Cisco's Single Vendor Vision Failure?

One of the clear themes at last week's Cisco Live conference was that Cisco really wants us all to buy a single vendor solution and it won't be any surprise that the vendor they are recommending is themselves. The basic premise is that by buying Cisco you get an integrated solution that saves you time and money both up front when you're implementing and along the way as you maintain and upgrade your infrastructure. It's not a bad story, but to be true Cisco would need to have a more coherent and well integrated set of product offerings than they currently do.

Anyone who has worked with Cisco devices knows that there are variations between product lines when it comes to management and configuration. As an example ASA firewalls don't support "show users" which is a common command to see who else is logged on to a device. There are many other examples that are unrelated to the functionality differences that exist between different types of devices.

Dealing with Cisco is like dealing with a ten thousand headed monster where most of the heads would prefer not to talk to each other and communicate instead through product announcements.

Another example is setting up different product lines to work with Cisco's ACS. ACS is a proprietary Cisco offering that provides authentication and authorization services. You would think that the configuration syntax and behavior would be more or less identical across all of Cisco's products. You would be wrong. There are subtle and sometimes not so subtle differences that can cause deployment delays, confusion and frustration.

I've been on the receiving end of HP's pitch to buy into their access layer switches and it's fairly compelling. HP's switches are less expensive, more capable and from a command line perspective look more like IOS than the command line of some of Cisco's products. I've also been on the receiving end of some horrific and expensive HP support so as compelling as HP's pitch was I personally wasn't ready to jump ship.

If Cisco wants to sell their integrated vision  they need to get their act together internally and start offering products that look like they are close relatives rather than distant cousins. They did this right a decade or so back when they came out with IOS for switches but have frequently failed since.

To be clear, I'm not claiming that IOS should be the language spoken by all Cisco devices. IOS offers an antiquated high cost interface to device management. Ideally though if you are going to make an effort to make an IOS like interface available you should do a better job on the implementation side by duplicating what has come before.

Really though Cisco needs to implement a management API that simplifies the task of configuration and make that API consistent across their entire line. Writing and debugging scripts that enumerate interfaces and do "for each" loops with logic to standardize interface configs should as much as possible be a thing of the past. Command line interfaces are nice, particularly for those of us who have been in the business for awhile but they should not be the primary means of management. Just to be sure I'm being clear here, Web browser GUI's that talk to a single logical device aren't the answer either.

Cisco also needs to streamline their product catalog and make sure that what remains is a line up that looks like it was designed from the get go to integrate quickly and easily if they want to argue with a straight face that they can lower companies Total Cost of Ownership.

Image by stars6 / Leonardo Rizzi via Flickr

Related Articles:Publish Post

• Cisco Cius (emkey1.blogspot.com)
• Why Is Cisco In Trouble? (emkey1.blogspot.com)
• Practical Analysis: IT Pros Don't See Cisco's Claimed TCO Advantage (informationweek.com)

Empire Avenue (Social Influence Scoring)

This is the third of what will likely be a four part series discussing Empire Avenue. Empire Avenue is one part game, one part social network and one part social network influence ranking. I'm still going back and forth as to whether this is a brilliant or misguided approach. This time out I'm going to talk a bit about the social network influence ranking portion.

My big issue with the other two sites that I'm familiar with that measure social network influence is that they combine the activity from multiple different sites into one composite score. This seems wrong to me and I made a post on Quora that elicited a response from Eva Schiffer that agreed with my basic premise so apparently I'm not totally off base in this belief.

Empire Avenue does not take this approach. The score each social network individually. You can see this at my public Empire Avenue page. Here's what you'll see as of today for the four sites Empire Avenue tracks.

• 
  3 Out of 100
• 
  15 Out of 100
• 
  1 Out of 100
• 
  1 Out of 100

Clearly I have a lot of room for growth, particularly on Flikr and YouTube. Actually I'm not sure I agree with the Flikr score. I've been posting images fairly regularly for a month now and have had a few views and contacts along the way. Based on that I'd expect to see at least a three or a four.

I don't have any issues with the other scores. I'm modestly active on Facebook and use it as a means to keep in touch with what is going on with my near to mid tier social network. It have zero interest in opening it up to a wider audience. I use Twitter and./or one of my BLOG's if I want to share with a wider audience.

Empire Avenue does provide some more detailed stats tools that give a slightly better idea of how you're doing. For instance on Twitter I have a quality score of two out of five and an audience score of 1.5 out of five. It's not entirely clear to me how I raise my quality score but the audience score is reasonably self explanatory.

