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Cisco Hosts Free Virtual Workshop For Developing Applications on the AXP

You are invited to attend the free and virtual Cisco Workshop For Developing Applications on the AXP

Please join Cisco’s TechWise TV host, Jimmy Ray Purser, and other Cisco experts, in the free virtual workshop as they discuss information for developing applications on the Cisco’s Application Extension Platform (AXP), Cisco’s new application development and hosting platform, and answer your questions in a live Q & A session. 

The virtual workshop is designed for application developers, network and IT solutions architects, and Cisco customers and partners interested in exploring application development and hosting solutions on the Cisco Integrated Services Router via Cisco AXP.

Event Details: Cisco Workshop For Developing Applications on the AXP

- Monday, February 2, 2009 at 8:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. PT

- No pre-registration is required.

- Click here to access the live Cisco Workshop For Developing Applications on the AXP, presented by Cisco TV.

- Submit your questions to Cisco experts in advance through the comment section on this Innovation blog post.

- If you cannot participate on February 2, a video on demand replay of the Cisco virtual workshop will be available on the Cisco Innovation blog after 5:00 p.m. on Friday, February 6, 2009

- If you can’t attend the workshop live and have questions, you may continue to interact with Cisco technical experts via this blog.

Thank you for participating and good luck!

Sincerely,

The Cisco Developer Team

Follow @CiscoGeeks on Twitter for “Think Inside the Box” Developer Contest updates and conversations.

Posted by Johanna Fry at 09:02AM

A walk in the clouds

Many publications listing the top technology trends in 2009 have cloud computing on their list. It’s not something new, but as buzzwords go, this one is gathering more momentum. The reasons aren’t hard to seek – services in the cloud are becoming more mature, and bandwidth is becoming ubiquitous and inexpensive. Google, IBM, Cisco, Sun, Microsoft Salesforce.com have all done their bit. Many fledgling startups have thrown their hat in the ring. Grid computing aficionados are adding cloud computing to their interests. The acronym industry is in fifth gear with SaaS, PaaS, ITaaS, NaaS and all the other “aaS”es, though I find some definitions to be confusing at times. Our resident ‘stir-the-pot’ blogger Doug Gourlay has chipped in with his thoughts and it seems that even some of the industry bigwigs agree to disagree on the definition.

The thing is, cloud services by whatever name are becoming popular, but they aren’t there yet, except in a few instances. And even it’s there 100% - ready – there will always be people, especially in branch offices, who’ll look for complementary offerings. Here are three reasons I think why:

• Trust – how much do you trust services in the cloud? And if you have the perception of security and trust, do you belong to an industry that mandates you NOT to trust? Regulations perhaps?
• Performance – When compared to the LAN, anything coming over a WAN link will have performance issues. Either because of the WAN link, or inspite of it
• Availability – Your cloud services may be available and always-on. But your access and connectivity to it may suffer, a corollary for the WAN link statement above. In that case, how survivable would your applications be?

I met up with my good friend Mike Wood, who’s the Director of Unified Communications and discussed a few of these ideas. He spent concentrated bursts late last year exploring business fundamentals of cloud computing, was brimming with new ideas, and as always, willing to share them.

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Posted by Shashi Kiran at 08:34PM

How can a retail store manager make business decisions driven by IT?

During the 2008 year-end post Christmas shutdown, as we checked out the Great Mall of the Bay Area, I wasn’t really expecting a lot of shoppers given the state of the economy. I was pleasantly surprised and a bit annoyed at finding the parking lots full, and having to circle the mall quite a few times before I could finally park, complimenting my quicker set of reflexes as another middle-aged man was trying to get the same spot from the opposite direction.

Walking in, I saw that most of the shops did have fairly lengthy lines, especially those that were offering huge discounts. On closer look, some of these long lines were at the returns counters, where customers were either exchanging gifts they’d received for the holiday season, or in some cases, returning them back.

Whether the lines are for purchasing products, or for returning them, the efficiency with which the store is able to service these people is what leads to customer satisfaction, and eventually customer loyalty. Nobody loves standing in long lines. So, given that customer satisfaction is inverserly proportional to lengthy lines, how do you use technology to “keep the lines moving”. That essentially forms the problem statement here. Barcode scanners, point of sale terminals, RFIDs,  loyalty cards - all these have helped in bringing technology to the retail environment to help keep lines moving quickly. What is the role of the network here, and how can embedded network-aware application help?

