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Google Cloud and a Chromebook might be your next contact center

The next time you call customer service, you may get an answer from a Chromebook.The Chromebook won’t answer your questions, but the human who does may be talking through Google’s connected laptop with a headset. And they may be doing so from home.The days of vast in-house contact centers may be numbered now that pure software and VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) can handle the same tasks dedicated systems used to do. One of the longtime vendors of call centers, Avaya, has started turning to cloud computing for some large enterprise deployments.Now, with an eye on smaller customers, the company is hosting its contact-center software on Google Cloud and letting companies send out Chromebooks to agents who will talk and text with customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DockerCon 2015 CFP Extended

Thank you to all who have submitted a session for DockerCon so far. We are very excited by the nearly 342 fantastic submissions we’ve received. After our initial call for papers closed on Monday, we received an overwhelming response and … Continued

Choosing a Route: Order of Operations

In Cisco IOS packets are forwarded through the router (or Layer 3 switch) by Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF). A data structure called the CEF table contains a list of known IP prefixes and the outgoing interface that packets should be put on in order to get them onwards to their destination. That's well and good. But how do the IP prefixes make it into the CEF table? To answer that question you have to work backwards and understand the order of operations that IOS goes through in order for a prefix to make it into the CEF table.

Premera Blue Cross says data breach may affect 11 million customers

As many as 11 million customers may have been affected by a data breach at U.S. health insurance provider Premera Blue Cross, in the second large attack against the health care industry disclosed in the last two months.The breach, discovered on Jan. 29, may have compromised customer names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, mailing and email addresses, phone numbers and bank account details, as well as claims and clinical information, Premera said on its website.It hadn’t determined yet if that sensitive information was actually removed from its systems, and it said there’s “no evidence to date that such data has been used inappropriately.” The FBI has been notified, it said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ellison swings at Salesforce as Oracle’s growth sputters

Oracle expects to generate more than $1 billion in new SaaS and PaaS business in 2015, putting it toe-to-toe in the cloud market with Salesforce.com, Oracle’s top executives said Tuesday.“It’s going to be close, but you won’t have to wait very long to find out who’s going to win this,” Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison told financial analysts during the company’s quarterly earnings call.Oracle’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) revenue grew by 30 percent to $372 million in the quarter ended Feb. 28, the third of Oracle’s fiscal year. Adjusting for strong currency fluctuations, the growth would have been 34 percent, Oracle said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EVPN Configuration

In my last blog I explained the features and use cases of the EVPN technology. In this blog I want to show how easy it is to configure, enable and expand EVPN. The configuration is focused on the Juniper MX platform, but as Junos is the single operating system across the entire Juniper portfolio, configuration on other platforms (like EX9200) is equal.

Design

The topology is really simple. I’m using 2 routers in this example, so multi-homing is not in scope. Each router has an Ethernet segment connected that consists of multiple VLANs on each side. There is 1 VLAN ID that is not equal on both sides, so this has to be taken care of.

Prepare for EVPN

To make sure we can start creating our VPN, we have to ensure the foundation is in place. This means we need IP reachability to the other Data Center routers loopback address and we need BGP with the EVPN address family enabled. The Junos release I’m testing with needs a special knob to be enabled to ensure packet lookups are done in the right way. Other versions will see this knob disappear as it is default moving forward.

routing-options {
    autonomous-system 64999;
    forwarding-table {
         Continue reading

Facebook brings payments to Messenger app

Users of Facebook’s Messenger app will soon be able to do more than just chat with friends and send them emoticons. They’ll also be able to send money.Facebook is adding a payments feature to its popular Messenger app, letting users link their debit card and send each other payments within the app. The tool is designed to be as easy as sending messages, with a “$” icon that will appear in the app. By tapping it, users can send money to the friend they’re chatting with. Recipients of the money will have to link their debit card to accept the funds.The free feature will be rolling out over the coming months in the U.S. to Messenger on Android, iOS and the desktop. Facebook made no mention of Windows.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook brings payments to Messenger app

Does Juniper have too many SDNs?

After last week’s Innovation Day announcements, Juniper Networks has a range of SDN, data center fabric and data center switching products to choose from.Does it have too many? The addition of the new QFX10000 spine switch and Junos Fusion fabric may mean some product rationalization is in the works.“There is some level of complexity in product positioning,” acknowledges Juniper CEO Rami Rahim. “But if customers decide to move from one fabric or SDN to another we provide the flexibility to move with investment protection. Customers care about the attributes of the product itself. That drives their decisions more than anything else.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Does Juniper have too many SDNs?