By breaking things down Empire Avenue provides much better visibility into what is and isn't working when you're trying to assess how you're doing while trying to build your social network influence. Based on anecdotal and personal experience though don't expect this feedback to be instant. It takes a week or so for an initial number to be established and after that changes come slowly. If you're trying something new be patient and don't just count on your Empire Avenue scoring. Each of these sites offers mechanisms that will give you much quicker feedback on how things are going like "Follows" and "Contact" adds. Empire Avenue does provide some external confirmation though as well as a place you can point people to in order to validate how you're doing.

Having said all that, there are some problems with the way Empire Avenue does their scoring. Broadly speaking there are two ways you can use a social network. The one I'm most interested in is to aid in engagement; high quality interactions that teach me something and give me an opportunity to get to know people. The second and much more common way that social networks are used is to create low engagement and high volume conduits to an audience that may or may not be listening. Sharon Hayes recently completed a ten week experimental engagement on Empire Avenue and made some very good points in an article she posted yesterday after disengaging. I highly recommend it.

So far as I can tell this rewarding of high volume/low touch engagement is pretty much par for the course. Hopefully we'll see continued refinement in the methodologies being used by Empire Avenue and other social network influence measuring sites.

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles:

• Empire Avenue (Social Networking) (emkey1.blogspot.com)
• Empire Avenue (The Game) (emkey1.blogspot.com)
• Empire Avenue Enables "Vacation Mode" (thetechscoop.net)

Cisco Cius

The Cisco Cius (See Us) is Cisco's first foray into the world of Tablets. It's an Android based device with a seven inch screen that features 1024x600 resolution and the capability to play back and encode 720p high definition video though strictly speaking 720p display would require the capability to display 720 horizontal lines and the Cius only does 600. Given the size of the screen though this isn't really an issue.

Cisco has been careful to position the Cius as a business specific tablet. This is reflected in both the suite of software that comes preinstalled on the and the price tag which is in the $750 range for a unit that is WiFi only with 32 gig of storage. That's very steep when compared to the current generation iPad but if Cisco is successful in their efforts to position the Cius they'll be able to charge a premium over Apple. Apple has had some success in the enterprise but that is much more a measure of how popular Apple products are than it is a reflection of any desire on Apples part to sell to the Enterprise.

I'm of two minds on the Cius. On tthe one hand it's a clever enough idea and the software integration is attractive even if much of it is available for free. The Cius is optimized to be the center piece of a portable office. You can be authenticated to your work network, sending and receiving texts, initiating and answering both voice and video calls and using custom applications all from anywhere in the world that supports a decent level of connectivity. This use case very much fits in with Cisco's "Borderless Networks" campaign which I plan on talking about in more detail at some point in the future.

But will businesses buy into this vision? Cisco certainly hopes so as they've staked a lot of their future prospects on the larger vision that the Cius fits into.

I'll go on records as saying that I think their vision is credible, but I'm not convinced they have what it takes to carry it out. I've run into a lot of Q/A related problems in Cisco products over the past couple of years and that doesn't give me a good feeling. Too often they seem to use their customers and TAC engineers to discover very obvious bugs in their products and find work arounds. This does not inspire confidence in their ability to execute on the highly complex and integrated vision they are trying to sell right now. They did announce at Cisco Live 2011 that they are in the process of reorganization their software efforts under one umbrella which is a very good move that should help move things in a positive direction if executed well.

One minor nit on the Cius. The ones I've seen only say Cisco. They  need to include the "Cius" name prominently. It's a clever name that does a good job of establishing a new kind of device and brand. Cisco isn't doing a bad job of marketing it otherwise but it's a fairly unremarkable looking and without the Cius name it's hard to be sure what you're looking at when you first see it.

I found my interest/excitement over the product tempered by the fact that I wasn't sure I'd found one when I stopped by the Cisco collaboration booth at Cisco Live 2011. Cius isn't just a product, it's a brand. Cisco needs to do a better job of getting the name out there and putting it on the front of the actual units would be an excellent way of doing that.

