Articles
A Wider View of Collaboration – and its Benefits
“Collaboration” usually means “people working together productively by sharing voice, video, and data”. Inside Cisco, the standard idea of Collaboration includes a lot of IT Technology, like: all voice-based Unified Communication (that is, all IP Telephony from hardware and software phones, and all…
What’s New from Cisco IT?
If you’ve seen the short introductory video to Cisco on Cisco, then you know that Cisco IT shares stories with customers. But – what kind of stories? Well – let me turn that around. What stories would you like to hear? Because we have some good ones. And if we don’t have content to point you to, we’…
Telephony: Video is the New Audio
Video is the New Audio at Cisco. That’s an audacious statement for a guy who started working in the Bell system about 30 years ago. The New Audio? Audio sets a standard that is pretty hard to beat. Audio telephony has been around for almost 140 years. (The first major phone system was started in 187…
How much Video at Cisco?
We use a lot of video at Cisco. A recent tally shows that Cisco totals over 24,000 video calls every day, which raises a pretty big question: why do we use so much video at Cisco? //…
Coming to a desk near you…DX70, DX80, and DX650
I have to envy my colleagues in the Cisco IT ACE program: they get to play with the latest toys. For several months now they’ve been playing with the newest Cisco releases of video phones while the rest of us looked on. Just recently though, they’ve started showing up on Cisco desks – lots of desks…
The Cisco TelePresence MX Series at a Glance
Cisco TelePresence is designed to create a virtual reality, to make you feel like you’re face-to-face with people, no matter how far away you are in the world. That used to take a lot of complex, standardized, in-room design, color, lighting and deployment. We had to custom-build the rooms, put in s…
The Cisco TelePresence SX Series – adding TelePresence to every screen
We have a little problem at Cisco: not enough TelePresence. This may sound strange since Cisco IT has installed over 1600 TelePresence endpoints already, which gives us about one TelePresence unit for every 50 employees. Utilization of these units is still greater than 60% worldwide (and some are in…
Building a New IT Organization
If someone asked you how to build a new IT organization from the ground up, what would you advise? A Cisco Sales employee asked me that very question last week. Her global customer had recently spun off a new regional group which was planning to do just that –build a completely new IT enterprise org…
Improving Email at Cisco Part 2 – The Employee Process Side
I’d mentioned earlier (see Improving Email at Cisco Part 1 – The IT Technology Side) that email has its ugly side: Too many Most of them are a waste of time Emails will, occasionally, carry virus payloads (or link you to sites that have worse); and yet I can’t live without it…