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Through the Cloud and Back: A night with Chris Hadfield


April 30, 2014


Last month, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield joined Cisco and Allstream for an event celebrating innovation and collaboration. Why Chris Hadfield, you ask?  For us, it was simple – who better than the world’s most famous astronaut, a man who literally has used technology to communicate via video and social media from the furthest reaches possible to share why technology is such a powerful vehicle for collaboration. Plainly put, if Chris Hadfield can use video to collaborate with his colleagues, so can you. And the answer how, like Commander Hadfield, is in the sky.

Left to right: Cisco Canada's Mike Ansley, Cmdr Chris Hadfield and Allstream's Mike Stroble. Photo courtesy of Allstream.

Left to right: Cisco Canada’s Mike Ansley, Commander Chris Hadfield and Allstream’s Mike Stroble. Photo courtesy of Allstream.

Cloud computing is set to redefine how companies – specifically how CIOs – view technology. According to Gartner, by 2015 50% of CIOs expect to operate the majority of their applications and infrastructure via the cloud. Any stigma that was associated with the cloud has been left behind, and businesses are seeing the value in leveraging the resources of trusted partners. Why? Because cloud computing reduces the total cost of ownership considerably, makes applications easily scale to their specific needs, in real-time, and enables businesses to get an application or infrastructure up and running much faster than if it was managed as a private project.

The cloud makes technology more cost-effective, timely, scalable and easy to manage. So what is next for cloud computing? With Cisco’s recent Intercloud announcement and $1B dollar investment to support our partners, we are pushing harder than ever to consolidate our number one position as supplier of cloud hardware and software.  We are committed to our partners’ and customers’ success in this fast-changing landscape.

That brings me back to collaboration. Offering collaboration solutions through the cloud is relatively new, and we’re proud at Cisco to offer our Hosted Collaboration Solution to customers across Canada through our trusted partners.  In fact we’re investing in this program to make it successful, because we see the value in offering collaboration solutions this way.

Collaboration is the next step for cloud, and here’s why. The cloud offers different deployment choices for companies that want to host the solutions on-premises, off-site or somewhere in between. It also can deliver a single, ubiquitous experience across your end users, and it optimizes company resources to maximize flexibility and agility.

The way that we work is changing. In a world of LTE, mobile applications and smart devices, employees need to be able to unlock the potential of these to communicate with less cost, effort and time.  And that’s exactly what the Hosted Collaboration Solution from Cisco and our partners will do.This video explains just how easy we are making it for businesses to collaborate, in less time than ever before:

To explore what Cisco and our partners can do for you please visit our website or contact your Cisco account manager, or Partner Account Manager, for more information about our latest announcements.

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