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles:

• Cisco Live 2011 Day One (Collaboration, Mega Trends) (emkey1.blogspot.com)
• The Cisco Cius Enterprise Tablet Hitting Verizon Later This Summer (techcrunch.com)
• AT&T To Sell The Cisco Cius (techcrunch.com)

Twitter/Things I've Learned/Rant

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

I've been using Twitter for just over a year now. twitter is generally referred to as a micro blogging site. For a long time I didn't understand the appeal. then I finally figured out that it's kind of like a RSS feed. Don't worry if you don't know what an RSS feed is. Suffice it to say twitter bears an uncanny resemblance if you squint your eyes and turn your head sideways. Once that light bulb came on I was ready to sign up and did so in June of 2010. I have some followers but I mostly use it as a place to keep track of what companies and people I'm interested in are up to.

I've learned the following things over the past year plus.

1. You can respond to somebody else's tweets by putting an @ in front of their twitter handle. Do this at the beginning of the line. For instance, 
• @emkey1tweets Your pointless ramblings burn my eyes.
2. You can reference somebody else by putting a # in front of their twitter handle. For instance, 
• I think #emkey1tweets is an ignorant slug
3. Some people "follow" others with the expectation that they will be followed back and unfollow soon after when that doesn't happen. In fact, sometimes they unfollow even if you do follow them.

Item number three really annoys me. I at least skim every single tweet that comes across my feeds. For this reason I'm VERY selective about who I follow. I have zero interest in following somebody who followed me just to get a follow back.

I do at least take a look at the profile of anyone who follows me and read a few of their tweets. If those tweets sound interesting and the volume is reasonable and I'm not feeling too over subscribed I might follow them. Quality over quantity is key for me. If the quality drops I'll unfollow and I'd expect others to do the same to me if the tables were turned.

Another thing I've learned is that the odds that anyone who would resort to mass follows to try to get follow backs will be worth following are almost nil.

On the flip side of the coin, two people I've been following for awhile who have very respectable numbers of followers and a high sound to noise ratio are

Semil Shah and
John Refford

Both provide interesting and provocative commentary along with timely links to interesting articles. That is the right way to build a following.

If you happen to follow me on Twitter and I don't follow back please don't feel insulted. I say with complete honesty that it isn't you, it's me. If I follow you I want to be sure I can follow you, not just skip over everything you write because I don't have the time to actually read any of it.

Related Articles

• Why micro-blog? Why Twitter? (danielbeylerian.wordpress.com)

I Can't Deny That Klout Like's Me Right Now

Image via Wikipedia

I've been following a lot of different threads in the social networking space. One of those is social network influence ranking sites such as Peer Index and Klout. I've generally been less than enthusiastic about them and to be honest that hasn't changed. I still don't think that a composite score can be valid when comparing two or more people. Those scores are all fruit, but no two people represent the same fruit for reasons I've discussed before.

Having said that, I do think they are useful as a measure of personal progress if you're trying to increase your social networking presence. Since this is something I've been working on for the past few months I'm finding Klout increasingly useful. It updates in a reasonably timely manner which puts them well ahead of PeerIndex, at least in my experience. Most of my PeerIndex profile never updates and a week after opening a trouble ticket with them I still haven't gotten any response. This is not good.

My current Klout score is 25 out of a possible 100. Klout has something called "Klout Styles". I wasn't very happy/impressed with how I was classified a month or so back when I last wrote on this topic. At that point Klout had me pegged as an "Observer". The description of this style implied that I spent most of my time watching and very little participating.  As an active participant in online forums for more years than I'm willing to admit that didn't make a lot of sense to me though the likely root cause was the limited view Klout took of social media. For instance, this BLOG wasn't and isn't included in their tracking. They focus very heavily on Twitter and Facebook with LinkedIn and foursquare being a more recent additions.

I'm now classified as an "Explorer" which is a lot better for my ego and closer to the truth as well. The description text for "Explorer" is as follows:

You actively engage in the social web, constantly trying out new ways to interact and network. You're exploring the ecosystem and making it work for you. Your level of activity and engagement shows that you "get it", we predict you'll be moving up.

I have been working hard recently to up my profile in a positive way on the outlets that Klout cares about the most so some of my improvement may be due to my own proactive actions. They've also made at least a  couple of tweaks to their algorithms over the past month or so based on the recalculations I've seen in my score history.

One of the things I continue to wonder about is how Klout plans on monetizing their service. One possibility would be to make component scores for the individual social networks they track available on a subscription basis. That information would be potentially interesting to companies that want to get a better grasp on how to utilize their limited resources in reaching out to customers. It may sound cynical/wrong, but knowing who has the most influence is an important consideration when making these decisions.

