Cisco’s New Executive Lineup Worldwide Channels

Good article by Chad Berndston over at CRN discussing Cisco and Keith Goodwin’s recent changes to his executive team responsible for partners worldwide: Cisco’s Goodwin: New Executive Lineup Built To Last.

Has Any Fortune 1000 Touched the Private Cloud?

What makes cloud computing truly unique from the computing frameworks of the past?  Here are two key characteristics that NIST defines as:

• On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider.

Short Review of Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today’s Profit and Drives Tomorrow’s Growth

Doing Both

I just finished reading Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today’s Profit and Drives Tomorrow’s Growth by Inder Sidhu, Sr. Vice President, Strategy and Planning with Cisco.

As a long time channel partner of Cisco, Doing Both gave some fascinating insight into Cisco’s vision, strategy and execution.   In a clear and concise way, Inder not only covered Cisco but also gave brief stories of other companies and their challenges, failures and successes, including Disney, Google, IBM, BYD, Whirpool, Harley Davidson and several others.  Inder’s ability to interweave these stories throughout the text made for an easy and interesting read.

10 Things to Know about Cisco UCS

WWT St. Louis Demonstration Center

Along the lines of my most read post (probably because I found guys a lot smarter than me to write it!) 10 Things to Know about the Cisco Nexus 1000V, I’ve invited Joe Onisick, WWT’s Unified Computing Practice Manager, to be my guest blogger to highlight:  “10 Things to Know about Cisco UCS.”  Here we go….and, thanks, Joe!

1. The most important feature of UCS is its management architecture.  The hardware was all designed with unified management in mind in order to reduce the administrative overhead of today’s server environments.  As companies move to more highly virtualized environments and cloud architectures, automation and orchestration becomes key.  UCS provides the management and provisioning tools at a hardware level to quickly realize the benefits of these types of environments and maximize the inherent cost reductions.

Speed: An Elementary Particle of Business

While I don’t think he has discovered anything new about the importance of accelerating business decisions, John Chambers, Cisco CEO, has a fantastic ability to zero in on important concepts and trends and draw the business community’s attention to them.  This week’s Global CIO Blog on InformationWeek.com writes:

If you think Cisco’s been aggressive with acquisitions and product launches in the past, you’d better tighten your shoelaces because John Chambers says the company’s new management structure has slashed decision-making times by more than 90%.

Chambers’ new management structure is a great lesson for all of us.