Feb 2009 Newsletter

Save to Invest

In today's business environment, focusing on saving costs is a logical strategy. When you free up funds, you can invest in areas that bring competitive advantage to your industry and market. Here are just a few ways to save:

• Conduct in-person meetings without traveling.
• Reduce real estate and energy costs by creating a remote and connected workforce.
• Preserve human and capital resources by using managed services.
• Consolidate and centralize IT infrastructure and resources.

Collaboration and virtualization are technologies that can help your organization succeed. With the savings you realize, you can make calculated investments that help.

New Sources of Productivity
Collaboration With an inclusive culture that encourages collaborative decision making and extends to customers and partners, a business can more effectively harness the efforts of talented people to solve problems and create customer value. For example, Cisco transitioned from a “command and control” decision-making approach to a model in which boards and councils make decisions. As a result, the company is able to focus on 26 corporate-wide priorities instead of three to five, as in the past.

• Presence: Cisco Unified Presence is a standards-based platform that collects information from multiple sources about user availability and communications capabilities to provide rich presence status and facilitate presence-enabled communications with Cisco Unified Communications and other critical business applications. This scalable and easy-to-manage solution can help you:
  • Increase productivity: Connect with colleagues on the first try by knowing their availability in advance on either Cisco Unified Personal Communicator and Cisco Unified IP Phone or MOC.
  • Enhance collaboration: Share availability information and instant messages with coworkers within your business or between businesses with Cisco Unified Personal Communicator.
  • Streamline communications: View telephony status of coworkers from Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, IBM Lotus Sametime, or Microsoft Office Communicator, and simply click to call them through Cisco Unified Communications Manager.
• Video: On the Internet, video has significantly enhanced people's abilities to create community, publish content, and create new business models. It has delivered the same benefits within Cisco, where it is actively used for product demonstrations, sharing expertise, and publishing. Video is also a powerful business collaboration technology. Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx Connect are rich examples of how video has become an essential tool that supports collaboration inside the organization and across business boundaries to include supply chain partners and customers.

New Sources of Productivity
Virtualization Virtualization enables resources – such as information, workspaces, and expertise – to be shared and dynamically delivered to applications and individuals on demand. Many businesses have already virtualized selected resources, such as in call centers and outsourced human resources services. The next wave of virtualization is occurring with:

• Data centers: Virtualization technologies are helping many businesses, including Cisco, dramatically improve storage utilization, service delivery, resource efficiency, and space utilization. Cisco virtualization solutions such as Cisco Nexus™, Cisco VFrame Data Center, and Cisco Data Center Manager solutions are enabling simplified, end-to-end coordinated provisioning of physical and virtualized servers, storage, and network-based resources while helping managers monitor and control energy use far more precisely than was previously possible.
• IT-as-a-Service solutions: Many businesses are also adopting IT as a Service (ITaaS) to simplify management of globalised resources and cost-effectively meet the needs of empowered users. Cisco WebEx applications are one example of using ITaaS to virtualize collaboration capabilities. ITaaS can help businesses achieve their goals without the high costs and infrastructure requirements associated with delivering these kinds of services themselves.
• Resources: Expertise and other scarce resources can be made accessible from anywhere to support, add value, and differentiate your company everywhere you touch customers, partners, or suppliers.

Would You Like Additional Information?
To learn more on how your business can save to invest, please contact your local Nexus Account Manager or email us at connect@nexusis.com.