In this demonstration, Ed Collins, one of our Enterprise Architects explains how integrating the conceptual “Credit card floor limit” application into the network is one cool way of bringing the network and application convergence through Embedded Event Management API.. This was one of the demos we shared on tradeshow booths, much before we launched the Cisco ‘Think Inside the Box’ Developer contest, and needless to say, it resonated very well with our customers.

And do you know what’s cool?

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Posted by Shashi Kiran at 01:34PM

Linux Magazine - Top 20 companies to Watch award

What could be a better way to start the new year than with a brand new award? Check out this issue of Linux magazine, which names Cisco to the ‘Top 20 companies to watch in 2009’ award, debuting at #5. According to Linux magazine, they’ve chosen these companies (with a little help from their crystal ball) because “these firms have a high probability of helping their customers to save some funds in 2009. Chosen because they could help enterprises survive and even thrive..”. I thought that was beautifully put, almost John Chambers like.

Among other things, Linux magazine specifically mentions the work done by the Integrated Services Router and the Cisco ‘Think Inside the Box Developer’ contest. I thought that was pretty cool. This is certainly a new direction for Cisco, but it also builds upon a lot of efforts that different groups of people have put in the direction of adopting Linux, Open Source and collaboration in general.

Special thanks to the Linux magazine, their editorial team and a big shout-out to their readers from our side. We are excited…Go 2009!

Posted by Shashi Kiran at 11:45PM

Fax-over-IP, anyone?

The best of innovations are the ones that solve real-world problems.  If they can mask complexity in the process, they are doubly beneficial. From the simple paper clip to the complex Enterprise IT software, ease of use and applicability are key to adoption.

Take fax for instance. It is a vital piece of the Unified Communications strategy that is often overlooked. Traditional analog faxing has been around for ages, but it has its share of problems. It is difficult to enforce an audit trail, multiple incoming faxes means dealing with busy signals. What compounds this is the paper consumption, toner cartridges that are hard to re-cycle.

Enter fax-over-IP. For those of you who are looking for sample ideas that solve customer problems for the Cisco developer contest, or otherwise, I recommend a study of the elegant solution from SAGEM-Interstar. 

Recently, Teresa Newell (who is a product manager for Unified Communication solutions on the Cisco Integrated Services Router) and I got a chance to host “faxperts” John Nikolopoulos, SAGEM’s Director of Marketing and Matthew Miller, XMediusFAX product manager who were visiting us at the Cisco San Jose Campus from Montreal, Canada. Against the scenic background of another Cisco building (yeah, I know) I quizzed John on the business value of SAGEM’s solution and why despite being Number one in their industry they still found it beneficial to host the application on the Cisco ISR.

Not to be outdone, Teresa put her engineering hat on and probed Matthew on what developers need to consider while porting applications onto the Application Extension Platform. Mattew also shared some of their experiences in bringing applications onboard which may be useful to others.

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Posted by Shashi Kiran at 10:42PM

Cisco extends Phase-1 of the developer contest to February 27th, 2009

As I had indicted in one of my previous blogs, we decided to heed your requests and pull the trigger on the contest extension. Cisco is pleased to announce that it is extending the entry deadline for Phase-1 of the “Think Inside the Box” developer contest from the original date of January 12th, 2009 to Feb 27th, 2009. With the extension of the entry deadline for Phase-1, Cisco expects to announce the finalists towards the end of April, and to announce the winners of the contest in July 2009. Please note this will be the only extension for Phase-1of the contest. For the complete contest terms and conditions as amended, please go to the contest website and click on Terms and Conditions.
Registrants who already have submitted proposals can continue to submit multiple proposals during this timeframe with different ideas, including an updated submission of their original proposal if necessary. In addition, this opportunity will allow for more submissions from non-English speaking constituents who need to make language translation arrangements.

We are excited with the quality of proposals that are coming in and expect more of the same. So, let’s buckle up and have some fun!

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Posted by Shashi Kiran at 12:52PM

Interesting blogs from 2008, and a warm welcome to 2009!

First, a very happy New Year to all of you! I hope everybody got a chance to spend some well deserved time with your families and have some good ol’ holiday fun. As we bid goodbye to 2008 (phew!) and welcome 2009, presumably a harbinger of renewed hope.I wanted to thank all the tech enthusiasts, geeks, analysts and media personnel who have thus far covered the Cisco Developer contest and other innovations from the Cisco stable.

In particular I’d like to thank the bloggers who’ve helped with the social media outreach and stimulated discussions within their communities (see the Slashdot blog below). One of the purposes of this contest is to facilitate two-way interaction, and nothing personifies that better than some spicy blogging. These outreaches have certainly given us fresh perspective.

We were fortunate to get some great blog coverage so far, and I wanted to share a few originals we came across that were particulary interesting.

