Cisco wins at recent CITE awards

We Won!! I’m pleased to announce the Cisco IT Any Device team beat 50 companies to win the “Best Business Computing Environment” at the 2014 IDG CITE awards in San Francisco. The Any Device team manage, secure, and support over 196,000 desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones including 70,000 BYO devices.

Cisco won the award for providing its workforce more choice in the devices they use, and more flexibility in where they can use them. The awards were judged by a panel of industry experts based on the range of hardware options offered; ease of use across allowable devices; application design to ensure quick access; and the role that UX objectives played in solution design.

In accepting the award, Kelly Conway, IT Senior Manager at Cisco said “Our goal with Any Device was to allow greater choice in devices and deliver a supreme user experience while protecting our customer and corporate data. The vast majority of Cisco workers use a computer and smartphone to access company services, with over 20 percent using more than two devices, and the diversity of those devices is growing exponentially.”

As an employee at Cisco you can choose from one of eight laptops or desktops running Windows, Linux, or OS X. Plus, every three years you can choose a brand new device. In 2009, Cisco launched a BYOD program allowing employees to buy just about any smartphone or tablet they’d like as long as it meets our Trusted Device standard. The Trusted Device standard sets a minimum security expectation for all devices and platforms in our environment.

I’m also pleased to say we relied heavily on our own Cisco technologies to deliver the Any Device program including Cisco AnyConnect, Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA), Identity Services Engine (ISE), WebEx, and Jabber.

The good news for our workforce is that we’re not finished yet. We’re in the process of launching our Cisco eStore which is a single store-front for all IT Apps and Services across any devices. Plus, we’re continuing to expand our portfolio of cloud-based services, and we’re delivering new tools to speed up and simplify device setup from inside and outside our corporate network.

Here’s hoping we can go back to back in 2015.