Cisco will host a live webcast on Wedn November 13, 2013 to discuss BYOD, mobility, security and how Cisco access switching address these customer needs. If you are reading this blog, there is a good chance that your work is somehow related to these critical areas. To test how widely BYOD, mobility and security impact IT professionals, I've used an unscientific way to check it out on several popular online IT web sites. I want to see if they consider at least one of these areas to be their main focus.  Here's what I've found -many of them (although not every single one) are devoted to at least one area.

There are both technology reasons and business reasons that drive these customer needs. The easy availability of mobile devices and new industry standards such as 802.11ac certainly contribute to BYOD and mobility. On the other hand, security and compliance bring necessary business requirements that IT professionals need to integrate into their infrastructure design and day-to-day operations.

The challenge is, many IT infrastructures were built many years ago.  I've had numerous customers who told me that their Cisco Catalyst switches had been running uninterruptedly for 6, 7, 8 or more years. Here's a config that I received last year when this system was retired. I removed some system details so that we don't expose the customer's system information:

?<host name> (enable) sh version

?WS-C4xxxx Software, Version NmpSW: 6.3(6)
?Copyright (c) 1995-2002 by Cisco Systems, Inc.
?NMP S/W compiled on Apr  3 2002, 17:28:33
?GSP S/W compiled on Apr 03 2002, 15:33:30

?System Bootstrap Version: 6.1(4)
?Hardware Version: 1.2  Model: WS-Cxxxx  Serial#: xxxxxxxxxxx
......

Uptime is 2949 days, 0 hour, 7 minutes

If you do the math, 2949 days of uptime are telling us that this switch had been running with no downtime for more than 8 years before it was taken offline!

While these switches are outstanding examples of Cisco product reliability and resiliency, they probably no longer meet the stringent demand of technology and business needs today.

Realizing our customers' challenges, Cisco has completely refreshed our Catalyst switching product portfolio to address these needs. The new Cisco access switching products include:

• Catalyst 2960-X switches: the greenest Cisco access switches ever
• Catalyst 3850 switches: converged wired and wireless switches with programmable Unified Access Data Plane (UADP) ASIC
• Catalyst 3650 switches:  also converged wired and wireless switches with programmable UADP ASIC, but more streamlined and more affordable
• Catalyst 4500-E switches with new Sup 8-E: highest port density and resiliency with investment protection.

Cisco Catalyst switching unifies wired and wireless networks to offer consistent policy-based security, compliance and network visibility that will lead to operational simplicity and business agility.

Join the Cisco access switching webcast to find out more details.  See you on the webcast!