Five cool blogs (in no particular order):

#1) The VAR guy blogged that Cisco offers $100,000 bounty to Linux Application Developers. I thought the $100K bill that the VAR Guy put out was a pretty cool visual.

#2) Brian Proffitt’s blog on the Linux foundation site, captured the contest info. quite succinctly. Brian actually reached out to me and turned out this great blog after a short conversation. I was very impressed with the turnaround time and the grasp that Brian had on technology aspects. BTW, Brian also did another blog before he talked to me, based on The VAR guy’s blog and that was great stuff too.

#3) Dana Blankenhorn’s ZDnet blog had a provocative title, but covered our contest well in the body. I do think in this age of information overload, sensationalism in the right tone sells, and shows good marketing acumen.

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Posted by Shashi Kiran at 12:47PM

Medianets - where do you want your network to go today?

Last October, I presented a paper on Video-delivery networks at the MPLS 2008 conference. The audience reaction was quite positive and I enjoyed talking to a bunch of service providers, some other vendors and a few Enterprise customers on how they saw their networks and products evolving. Almost all of them saw video traffic as a major inflection point in their networks and were aligning their strategies to deal with it. Later, as we gathered for lunch, there was a healthy but spirited discussion mostly around video quality-of-experience, and which network architectures were best suited to deliver this.

Why so much interest? Simple. Video will be the dominant application on networks. Service Providers envision business video as a good source of revenue and are preparing differentiated offerings, but also understand that their netwowk need to carry consumer video. Enterprise customers recognize the bandwidth and storage demands video will impose and are preparing for it. Vendors obviously are building products, and working on common and proprietary standards to best position themselves in their customer networks. Clearly, there is traction. (The Cisco Visual Network Index projects video to be 90% of network traffic by 2012). And it isn’t just one type of video or for a specific end application. It also isn’t just delivering video over IP – it really is about delivering rich media content anywhere, anytime and to any device with personalization and a high degree of reliability. So, the multi-billion dollar question – Is your Network Media ready?

With video and rich-media applications becoming the dominant traffic in networks, last week, at C-scape, Cisco took the next step in this innovative evolution to announce “medianets”. This new class of technologies is designed to enable advanced communications, collaboration and entertainment experiences through video- and rich media-optimized service provider, business, and home networks.In one of my previous blogs, Zeus Kerravala, SVP, Yankee Group talks about cool ideas for the Cisco developer contest and makes a key point – the best ideas are where the network and application come together, with the application being able to tap the intelligence of the network, being able to address congestion issues etc. In other words, being “network-aware”. Medianets do all this, and more, by being media, endpoint and network-aware. They are largely based on open standards and created by adding new technologies and devices to converged IP architectures. Check out the Media Experience Engine. 

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Posted by Shashi Kiran at 01:52AM

Innovating In a Fragile Economy

Last weekend, on my marriage anniversary, I took my wife out to a fancy restaurant she cherishes. It usually requires reservations, and has a nice ambience with a quiet seating conducive for gentle conversation. Imagine our surprise when we found the restaurant had changed not just its menu, but also its business model and introduced a buffet section. Instead of a relaxed atmosphere, there was a sense of urgency. Menus were brought much quicker, food was served faster and the waiter came by a few times after a while to “check if we were doing allright”. We got the hint and left quickly. No, they weren’t being discourteous. It’s just their new business model demanded they service customers quickly and increase turnover to improve cashflow. With customers tightening wallets, they were just trying to survive. 

On the way back, we hit a mom-and-pop grocery store we frequent, which also had made a few changes. Previously with wide aisles, they now had a video rental in one corner, a take-out service in another and had sub-leased yet another corner of the store to a travel agent, who sat at a desk with a computer and phone booking air-travel and cruises. Sure the aisles got squeezed, but these guys were trying to increase revenue per customer.  It looked like a win-win with the grocery owner amortizing expenses, the travel agent having low-set up costs, and us, the customers getting “integrated services”. There is gloom in the financial services industry and the retail sector, but nimble business owners are offsetting the economic downturn by focusing on operational efficiency and productivity, through innovative out-of-the-box thinking.

This brought into mind a conversation I recently had with Zeus Kerravala, a Senior Vice President at the Yankee Group. I’ve known Zeus for a while and he’s usually at the epicenter of innovation. During a typical Network-related conversation he made some comments on innovation and the economy that I thought had a broader applicability across multiple businesses and had a common-sense approach. He postulated that in a down market economy, it is easy for an IT department to overly focus on cost savings, or even do nothing, but this posed a danger to the business falling apart. Simply put, I read his words that investing in innovation is important independent of whether the economy is looking up or down, so we can expect a return-on-investment. He said depending on the economy, such innovations could be driven from the IT departments or the business units. Zeus cited video collaboration through Cisco Telepresence as an example of a business unit driven innovation.

