Salesforce.com’s Benioff joins Cisco board
Cisco has added venerable and outspoken cloud computing executive Marc Benioff, founder and chairman of Salesforce.com, to its board of directors, the company announced today.
Benioff spent 13 years at Oracle before leaving to found Salesforcein 1999. Since then, the company has in many ways defined the SaaS (software as a service) cloud computing market, and continues to be a leader in both its CRM service and, increasingly in the PaaS (platform as a service) and social collaboration areas. The company's Force.com and Heroku services allow users to create applications that link in with the CRM application, while the company's Chatter feature is meant to be a social media-like platform for enterprise use. In addition to Benioff, Cisco also added Kristina Johnson, CEO of hydroelectric company Enduring Hydro and a former U.S. Department of Energy undersecretary. Read more...
Cisco’s $5bn telly encryption biz gobble wins EU blessing
Networking giant Cisco's $5bn takeover of pay-TV software maker NDS was approved by Brussels' competition officials today.
The European Commission said its "investigation confirmed that the merged entity would continue to face competition from a number of strong competitors and that customers, namely pay-TV providers, would continue to have alternative suppliers in all markets concerned".
Staines-based NDS, which makes software to encrypt programmes and such like for broadcasters and cable companies, started life in Israel in 1988. It is 51 per cent-owned by the Permira private equity fund and 49 per cent-owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Read more...
Cisco acquires Virtuata to secure virtual machine data
Cisco has acquired Virtuata, a privately held developer of technology for securing virtual machine data in multi-tenant data centers, the company said Monday.
Virtuata helps to isolate each virtual machine from others in the same virtualized data center or cloud environment, Cisco said. It can help to address the security concerns of enterprises or service providers that want to host multiple customers, departments or applications in a single infrastructure. Cisco said the acquisition complements its mission to help customers create unified data centers. Read more...
Cisco apologizes for privacy ‘confusion,’ makes cloud service an opt-in feature
Cisco Systems has taken a step back from its Cisco Connect Cloud service, removing it as the default setting for management of its Linksys EA Series Wi-Fi routers after a firestorm of complaints from customers about automatic firmware updates and the service's terms of service.
The default method for managing the high-end Linksys routers has been changed to traditional setup and management over the local network, Cisco said in a blog entry posted on Thursday. When the company brought Cisco Connect Cloud online last week, it made the Internet-based administration service into the default tool for the routers. Read more...
Cisco + OpenFlow + OpenStack = ONE software-defined network
Everybody is talking about OpenFlow, the "Quantum" networking abstraction project that is part of the OpenStack cloud controller, and software-defined networks in general. A lot of the talk has been about removing the hegemony of Cisco Systems in switching and routing. Now it is Cisco's turn to talk, the company's top brass declared at its annual customer event in San Diego.
Cisco executives talked for hours about software-defined networks and Cisco's plan to create them on its switching and routing iron. Execs holding forth at the preceding press conference included Shashi Kiran, senior director of data center, cloud, and switching solutions, and David Yen, general manager of Cisco's Data Center Group. Meanwhile Padmasree Warrior, CTO at the networking giant, gave a keynote address to the multitudes at the Cisco Live event following in its wake. But it was David Ward, dressed in jeans and not wearing any shoes, who stole the show when he explained, at length and rather eloquently, why Cisco has been so quiet about how it was going to make networks externally programmable and why it has taken so long to come up with its Open Network Environment, or ONE for short. Read more...
Cisco bundles target BYOD, mobile virtual desktop
Cisco announced yesterday three pre-tested bundles of products and services designed to cut through the confusing complexity of enterprise mobility.
The new Smart Solutions packages are by themselves not new at all: they're formed of existing Cisco hardware and software, third-party partnerships, and consulting services from Cisco or its partners. But Cisco says they represent a shift in the company's thinking about how to deploy mobile technology for businesses.
Instead of a grab bag of separate products, the new approach sees mobility, in effect, as a whole that's greater than the sum of its many parts, including devices, operating systems, apps, Wi-Fi access points, VPNs, authentication, and security. The overarching enterprise benefit, according to Cisco, is summed up in a new term, "Cisco Unified Workspace." Read more...
Which IT vendors offer the best and worst customer service?
Tech vendors looking to bounce back from the recession might consider investing a few more dollars in improving customer service. According to a survey of IT professionals, most tech companies are offering merely an adequate customer service experience. Yet IT shops tend to steer their limited budget dollars toward vendors that offer not just the best products, but also the best customer service experiences. Even as large enterprise providers consolidate, IT still has clout -- and is using it.
The new report from Temkin Group found that only Microsoft's business application division, Microsoft's server division, Cisco, and IBM SPSS earned rankings of Excellent for customer experience they provided (a score of 71 percent of higher). Twenty companies came away with Okay ratings (a range of 61 percent to 70, including Intel, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Dell, Citrix, and Red Hat); 36 were slapped with Poor (51 percent through 60, including Salesforce.com, McAfee, Adobe, and Symantec) or Very Poor customer-experience ratings (including Capgemini, Fujitsu, Novell, ACS, Software AG, Hitachi, Alcatel-Lucent, and Open Text ). Read more...
Cisco continues expanding its cloud universe
Cisco has demonstrated in recent months that it really and truly does have a cloud strategy, and the networking giant unveiled today its broad-reaching cloud framework dubbed CloudVerse, designed to help organizations build, manage, and connect public, private, and hybrid clouds. Also in the CloudVerse bucket: An array of hosted collaboration and security applications, along with new capabilities for delivering those services to mobile users.
CloudVerse isn't a cloud platform like Microsoft Azure or Hadoop. Rather, Cisco's clear intent remains to apply its network expertise to provide a framework with which companies can roll out cloud-based services to customers or seamlessly stitch together disparate cloud platforms and services for their own use. The ability to combine clouds is increasingly important for organizations that, for any number of reasons, want to extend certain services to the public while keeping other processes and data protected under lock and key. Read more...
Cisco, Xerox creating mobile printing system
Cisco Systems has teamed up with Xerox to create a mobile printing system that lets users print from any device to any printer.
The companies plan to make printing faster and easier for employees on the move, adding software to routers and switches to make the process faster and more secure. Cisco channel partners will resell the technology and a managed service that will be delivered by Xerox from a data center built with Cisco's UCS (Unified Computing System) servers, the companies are announcing on Monday. Read more...
Cisco backs up its big cloud talk
Cisco made announcements this week that demonstrate its commitment to more aggressively pursue its cloud vision. Clearly, the company is not aspiring to be a cloud provider like Amazon or Google. Rather, it aims to provide the groundwork for converged data centers, where network and storage traffic share the same fabric, workloads can move across data center boundaries with ease, and organizations can grab hosted and cloud-based resources with equal simplicity.
On Wednesday, the company unveiled a host of enhancements to its Data Center Business Advantage portfolio, ultimately aimed at allowing multiple data centers and cloud services to be connected across a common intelligent fabric. The announcement came one day after Cisco revealed plans to acquire newScale, a provider of software that delivers a self-service portal for IT organizations to select and deploy cloud services in a near on-tap manner. Read more...