This week, Apple and Cisco today announced a partnership to create a so-called “fast lane” for iOS business users.

How will they do it, you ask? By optimizing Cisco networks for iOS devices and apps, integrating iPhone with Cisco enterprise environments and providing unique collaboration on iPhone and iPad.
Sounds simple enough, but there’s much to be done.

“iOS is the world’s best mobile platform, and nearly every Fortune 500 and Global 500 company today has put iOS at the center of their mobile strategy,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in a news release. “iPhone and iPad have become essential tools for the modern workforce and are changing the way work gets done. Together with Cisco, we believe we can give businesses the tools to maximize the potential of iOS and help employees become even more productive using the devices they already love.”

In short, as a means to address the growing demands on corporate infrastructure, Cisco networks and iOS devices will be optimized “so that they work together more efficiently and reliably with the goal of providing users with even greater performance.”

“Ninety-five percent of companies in the Fortune 500 count on Cisco Collaboration and Cisco networks to help their teams be more productive,” said Cisco Executive Chairman John Chambers. “Through this engineering and go-to-market partnership, we’re offering our joint customers the ability to seamlessly extend that awesome Cisco environment to their favorite iOS devices. Together, we’re going to help teams achieve higher levels of productivity and effectiveness.”

For now, the partners are talking a good game, but providing new additional details about the steps that will follow this week’s announcement.

The post Apple, Cisco Partner and Take Aim at iOS Enterprise Users appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

It’s the globally connected network of clouds Cisco is building with its partners — and an elite hand-picked ISV roster will “offer cloud services to help customers capture the multitude of opportunities created by the Internet of Everything (IoE),” according to the company.

In related news, Cisco also unveiled its latest hybrid cloud software innovations. They address new security capabilities, increased manageability across clouds, and support for additional hypervisors.

“By enabling flexible workload placement and consistent network and security policies across public and private cloud environments, Cisco Intercloud Fabric is taking the complexity out of hybrid cloud,” a provided statement reads. “By simplifying hybrid cloud, Cisco Intercloud Fabric is showing strong market momentum with more than 100 customers and 65 partners worldwide.”

The first wave of new Cisco Intercloud Marketplace application developers and service partners include: ActiveState, Apprenda, Basho, Chef, Citrix, CliQr, Cloud Enabled, CloudBerry Lab, Cloudera, Cloudify, CloudLink, Couchbase, CTERA, Datadog, Davra Networks, desktopsites, Druva, Egnyte, ElasticBox, F5 Networks, Hortonworks, Informatica, MapR, MongoDB, Moonwalk, Nirmata, Panzura, Pegasystems, Platfora, Sanovi, ScaleArc, Skytree, StoAmigo, Talisen Technologies, and Zenoss.

Cisco plans to open the Intercloud Marketplace in the fall of 2015.

The post Cisco Advances Intercloud Initiative Working with 35 ISVs appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The worldwide leader in information technology has asked Barcelona-based street-artist Zosen and his team of painters to put their graffiti-style talents to work as they create a lavish wall mural to portray the mobility elements and hot topics at MWC 2015.

There is also a story within the artistic story. A portion of the mural’s left side will be dedicated to portraying elements of Mobility IQ, a new Cisco Cloud SaaS that unlocks the power of visual-network knowledge.

Mobility IQ is a visual-metrics platform that is hosted on the Cisco cloud and will allow Cisco’s service provider customers to better understand how to optimize the network, monetize user behavior and make important business decisions.

For example, Mobility IQ can tell you when a customer is dwelling in a specific area of a store or venue and for how long. It can tell you which social media sites are used the most during a specific time frame and when network traffic is congested within the environment. All this information helps you make decisions to guide traffic, push offers, and much more.

Cisco says with the help of Mobility IQ, businesses can take individual data points that alone don’t add much value and piece them together into a complete picture, just like Zosen and his artist team are doing with the mural.

The artists will create the mural inside the Fira Gran Via exhibition center over the four days of MWC, the world’s largest annual gathering of top mobile and related-industry executives.

MWC participants can watch the progress until the final touches on the 25-by-4-meter mural are completed on the event’s final day.

The post Cisco and Street-Artist Zosen Team Up For Mural at Mobile World Congress 2015 appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

According to Cisco Systems’ freshly published Visual Networking Index report on global mobile data trends, mobile data consumption is ballooning at an unprecedented rate across the global landscape.

Mobile users the world over came close to doubling their mobile data consumption between 2012 and 2013 as average monthly usage peaked well over 1 GB in the U.S, and several other countries.

“North America led the pack with the average mobile subscriber consuming 1.38 GBs a month, up from 752 MBs in 2012 and a full gigabyte more than the average global usage of 356 MBs,” summarizes Kevin Fitchard of Gigaom. “When looking at individual countries, Japanese users led the world with 1.87 GBs, followed by the U.S. at 1.41 GBs and South Korea with 1.25 GBs.”

Not surprisingly, faster smartphones and faster mobile networks are fueling this mammoth momentum of mobile data consumption.

In 2013, the world saw 1.5 exabytes of data cross mobile networks on a monthly basis. Based on Cisco’s latest projections, that number will reach 15.9 exabytes per month by 2018.

The post Report: Americans Have Entered the 'Gigabyte Era' in Mobile appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The projected increase in mobile traffic is partly due to continued strong growth in the number of mobile Internet connections, such as personal devices and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections, which will exceed 10 billion by 2018 and be 1.4 times greater than the world’s population (the United Nations estimates 7.6 billion people by 2018).

