Over the last several months, since Cisco announced its Open Network Environment strategy, there has been considerable progress on multiple fronts:

-Early field trials (EFTs) with several Enterprise and Service Provider customers

-Proof-of-concepts (PoCs) and customer feedback providing more insight into use-cases and product evolution

-Several acquisitions have been announced that complement the strategy we outlined

-Our engagement and leadership in all the standards bodies around various aspects of open networking continue to grow

During all of these activities and customer interactions, what stood out was the considerable appetite amongst customers and others to learn about these emerging concepts in a more structured way. They expressed a strong desire to break through some of the hype cycle that has pervaded the industry around some of these topics, causing some degree of confusion. They also asked Cisco to present information in an easily consumable manner.

Given the breadth of our portfolio and the diversity of our customer base,  this was a bit of challenge for us.  A lot of this information was  disbursed across different landing pages, blog sites etc.  So we had to take a fresh approach to accede to this request.

Based on efforts over the last several weeks, the team has built two foundational portals that serve the purpose of both information aggregation as well as hopefully a watering hole for knowledge seekers -

The Cisco ONE Knowledge portal:This is a centralized aggregated information repository of all the content that we are generating around the topic of open networking across the portfolio, whether it is more formal and structured, or more informal and social. The information here is organized in a more structured way, based ontypeof content and thechronology.

Check this out at www.cisco.com/go/one and click on the "Knowledge Portal" tab.

What you will see is some quality content manifest itself over time, as we bring the consolidated efforts from various Cisco thought leaders, customers, analysts etc. and assets including more demos, deployment use-cases, case-studies etc. We are also initiating a series of webcasts on this topic to do a deeper dive on technology topics with roughly a 4-6 week cadence, with Cisco CTOs across various technology groups mostly leading the sessions.  The intent is to Educate in a more structured manner. For example, we're kicking off the first of these Cisco ONE webinars with "An Introduction to OpenStack". (If you have not registered for the webcast yet, please do so).

We sincerely welcome your feedback on how to continue to improve the content as well as experience with the Cisco ONE knowledge portal.

The Cisco ONE Newsroom portal:We have also aggregated recent "newsworthy" items on our Newsroom portal. This should make it easier to view some of the recent happenings and amplify them via social media or otherwise.

Check this out at: http://newsroom.cisco.com/cisco_one

We hope you will find these efforts to present information in a more structured way beneficial, and it will help you learn more about these emerging concepts as we continue evolve the strategic role of the network.