Cisco Spark

­Making the Impossible, Possible Last year, one of my colleagues went to a start-up conference with 2,000 people. On stage, someone asked the audience how many were working on consumer apps. Almost everyone raised their hands. Then the person asked how many were working on enterprise apps. This time…

Really and seriously, and I mean it this time. In my work in the last twenty years on IP communications, the holy grail of the industry was to enable solutions that provide true any-to-any communications. That is – in the workplace environment – it would be possible for any user in Company A to talk…

Henry Ford wasn’t the first person to build a car. He was, however, a pioneer in creating the Model T, a car that was affordable for the average consumer. It took years to develop and prototype this model—and, at the same time, to revolutionize the manufacturing process that led to the moving assemb…

  This post comes from Stacy Shrader, an intern with the collaboration marketing team and a rising senior at Virginia Tech with a dual degree in business management and public relations. Innovation. Yes, a simple word, but one filled with ambiguity. Marketing leaders can attest that innova…

Cisco Live US which was held in Las Vegas the last week in June, is one of the premier IT industry events Cisco hosts every year.  This year’s event drew over 28,000 customers, partners, press and analysts. Our top executives presented keynote and innovation talks which tackled topics like cloud, co…

It’s definitely been quite a while since I sat in a classroom for more than the annual back-to-school night routine. When I was a student, the classrooms always smelled like chalk. We turned in assignments in our best handwriting and carefully chose the right folder to encase our reports. Eventually…

I recently had the privilege of taking my family to see Hamilton, an American Musical. It blew me away. It was the best play I’ve ever seen. For three hours, we were held captive by the pure energy of the music and lyrics, recounting the history of America’s founding fathers. The song, “My Shot,” wh…

Last week, our industrial design team traveled to Essen, Germany to receive one of the greatest honors in the international design community: the Red Dot award. It would be a great honor to receive one award. Instead, Red Dot awarded us with four. We received awards for Cisco Spark Room Kit, Cisco S…

How do you get through a 12-month deployment with the US Army to the Middle East? For me, much of it was through my Cisco Family. As you can imagine, life in a combat theater can be quite lonely, especially for a person of my rank, Command Sergeant Major. The good news is that, after having been dep…