Red Hat formulates a plan for building enterprise mobile apps

Red Hat understands that developing a mobile application is not the same as building one for the desktop, which is why the company has augmented its software stack with new technologies for mobile development.“The whole Web architecture is giving way to an emerging mobile architecture,” said Cathal McGloin, Red Hat vice president of mobile platforms.Like IBM and Oracle, Red Hat has been working to extend its enterprise software portfolio so it can support mobile applications as well, particularly those that its customers develop in house.The company said Tuesday that it has completed integrating into its own software portfolio the mobile platform it acquired when it purchased FeedHenry last October. It has outlined how enterprises could use these technologies to build mobile applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Red Hat formulates a plan for building enterprise mobile apps

Nvidia unveils $10,000 autonomous driving computer

As thousands of dashcam videos on YouTube vividly demonstrate, drivers see the craziest things. Be it an angry bear, a low-flying aircraft or even a guy riding a shopping cart on the freeway, the videos make for entertaining viewing but also illustrate a problem facing developers of self-driving cars: how can you program a computer to make sense of all this?On Tuesday, chip maker Nvidia introduced a $10,000 computer that it says will allow cars to learn the right and wrong reactions to different situations, essentially figuring out what to do from experience rather than a rigid set of pre-defined situations.“Driving is not about detecting, driving is a learned behavior,” said Jen Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, during a presentation at the company’s GTC 2015 conference in San Jose.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Announces Version 3 of the CCIE Wireless Blueprint

The wait is finally over and version 3 of the wireless CCIE blueprint has finally been announced. On September 14, the new version of the written and lab exams will go live. This will bring a very long-in-the-tooth version 2 blueprint to an end after a nearly 4-year run. While we tearfully say goodbye to WCS, let’s take a look at what version 3 is bringing to the table.

New Lab Exam Format

First off, let’s look at what has changed in the format of the lab itself. The wireless track is following suit with the R&S and SP tracks and including multiple sections to the lab. The wireless lab will now begin with a 1 hour Diagnostic section, followed by a 7 hour Configuration section.

The Diagnostic section is similar to what was done in R&S and SP. This section tests your ability to assess and diagnose issues in a network without any access to the devices themselves. Basically, you are given access to a number of pieces of information (emails, topology diagrams, logs, etc) that describe an issue and give the needed information to figure out the root cause. You Continue reading

CCIE Data Center Rack Rental Scheduling Changes

In an effort to make our CCIE Data Center Rack Rentals have a better fair scheduler, we’ve implemented a new QoS policy for them as follows:

Users can have a maximum of 3 concurrent sessions scheduled
Sessions can be a maximum of 9 hours apiece
Maximum hours per month limit is now removed
Base sessions (Nexus 7K/5K) and add-ons (UCS/SAN & Nexus 2K/SAN) are now 8 tokens per hour

Note that these changes will only affect new session bookings, not any sessions that you already have reserved.

For those of you looking for more dedicated rack time I would suggest to look into our CCIE Data Center Bootcamp, where students get 12 days of 24/7 access to all hardware platforms in our racks (Nexus 7K/5K/2K, MDS, & UCS).

Happy Labbing!

Twitter adds tool to report tweets to the police

Twitter has added a tool to help users report abusive content to law enforcement, which could aid in removing the most threatening posts as Twitter ramps up its efforts to combat harassment.The tool has been incorporated into the existing process for flagging abusive content or tweets. After reporting abusive or threatening content to Twitter, users have an option to receive an emailed summary of the report. The report would include the flagged tweet and its URL, the time at which it was sent, and the user name and account URL of the person who posted it.The report, aimed at law enforcement, would also include a link to Twitter’s guidelines on how authorities can request non-public user account information from Twitter. The idea is that after seeing a report, law enforcement might feel compelled to take further action.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM Exec: ‘Perfect Storm’ Poised to Transform Networking

How IoT could change network management.

First Docker Maintainers Summit

It doesn’t take much during an extremely cold and snowy February to entice key Docker contributors and maintainers to get on a plane and spend a few days together at Docker HQ in (sometimes) sunny San Francisco. That’s what happened … Continued

5G faces technical, political hurdles on the way to offering multigigabit speeds

For 5G to be successful, the whole telecom industry has to re-evaluate how networks work and are developed. Multiple challenges, both political and technical, have to be overcome before the technology can become a reality.“Availability of spectrum is obviously a big thing,” said Gerhard Fettweis, who heads a Vodafone-sponsored program at the Dresden University of Technology.The amount of spectrum allocated to 5G will determine how fast networks based on the technology will eventually become. If they are to reach multiple gigabits per second, which proponents are already promising, operators are going to need a lot more bandwidth than they have today. A first step in securing that will hopefully be taken at the World Radiocommunication Conference in Geneva in November, according to Fettweis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Carrier SDN Efforts Require New Service Orchestration

Decades-old telco software is due for an SDN-driven makeover.

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