Putting some of these gargantuan numbers into perspective, the Cisco VNI Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast’s annual run rate of 190 exabytes of mobile data traffic for 2018 is equivalent to:

• 190 times more than all Internet Protocol (IP) traffic, fixed and mobile, generated in 2000; or
• 42 trillion images (e.g., multimedia message service or Instagram)—15 daily images per person on earth for a year; or
• 4 trillion video clips (e.g., YouTube)—more than one daily video clip per person on earth for a year.

“The incremental amount of traffic being added to the mobile Internet just between 2017 and 2018 is 5.1 exabytes per month,” Cisco summarizes, “which is more than three times the estimated size of the entire mobile Internet in 2013 (1.5 exabytes per month).”

To learn more, check out the Cisco Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2013 to 2018.

The post Global Mobile Data Traffic Increasing at a Record Pace appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Cisco’s latest efforts come at a time when the modern workspace is scrambling to integrate tools at work with many of the tools that employees use at home. These pairings support mobility trends that enable people to access information and communicate from their device of choice in ways not possible just a short time ago.

To give organizations a “fast onramp” to secure communications, Cisco is pushing its new Cisco Expressway, an advanced gateway that maintains security without the need for device-level registration, accounts, and passwords.

This means that users, regardless of location, can “gain instant access to all of their collaboration tools — helping to make communications happen faster and more efficiently.”

As a key component of the Cisco Collaboration Edge Architecture, Cisco Expressway is optimized for real-time collaboration, and secures voice, instant messaging (IM) and video communications from Jabber and TelePresence endpoints with Transport Layer Security — the same technology that’s widely used to secure e-commerce transactions.

Amidst an array of other announcements today, Cisco also launched a set of capabilities that :blurs the line between the mobile world — which includes many of the devices end users prefer to use at home — and fixed/on-premise collaboration environments.”

Called Intelligent Proximity, this innovation allows users to link their personal mobile devices with on-premise products in the office to enhance the experience.

“The rise in mobility has opened up new ways in which teams, employees and customers are choosing to connect and collaborate with one another to get things done,” says Cisco executive Rowan Trollope. “The key to success in this new world is having open and accessible communications that cross experiences — whether it be in a physical office, face-to-face through a video call, in a voice call, or in a converged connection through Cisco Jabber. With these latest announcements, Cisco is providing customers with a sophisticated collaboration and communication experience that corporate IT expects, while also offering the same intuitiveness and simplicity found in easy-to-use software-based consumer communication tools.”

The post Cisco Envisions a More Mobile Modern Workspace appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Although terms of the deal weren’t made public, a whopper of an arrangement must have been secured, particularly in light of the fact that Belkin will now retain close to one-third of the total U.S. retail home and small business networking market.

“We’re very excited about this announcement,” says Chet Pipkin, CEO of Belkin. “Our two organizations share many core beliefs – we have similar beginnings and share a passion for meeting the real needs of our customers through the strengths of an entrepreneurial culture. Belkin’s ultimate goal is to be the global leader in the connected home and wireless networking space and this acquisition is an important step to realizing that vision.”

Belkin says it will maintain the Linksys brand and will offer support for Linksys products as part of this transaction.

Belkin and Cisco announced Thursday that they will “develop a strategic relationship on a variety of initiatives including retail distribution, strategic marketing and products for the service provider market.”

The post Cisco Exits Consumer Business Through Deal with Belkin appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The acquisition of NDS will complement and accelerate the delivery of Videoscape, Cisco’s comprehensive platform that enables service providers and media companies to deliver next-generation entertainment experiences.

Based in England, NDS presently has about 5,000 employees across five countries. NDS chairman, Abe Peled, will remain with the outfit and become a senior vice president and chief strategist for Cisco’s “video and collaboration group.”

“Cisco and NDS are helping drive the transition that will enable service providers and media companies to offer new revenue-generating video experiences,” Peled says. “NDS’s open software video platform and services are highly complementary to Cisco technology, and together we are uniquely positioned to enable service providers to deliver fresh and exciting multi-screen video services to their customers.”

John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, shares that excitement.

“Our strategy has always been driven by customer need and on capturing market transitions,” Chambers admits. “Our acquisition of NDS fits squarely into this strategy, enabling content and service providers to deliver new video solutions that leverage the cloud and drive new monetization opportunities and service differentiation.”

The post Cisco to Pay $5 Billion in Acquisition of NDS appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Within the five year period outlined, worldwide mobile data traffic will increase 18-fold, reaching 10.8 exabytes per month — or an annual run rate of 130 exabytes — by 2016, Cisco says.

The expected sharp increase in mobile traffic is due, in part, to a projected surge in the number of mobile Internet-connected devices, which will exceed the number of people on earth (2016 world population estimate of 7.3 billion; source: United Nations). During 2011-2016 Cisco anticipates that global mobile data traffic will outgrow global fixed data traffic by three times.

So just how much is an annual run rate of 130 exabytes of mobile data traffic? Here’s what that’s equivalent to:

• 33 billion DVDs.
• 4.3 quadrillion MP3 files (music/audio).
• 813 quadrillion short message service (SMS) text messages.

Among the leading trends to drive these significant increases are more streamed content, more mobile connections, enhanced computing of devices, faster mobile speeds, and more mobile video.

According to Cisco, mobile video will comprise 71 percent of all mobile data traffic by 2016.

The post Cisco Projects 18-Fold Growth Over 5 Years in Global Mobile Internet Data Traffic appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.