What we're really seeing emerge here is an influence economy. That frightens me a little, but it doesn't have to be all bad and in reality we've always had one. The only real difference is that in the future it will be clearer who has the influence and if you want to look closely how they got it.

Related Articles:

• Klout & PeerIndex (Social Network Influence) (emkey1.blogspot.com)
• Klout Now Factors in Foursquare Checkins (mashable.com)
• LinkedIn Users: You've Got Klout (mashable.com)

Why Google+ Circles Encourage More Sharing (Short Take)

It's been interesting to hear some Facebook supporters defend Facebook by slamming Circles, insisting that they discourage sharing and are thus a bad thing. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, Facebook has their own implementation of this concept even if they have buried it increasingly deep in their UI over time. More apropos though is the concept that Teresa Zazenski came up with as part of an online conversation in the comments section of the post linked to her name. She pointed out that people may in fact be MORE likely to share if they have Circles. The reasoning is that most of us self censor if we have something to share that isn't apropos to our entire group of "friends". Circles give us the ability to target our message appropriately and thus increases the chance we will do so. She made some other excellent points that I won't share here so check out the link.

Facebook supporters need to find a better approach to criticizing G+ than Circles. The Circles concept is easy enough to defend and so far all of the criticisms I've heard have been weak while the arguments in favor have gotten increasingly strong.

These kinds of online dialogs are one of the reasons the Internet is very cool. Similar types of conversations have been happening for centuries but two hundred years ago they would have happened by way of journals and private letters and taken months or even years to run their course.

This sort of rapid sharing and dialog is one example of why the pace of change continues to accelerate.

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles:

• G+/Facebook/Circles/Lists (emkey1.blogspot.com)
• Can Facebook and G+ Coexist? (emkey1.blogspot.com)
• Why Google Plus Might Be Better Than Facebook (ken_ashford.typepad.com)
• Why Google+ Is Not a Minus for Facebook (fool.com)

Pete Rose/Cisco Live 2011

Image via Wikipedia

It's starting to look like Pete Rose's day job is hanging around outside one of the shops in the mall that is part of the Mandalay Bay Casino in Vegas from noon until five PM. He's been there two of the three days I've been in town. This is not the way you would expect a seventy year old sports legend to be spending his twilight years. On the plus side I did see a queue of about five people waiting for him at one point today so he still has some fans. It seems kind of dangerous for a guy with an apparent gambling addition to be hanging out in Las Vegas though. It's kind of like a pyromaniac choosing to live next door to a fireworks factory.

The Cisco Live conference has been fun and in case my boss is reading this, educational as well. Cisco Live isn't "all Cisco, all the time" but it's close. Partners also make an appearance and based on my experience it's not a bad place to come if you're looking for some insight into what is coming in the world of technology in general and networking in particular.

I'll no doubt be using this conference as BLOG fodder for the next several weeks but here are some random observations I wanted to share today.

Cisco has been accused of losing sight of their core focus in recent years. Their stock price has been in the doldrums for a decade and significant growth has been elusive. I've written before about their acquisition culture and how it didn't seem to be working anymore. I'm seeing signs that both the lack of focus and the failure to leverage acquisitions effectively may be a thing of the past. It's too early to tell if their new focus is a winning one, but they clearly have one. What is it you may ask?  Video, collaboration, the social revolution and delivering the technologies needed to make those things reliable, affordable and cool.

Where Cisco went wrong in the past was going down market. Their acquisitions of Flip and Linksys took them directly into the consumer space where competition is fierce, margins are low and entire product categories can be born, live out their lives and die in a handful of years. That isn't the world Cisco came from and it shouldn't have been their focus. I think they've figured that out.

The Cius, Cisco's debut tablet is either the ultimate proof of their revival or another wrong step. It's priced much higher than the iPad and from a hardware perspective it isn't especially impressive. At first I thought it was a total misfire but based on the story Cisco's telling I'm not so sure now. It is firmly aimed at the enterprise and Cisco has included an impressive suite of collaboration tools. It's a phone, it's a video conferencing solution, it's a note pad, it's just about anything you want it to be if you're a business since it purports to be highly secure and amiable to custom application development.  I'm sure I'll write more about this in the future. With a bit of luck I might be able to get my hands on one for a few minutes in the next couple of days.

Related Articles:

• Cisco Live 2011 Day One (Collaboration, Mega Trends) (emkey1.blogspot.com)
• John Chambers at Cisco Live 2011: Cisco Will Drive the Future of Networking (blogs.cisco.com)