Business Technology Roundtable

Cisco released the final installment of the Cisco Connected World Report, an international study about the behavioral trends of workers in accessing information anywhere, with any device, and the ability of information technology (IT) professionals to address their needs. The latest results focus on data center, virtualization, and cloud computing trends , and evolving IT roles, in the context of increasingly mobile and distributed workforces. The study found that global IT professionals are creating new job opportunities by increasing collaboration among teams in the data center, and adopting new technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing . But they’re also struggling to maintain security and data governance as employees demand more offsite access to networks and information. Comparing Cloud Adoption Rates by Country For example, across the 13 countries in the global study, 52 percent of the IT professionals stated they use or plan to use cloud computing, while mu...

Cloud is not a one-size-fits-all proposition – clearly, the right approach depends on your organization’s needs and priorities. Different service and deployment models can be adopted to match the requirements of different types of workloads from across the whole organization. To illustrate some of these solution trade-offs, we’ll profile public-sector organization needs, and their related information technology and communications service requirements. Government entities will use a variety of Cloud configurations. Those of sufficient scale will likely adopt similar Cloud models to those of large enterprises. Organizations with common needs and interests may join together to build and share community clouds. Some government services may be provided through the public clouds of managed service providers . A major issue for public-sector organizations will be balancing concerns and regulations regarding privacy and security with aspirations for transparency and sharing information. ...

Cisco commissioned a study of present-day challenges that companies face as they strive to address employee and business needs amid increasing mobility capabilities, security risks, and technologies that can deliver applications and information more ubiquitously -- from virtualized data centers and cloud computing services to traditional wired and wireless networks. The results of this international workplace study reveals that many people now believe that they no longer need to be "in the office" anymore in order to be truly productive. This and other findings provide new insight into the expectations, demands, and behavior of today's global workforce -- that's influencing the way information is accessed and how business communications are changing. "The Cisco Connected World Report gives further insight into the future of the workplace and it is clear from the research findings that the desire among employees to be more mobile and flexible in their work ...

With the increased reliance on IT from business leaders, it's important for CIOs to understand the concerns of CEOs and the implications they may have on IT, according to Gartner, Inc. "Business leaders see very uncertain times ahead in 2011, and they must defend growth despite falling business and consumer confidence," said Mark Raskino, vice president and Gartner Fellow. According to Gartner's assessment, CIOs should target at least one major business process to be revolutionized or obliterated in 2011 or 2012 -- substantively improving how companies collaborate is one example. BT and Cisco have a shared vision for the future of hosted collaboration and unified communications services, built on their insight across a variety of networked IT and communications services. The companies' mutual understanding of complex network environments and solution provisioning has helped them deliver superior capability, service, and value with global reach. BT and C...

You may recall, we've reported on the compelling cost savings associated with TelePresence service usage. It's proven to be a key motivator for increasing adoption. That said, a new market study has uncovered value-added benefits -- such as building trust, improving group collaboration, and increasing competitive advantage. Cisco unveiled the findings of a global study of perceptions of video collaboration technologies in the workplace. The research, conducted by Ipsos Mori , polled an international sample of workers from across 12 countries and found that the benefits of TelePresence and video conferencing are extending well beyond the highly touted benefits of cost and travel reduction. Among the key findings, 90 percent of respondents believe video collaboration saves them at least two hours of valuable work time a week. One-third of respondents who frequently use video collaboration solutions estimate they save close to one full day -- seven hours or more -- per week....

Managed cloud services can accelerate your business by allowing you to transform ideas into marketable products and services with greater speed. Cloud can provide nearly limitless scalability, enabling your business to grow without time and resource intensive IT build-outs. Cloud can transform the economics of your IT -- from capital-intensive, to pay-as-you-go. Service level agreements guarantee the capabilities you need, when you need them. Costs are tiered and metered to accurately reflect your requirements and usage. All applications, including legacy, run more efficiently and sustainably with greater utilization of the underlying infrastructure. Cloud can make new business models possible and unlock revenue potential. Companies can enter new markets, respond more quickly to changing customer needs, collaborate more effectively to drive innovation and business value. Collaboration Use-Case Scenario Global organizations face real collaboration challenges. Employee expertis...

