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Rich Gore

Senior IT Manager

IT Customer Strategy and Success

I've been in IT all my professional life, starting with AT&T Bell Labs designing PBX services, through independent consulting and then with Cisco IT for the past 10+ years. Mostly I've worked in IT Infrastructure architecture teams, working with some of the brightest and best network and data center architects in Cisco. Over time I've learned a little about a lot of things going on inside Cisco IT, and I like to stay current. I try to share this experience with customers, by identifying their issues and describing how Cisco has overcome them (or by asking their advice on how Cisco can learn from them!).

I'm a California native, transplanted to London to help support Cisco customers in Europe. When I'm not working I'm touristing around London, the UK and Europe, and continue to be amazed by the history and beauty so near and so accessible.

Articles

April 2, 2014

INSIDE CISCO IT

Improving Email at Cisco Part 1 – The IT Technology Side

My personal email has 4 characteristics that drive me crazy: I get way too much email Most of my emails are a waste of time Emails carry the risk of, very rarely, nasty virus payloads (or link you to sites that have worse) Despite all this, I can’t live without email…

March 12, 2014

INSIDE CISCO IT

How to Make Free Phone Calls at Work – 5 Tips from Cisco IT

Every company gets phone bills. Whether you use hardware phones or laptop software phones or mobile phones, video phones or audio phones, your calls have to get carried over the some service provider’s network, and that costs money.…

February 26, 2014

INSIDE CISCO IT

How Does Cisco Keep Voice Costs Down?

How does Cisco keep voice costs down with our Unified Communications voice service?…

November 20, 2013

INSIDE CISCO IT

Cisco IT – Why So Many CUCM Clusters?

Last week, we looked at the question “How close to the phones does the CUCM cluster have to be?” There was no easy or set answer to this question, but we acknowledged right at the start that minimizing the number of clusters is probably a good idea. So why, then, does Cisco IT have so many clusters?…

November 6, 2013

INSIDE CISCO IT

How Close To Your Phones Does a CUCM Cluster Have To Be?

The first things involved in designing a Unified Communications network are deciding where to put the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) clusters, and how many clusters to have. And some of the major factors to consider are “Where are the phones? How many are there, and how close to the pho…

September 25, 2013

INSIDE CISCO IT

UC and Video – Phones of the Future

What will phones in the future look like?  If our experience at Cisco is any guide, there will be more and more phones, and they will look like almost anything. They will all have two things in common:  they will all bring people together – and they will do it with voice and video.  Always video. Th…

September 6, 2013

INSIDE CISCO IT

SIP Trunking: Less Cost, More Services

Voice over IP for business telephony is old news. But when business enterprises like Cisco connected to the outside world, they still used old-world technology. In the past two years Cisco IT has migrated its big connections to the outside world to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).  This move has s…

August 16, 2013

INSIDE CISCO IT

UC on UCS – The Invisible Servers

Cisco IT completely changed our voice and video infrastructure in the data center – and nobody noticed! We changed the systems that Cisco IT uses to run ALL our voice and video supporting: 200,000 voice endpoints in 540 buildings around the world, 87,000 voicemail boxes 1600 TelePresence units 8.6…