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Posted by Shashi Kiran at 10:21PM

Developer, Developer - where do you code from?

I wanted to share information on the countries we’re getting registrations from. Can I just be honest and confess I found a registration coming from a country I had never heard about? In fact, had to google the name to find out if it was really a country…any guesses on which country stumped me? Hint: It’s the one with the Wiki link>.

Check these out:
Angola, Argentina, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Canada, China, Columbia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Equador, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Italy, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Kuwait, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Netherlands, Nigeria, Oman, Peru, Phillipines, Portugal, Republic of Taiwan, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden,Thailand,Tunisia, Turkey, USA, UK, Vietnam, Venezuela.

We’ve heard of developed countries and developing countries. How about we introduce developer countries?

While a majority of the initial registrants were from the US of A, we’re seeing the bulk of registrants come from all over the world, both from English speaking countries and non-English speaking countries. It’s certainly taking a while for the non-English speaking world to become aware of the contest, and our friends out there are helping out by putting front-ends for countries like China, Japan and Korea etc. There is also a request from some of these countries to extend Phase-1 as it took a while for them to customize the contest to local languages and we’re seriously considering that. For now, we’re averaging a healthy 60-70 registrants per week, and the proposals are starting to come in the last few weeks with pretty cool ideas. We do expect the number of proposals to scale up as we near the end of Phase-1.

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Posted by Shashi Kiran at 11:54PM

Cisco AXP Virtual Blade - Really Virtual or Virtually Real?

In one of my previous blogs, I’d posted that we’re providing an AXP “Virtual blade” based on the VMware player. Frankly, this has been available on our developer website for sometime, we probably hadn’t publicized it enough - so I thought I’d help provide a pointer to that.

What is the AXP VMware Virtual blade? It’s a virtual development environment that emulates the Cisco Application Extension Platform, including the CLI, . It is portable, which means you can download it to your PC and it can simulate nearly everything that the actual AXP physical module does, including API calls to the router. Simply put, it is yet another way we’re trying to make life easier for people who want to develop applications on the Cisco Integrated Services Router.

Why is this important? We think it will help developers itching to get their hands on the AXP, the closest thing to the real deal. If you’re an organization with a number of developers who need access to the module, this is an easy way to scale. Also, you can do pretty interesting stuff with it like (a) try before you buy (b) you can code offline on a long aeroplane flight like my esteemed geek friend Jimmy Ray Purser does, or (c) while sitting at the beach (just tell your boss you’re telecommuting). Oh, and did I mention, that it is FREE? How cool is that?

I asked Anurag Gurtu, our router TME to put together a short Camtasia-based demo to tell you where you can download this from and provide some basic configuration tips. You’re probably going to say Anurag’s doing a bad job at lip syncing, but it is his earnest effort to get the demo to you guys before he took a flight to Johannesburg.

So, for all of you, who have registered for the Cisco Think Inside the Box Developer contest, and want to get your hands on the AXP, for now, this is as good as it gets. If you get shortlisted as a finalist with your proposal, you will of course get access to the Integrated Services Router, the AXP module and any other development environment that we can help put together to let you demonstrate a proof-of-concept of your application. 

And if you’ve more questions, drop a comment here, or on the Cisco AXP Developer resources site. Have you checked that out lately? 

Posted by Shashi Kiran at 03:21PM

Tweet! Tweet!

Or is it Twit, Twit?

Either way - Check out our new Twitter site that went live just before Thanksgiving.. hoooha!

What do you think of the name - “CiscoGeeks”? Codejockeys and other certified geeks most welcome!

Posted by Shashi Kiran at 12:52AM

Crossing the Chasm

As we navigate through the Developer contest, we’re often asked what is our target audience? Valid question, don’t you think? So, I thought it worthwhile to dedicate some blog space to it.  The primary audience for the Think Inside the Box contest are many and include the network application developers, the vertical domain application experts, the Linux and Open Source programmers, IT network engineers, University students as also our traditional VARs and ISVs. Certainly the playground is fairly broad.