Orange Business Services together with Cisco, EMC and VMware have formed a business alliance, called Flexible 4 Business -- to offer end-to-end cloud computing services for enterprises. This business alliance will help customers easily transition to cloud computing and gain the infrastructure flexibility, cost reduction and business performance optimization cloud computing enables. Orange Business Services will be the service provider for the business alliance and will deliver the four types of pay-per-use managed cloud solutions based on the industry-leading technologies from the four partners. Through Orange Business Services cloud portfolio supported by the Flexible 4 Business alliance, enterprises can realize the benefits of having IT as a service without the concern of building their own cloud computing infrastructure. Through a single service provider, customers will be able to accelerate the deployment of highly secure cloud services across their enterprise while reducing man...

We live in a more connected and fast-moving world than ever before. Small business start-ups overtake established incumbents to dominate their markets with increasing speed. Developing countries leapfrog massive landline telecom investments and jump straight to mobile communications. While our growing interconnectedness brings many benefits, it also sometimes means greater vulnerability and a heightened sensitivity to risk. Increasingly we look to enabling technology to support both our personal and professional lives. As individuals, we expect instantaneous and ubiquitous access to communications, data, content, and applications. We increasingly look to social media to inform our personal and business decisions. As business leaders, we expect technology to deliver cost efficiencies, improve customer experience, drive revenue growth, and foster innovation. At the same time, we expect constant availability and end-to-end security. Evolving Beyond the Legacy IT Models This combi...

Once again, we return to the topic of managed cloud services lessons-learned, and the associated best practices that have been gleaned by the early-adopters. The need for agile organizations and adaptive business processes continues to fuel demand for alternatives to the legacy IT status-quo. According to the latest market assessment by IDC , cloud computing is being adopted more widely for a larger portfolio of business applications, as IT and business leaders discover what works well -- and what doesn't work so well. The active ingredients for cloud enablement are: just-in-time software stacks that are ready to provision, on-demand deployments, a self-service catalog of cloud services, the scalability to meet growing demand for computing resource and the flexibility to scale down resources -- when they're no longer needed by the user. Cloud computing uses still focus primarily on public cloud services, with the early adopters leveraging cloud computing for application ...

Companies are increasingly turning to videoconferencing solutions, whether to reduce travel costs, ensure business continuity in the event of a natural disaster, or reduce their environmental carbon footprint. Service providers are also progressively working together to advance the adoption of new video communication capabilities. Orange Business Services is offering its Telepresence Community, a solution that provides direct access to Cisco TelePresence in 800 existing meeting suites around the world, on a free trial basis. They are also promoting service interoperability with other global service providers. As an established global provider of fully managed Telepresence solutions, Orange Business Services offers video communication solutions for on-demand collaboration with customers, partners and suppliers -- using the immersive virtual meeting experience of Telepresence. "Through Telepresence Community, our B2B Telepresence solution, opening our network and customer base to ...

The reinsurance business is evolving. Traditionally, reinsurance transactions are between two insurance entities: the primary insurer that sold the original insurance policies and the reinsurer. The companies in this industry are long-standing users of advanced communications technology, now including video collaboration. Tata Communications announced that it has been chosen by German reinsurance company, Hannover Re, to deploy and run its Telepresence facilities -- serving the group’s internal teams in 18 locations across 16 countries, worldwide. Tata Communications will deploy the Cisco TelePresence high-definition, immersive video collaboration systems to help employees based in Europe, North America, Asia, Middle East and Africa collaborate with each other on a daily basis. Under this agreement, Tata Communications will provide Hannover Re with a solution that includes deployment and installation of rooms, maintenance, management and concierge service for scheduling and reservati...

New cloud-based business technology applications are reinventing workplace collaboration -- to address the needs of forward-looking organizations and their essential employees, in today's more economically frugal operating environment. Progressive business leaders are breaking down traditional communication silos by creating the environment for key staff to easily connect with peers and readily share information across globally dispersed organizations. How will they be able to fuel this ongoing transformation? Cisco announced the availability of the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution that allows service providers to offer their customers a wide range of collaboration applications -- via the cloud, using a "business technology as a service" model. The Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, which builds on existing hosted Unified Communications offerings, provides customers with unprecedented flexibility in choosing how they deploy collaboration applications throughout thei...

