Stephen Speirs
SP Product Management
Cisco Customer Experience (CX)
Articles
Yes Adopt DevOps But Don’t Forget The Pain of Re-Writes: My Biggest Software Lesson Ever
As we deliver more and more software projects in my part of Cisco Services, I have a keen interest in software development best practices. And concerns on poor practices. A few weeks ago, a software vendor made a passing comment on their next software release to me “It’s OK, in our new…
Part 2: The Ski Centre Queues and the Service Provider Internet of Things Opportunity
Last week, in Part 1, I blogged about the bizarre association of queues at my local ski centre and unreliable access to cloud payment services. Being located in an area of poor internet provision, the resulting unreliable and slow access to cloud services means that credit card payments process slow…
The Connection between Long Ski Centre Queues and the Cloud: The Service Provider Internet of Things Opportunity
Back in 2010, not long after I started blogging here on Cisco.com, I discussed some of the challenges customers were fearing regarding the feasibility of cloud adoption. In my market research work, the survey I ran back in 2010 came up with some interesting concerns: that lack of bandwidth and inter…
The Most Boring Service We offer … And how to bring down a data center in one easy snip!
I do enjoy the (sometimes irreverent!) perspectives of some articles on data center in the UK publication “The Register“, and the story of how a data center change went wrong made me laugh, cringe and cry at the same time – the change being when an electrician cut the wrong wire an…
Your New Year’s Resolution for 2016: Start with a Cisco Domain Ten Workshop
A few years ago, I wrote a series of blogs on Cisco’s Domain Ten(SM) framework. Since then, we’ve used this simple yet powerful analysis tool to help guide many customers on data center and IT transformation projects. I personally found it quite notable that leading market analyst firm IDC, recog…
Part 2: Ten Learnings and Observations from the 2015 London Gartner Data Center Conference
Last week I attended the 2015 London Gartner Data Center conference. In my first blog (part 1) on this event, I covered some of my main learnings and observations, #1 .. #5: Bi-modal IT, Anti-fragility, Shadow IT (and how Cisco Cloud Consumption Services can help you here, SDN, and Software asset…
Ten Learnings and Observations from the 2015 London Gartner Data Center Conference (Part 1)
This past week I attended the 2015 Gartner Data Center Conference in London. This is always a great conference to learn from, although it always pays to look out for some of the hype too. There were key note presentations from the sprinter Michael Johnson and from previous UK government Vince Cable…
Part 2: Why not Initiate a “Save to Invest” Program for your Data Center?
Two weeks ago, in my previous blog, I invited you to consider ways in which you could initiate a “Save to Invest” program for your data center. That is, how can you save money from your current data center spend, in order to re-invest it into currently un- or -under-funded areas of your…
Why not Initiate a “Save to Invest” Program for your Data Center? (Part 1)
As a Scot, I have a natural predisposition – almost a gene – for money saving initiatives! As I’ve been researching new initiatives in my work for Cisco Services over the past few months, I’ve become aware of – for the first time I am ashamed to say in some cases – some huge sinks of your cash in t…