However, some are perhaps at a natural advantage as they get the concept much more easily than others, possibly due to their background. For instance, ISVs who are exposed to Cisco routers and constantly deal with customers have a fundamental understanding of the problem space, and are probably in a better position to define a better solution to address it. University students and traditional application developers may be very good at what they do, but they may not have a true understanding of the branch problem statement and have to spend cycles to understand this. Our goal is to level the playing field. In that process, if we develop (no pun intended) a better relationship with the developer community and help them cross the chasm to understand the Network as a platform, we’ll give ourselves a pat on the back.

With that objective, we’re going to enrich this site and other related ones to bring additional focus to the traditional application developers, the Linux programmers etc., and expose them to the branch concepts, the Integrated Service router in general and the AXP platform in particular. We’re also going to make some of the developer tools available well in advance, including VMware based AXP virtual blades that will help contest entrants and the community at large to start getting their feet wet.

For this blog, I talked to Anurag Gurtu, our lead Technical Marketing Engineer to outline some of the basic concepts around the Cisco AXP and bring a developer’s perspective. Now, Anurag is a sharp guy. He went on to explain how application developers and Linux programmers can bring a sense of co-relation to actually developing some innovative ideas on the router. Enjoy!

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Posted by Shashi Kiran at 11:10PM

Do you have a life? How about a Second Life?

A few days ago, I was having lunch with Navid Rastegar - one of Cisco’s bright young hires. I was supposed to be his mentor. Ironically, he was the one educating me on why I should have a presence on Facebook and become active there. The world, he said, is moving towards Tweets, diggs and scraps. My response was to fall on the information overload argument and emphatically state that for now, my multiple e-mail accounts, my cell phone and instant messengers sufficed for me to be connected.  Aside from the hassle of maintaining a track of all the additional logins and passwords, I told him I wasn’t sure if it was a time sink, and I’d rather spend time frolicking with my 3-year old.

But even as I was talking to him, while trying not to be uncool,  I was reflecting on something I’d heard a few years ago - the Gen Y workforce is going to come in to the workplace with a language all their own. For them, this social media networking is not a chore, but a way of life. Companies that recognize this will tend to be flexible,and deliver more value to their partners and customers. Cisco is no exception.

As a company, Cisco has been slowly but surely adopting best practices in social media networking. I want to touch upon just one - Second Life. When Cisco initially launched a presence on Second Life in Dec 2006, it was a novelty. We had a few visitors, but it was mostly a lot of Cisco employees logging in to create their avatars and flying over the islands. Though it was loads of fun, I wasn’t sure if it’d really take off. But it did. Today, when we host a Second Life event, a few thousand people attend the live and archived events. The sessions are very interactive, and we find the community to be real fun. So, here’s more.

Attend a Cisco AXP Technical Session on Second Life:
We’re using Second Life to host a technical session on “Cisco Application Extension Platform - Your Open Developer Platform” with a couple of Cisco Experts, and SAGEM-Interstar. The Second Life event is on Nov 20th, 2008.

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Posted by Shashi Kiran at 09:58PM

A Question of IP

Not the Internet Protocol this time, but Intellectual Property…

With any contest soliciting ideas, questions pop-up on who owns the IP? We’re getting quite a few questions on who owns the IP for the ideas submitted to the Cisco ‘Think Inside the Box’ Developer contest. As you may already know, we’re conducting this contest in two Phases: Phase-1 involves submitting the concept on the proposal template provided by Cisco; Phase-2 involves the prototype proof-of-concept application development.
Let’s consider Phase-1 first. By submitting your proposal, you’re providing to Cisco a non-exclusive license to use the proposal template as described in the terms and conditions. Non-exclusive means, you as submitter of the idea continue to own the IP rights, but grant Cisco a broad license to the content of the proposal template. For specific license terms, please see the contest official rules.
In Phase-2, qualified finalists will have an opportunity to create a working prototype demonstrating proof-of-concept. Again, Cisco takes a non-exclusive license, but the license only covers a portion of the rights that apply to the Proposal Template. 

Since one of Cisco’s objectives in launching this contest is to seek innovative ideas and possibly productize the solution, Cisco also requires to have a first right of refusal for a period of 6 months after the end of the Contest Period. This means, if the participant wishes to sell, lease, license or otherwise transfer the idea, in whole or in part, to any third party, within 6 months after the contest ends, they need to approach Cisco for an offer first. If Cisco refuses, or doesn’t get back to them within 10 business days, then they’re free to move forward with the third party offer.

We realize contest rules and legalities can often seem couched in legal jargon that isn’t easily understood. But do give the contest terms and conditions a thorough read, as it overrides anything else that you may hear about the contest from anywhere, this blog included. If you continue to have questions, send them to us at “ask-devcontest@cisco.com”. Or blog back with your comments.

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Posted by Shashi Kiran at 10:29PM