In today's fast-paced world, the need to be constantly connected and always accessible has made mobility a strategic corporate asset across the enterprise. Business can come to a halt when employees do not have access to network services and when they cannot easily reach the people they need -- or be reached by the people who need them. Cisco has unveiled Cisco Cius, a first-of-its-kind mobile collaboration business tablet that delivers virtual desktop integration with anywhere, anytime access to the full range of Cisco collaboration and communication applications, including HD video. Cisco Cius is an ultra-portable device weighing just 1.15lbs (0.52kg) that extends the productivity benefits of Cisco collaboration applications to a highly secure mobile platform. In addition to full telepresence interoperability, Cisco Cius offers HD video streaming and real-time video, multi-party conferencing, email, messaging, browsing, and the ability to produce, edit and share content stored l...

Cisco announced the results of a survey exploring the security implications of social networking and the use of personal devices in the enterprise. Perhaps the most telling finding was that employees continue to work around restrictive corporate IT security policies. Why do businesspeople, including senior corporate executives, continue to bypass their own IT organizations? Typically, the most common complaint is a lack of agility -- an inability to meet the business technology needs of internal stakeholders in a timely manner. Another significant finding: 71 percent of the survey respondents said that overly strict security policies have a negative impact on hiring and retaining talented employees under age 30. Conducted on behalf of Cisco by InsightExpress, the survey polled 500 IT security professionals across the United States, Germany, Japan, China and India. The results illustrate that the consumer influence on enterprise IT is growing and that more employees are bringing persona...

American Express Business Travel and Cisco announced the global availability of public Cisco TelePresence Suites through American Express Business Travel's virtual meetings eXpert (vmX) solution. This agreement provides corporate clients with virtual meeting consulting services which will enable clients to make better decisions about the best method of face-to-face collaboration -- by leveraging publicly-available Cisco TelePresence rooms and increase use of private, corporate-owned systems around the world. Cisco TelePresence uses high-definition video and audio to create the experience of face-to-face meetings. People appear life-size around a virtual conference table, creating an environment where meeting participants feel as though they're sitting in the same room. Public Cisco TelePresence Suites offer convenient access to organizations, travelers, remote workers or business partners to communicate and collaborate with colleagues, customers and partners. Public Cisco ...

Telepresence video communication systems enable groups of people to meet and collaborate in multiple locations worldwide -- while feeling as if they were all in the same room together. Executives can now equate the full positive impact from several tangible benefits of utilizing telepresence systems, according to the results of a new market study commissioned by the Carbon Disclosure Project . U.S. and U.K. businesses that substitute some business travel with telepresence meeting services can cut CO2 emissions by nearly 5.5 million metric tons in total -- the greenhouse gas equivalent of removing more than one million passenger vehicles from the road for one year -- and achieve total economy-wide financial benefits of almost $19 billion, by 2020. Other conclusions of the global market study determined a business with $1 billion or more in annual revenue that utilize four telepresence rooms could: Achieve a financial return on investment in as little as 15 months. Save nearly 900 busin...

Cisco and Verizon Business will host a live webcast to unveil new findings from a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Cisco and discuss new opportunities in managed and cloud services for service providers and enterprises. Key findings from the market study include: Global managed services growth will outpace technology growth in 2010 by more than double. The total global managed services opportunity will be $217 billion by 2014. Join Ellen Daley, Forrester Research vice president; Will Scott, Cisco global director of managed solutions; and Joseph Crawford, Verizon Business executive director of IT solutions, for an online discussion on these major market trends. Managed and Cloud Services: Opportunities in a Transitioning Market Date: Thursday, June 10, 2010 Time: 8 to 9 a.m. (PDT) / 11 a.m. to noon (EDT) Register, in advance, at: Cisco Verizon Business Webcast

As the European aviation sector encountered major disruptions, online business meeting services attracted growing interest and new demand. Apparently, few traditional globetrotters plan for, or even anticipate, the effects of a natural disaster so many were searching for last-minute alternatives to international air travel. Online visual collaboration platforms -- that enable just-in-time face-to-face meetings -- were a natural choice for the informed business travelers who, like most of us, only recently discovered that Iceland has an active volcano. According to the latest market study by Frost & Sullivan, renewed awareness of videoconference solutions will create further opportunities for TelePresence service providers . Telepresence Market Growth Predicted Frost & Sullivan estimates the global Telepresence market value was $396.2 million for 2009, and forecasts this market to reach $825.9 million in 2015. Their research assessment included both ready-built Telepresence room...

