define accounts, and their goals and plans. They may also be responsible for gathering account intelligence and building engagement strategies, from content to live events.

In ABM, Marketing is a true partner with Sales, targeting the same list of high-value accounts, and working together to engage those accounts over the lifecycle of the account’s journey – from awareness to engagement to close, then after the deal to renewal and expansion.

4. Multi-channel is the best ABM approach. On that note about channels, the explosion of digital marketing has introduced more ways to engage individuals within our target accounts than ever. But, for an ABM program to be successful, we have to leverage them in a more focused way.

Here’s how B2B teams use all channels in ABM:

– Email marketing looks different with ABM. Sales owns more early-stage email outreach with highly personalized, tailored, and targeted notes.
– Direct mail is used to send custom, bespoke assets appropriate for a small amount of specific accounts.
– Field events are more targeted as well, used to nurture relationships with key accounts in cities they are more concentrated in. These can be VIP experiences, lunch and learns, breakfast roundtables, or panels.
– Digital ads are used to serve content to specific accounts by IP addresses, or a list of contacts.

5. ABM requires leading with insight. Corporate Visions found that 74% of buyers chose the sales rep that was FIRST to provide value and insight. This aligns with research from Edelman and LinkedIn that reveals thought leadership enhances B2B decision-makers trust in a vendor (88%), their perception of a vendor’s capabilities (88%), their respect of that organization (90%) and even convinces 61% to pay a premium because it demonstrates deep thinking and other virtues important to them.

Because ABM is inherently outbound (whereas traditional lead generation let us publish content and attract leads in an inbound model) the quality of our outreach is held to a much higher standard.

Unfortunately, only 15% of decision-makers say the thought leadership they read is very good or excellent. This presents an enormous opportunity for B2B marketing leaders to improve, and for those with strong thought leadership programs in place today to differentiate and thrive.

It can feel like ABM is only the B2B marketing industry’s hottest new buzzword. But, I think of it as a far more critical industry transition. ABM gives our department a way to serve our businesses in more strategic, impactful ways.

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