Examining the ever-changing landscape of online collaboration, and assessing the growth of social networks, Cisco announced findings from a recent market study about end-user collaboration applications and individual preferences within the workplace. Within the group of respondents using social networking for work, fifty-nine percent say that their usage of social media applications has increased over the past year. The study also found the most frequently used application for collaborating with others is email (91 percent). However, what people want from their email application is changing -- the findings highlight the potential for email service evolution. The market study, conducted by Harris Research, surveyed more than 1,000 end-users from across the United States and found that email is the preferred collaboration application at work for a variety of reasons. Navigating within the Comfort Zone Respondents like the fact that email provides an easily-accessible record of communicat...

Enterprise leaders say that it's becoming difficult to find the highly qualified IT and network security talent they need that's affordable, and so they look to service providers for a solution. According to the latest market study by Forrester Research , demand has been growing. That said, Forrester believes that using a managed security services provider (MSSP) is more than just a lower-cost alternative to doing the same work in-house. MSSPs are not just managing devices, they also provide insightful analysis that can help with business decisions. CIOs and other business technology leaders used to resist out-tasking their IT and network security requirements. The talent scarcity issue has helped to change that mindset. Now, one in four out-task their email filtering, and another 12 percent are very interested in doing so in the next 12 months. Another 13 percent already out-task their vulnerability management and an additional 19 percent say they are very interested in doing ...

The goal of creating a collaborative enterprise might seem like an essential requirement that all forward-looking business leaders would actively support. However, fear of the unknown sometimes makes intelligent people react in ways that, in hindsight, appear totally illogical. A case in point, Cisco announced results of a global study that found that while 77 percent of IT decision makers surveyed plan to increase spending on internal collaboration tools, company employees believe that their ability to collaborate is constrained by their own employer policies. That said, more than a quarter of those who work at organizations that prohibit the use of social media applications admitted to changing the settings on their corporate devices to gain online access -- claiming they "need the tools to get the job done." This new insight was attained by investigating practices at medium to large enterprises -- those with more than 250 employees. The study, conducted by InsightExpress,...

The American hospitality industry has suffered from the global economic meltdown. While room rates sank nearly 9 percent for the U.S. hotel industry overall, luxury hotels saw their rates decline more than 16 percent, according to a market study by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Was the "frugal consumer" phenomenon to blame? Actually, they're not the main culprit. Business people that chose to travel to meet their customers and suppliers are still not likely budgeted to stay at the pricier hotel properties. What's a savvy upscale hotelier to do, given this scenario? Follow a customer demand trend that has gained momentum -- where spending has risen, based on a solid ROI justification. Starwood Hotels & Resorts unveiled its first in-hotel Cisco TelePresence meeting suites with a virtual, interactive meeting spanning across two continents. The W Chicago City Center and Sheraton on the Park Sydney are the first in Starwood's global portfolio to introduce the new meeti...

The National Retail Federation (NRF) released its 2010 economic forecast, projecting retail industry sales to increase 2.5 percent from last year. In contrast, total industry retail sales for 2009 had actually declined by 2.5 percent. "As we continue to see signs of improvement throughout the U.S. economy in 2010, overall sentiment will begin to lift, making way for slight increases in consumer spending," said NRF Chief Economist Rosalind Wells. While this past year certainly has been a challenging one for most retailers, they continue to seek out ways to apply business technology that helps to transform both their in-store communications and the way they interact and collaborate with their primary suppliers. Earlier this month, the NRF 2010 "Big Show" attendees were able to once again experience Cisco TelePresence systems and AT&T services in action. The above video includes insights from some of the people who shared their perspective about how business vide...