Our Insight

Cisco's unified communications (UC) and telephony systems are pretty much the gold standard for reliability, quality and features, but until now they've been overkill for a startup or many smaller SMEs. If you're running a company of, say, 25-100 people, you need a great phone system, but you probably don't need full-blown Call Manager - or the hardware, software and days of configuration work involved in an enterprise system like Cisco's Business Edition 6000. To be honest, you probably can't afford them either.

That's why we're excited to be offering Cisco's brand new Business Edition 4000 (BE4000): a quality, full-featured IP telephony system in one easy-to-configure box.

Our series of interviews with women who work in IT and the technology sector was started by co-founder Claire. It's a response, in part, to the lack of female applicants for our job vacancies.

As digital marketing manager and founder of Brighton Digital Women, Rachel Finch is a well-placed advocate for women in Brighton's thriving digital industries. Here she shares her experience, and offers advice to anyone starting their own career in technology.

We've looked before at how the public cloud, for all its benefits, isn't a one-size-fits-all proposition. From concerns about data security and sovereignty, to my own thoughts about the challenge of managing data and applications across providers, it's clearly not a panacea.

We've talked a lot about software-defined networking (SDN) and the increasingly intelligent network hardware that enables it. Lately, fellow solutions architect Daren Vallyon and I have been trying to provide a bit more detail about how Cisco is innovating in both areas, with technologies like Digital Network Architecture (DNA) and Campus Fabric.

Our take on the details might be interesting to fellow technologists, but what if you're trying to build the business case for your organisation to invest in new networking technologies?

Our series of interviews with women who work in IT and the technology sector was started by co-founder Claire. It's a response, in part, to the lack of female applicants for our job vacancies - a particular problem when it comes to technical, hands-on roles.

As product owner team lead for a software company, Lisa Legg has just such a role, but like many other contributors to the series she didn't originally plan or study for a technical career. Here she shares her experience, and offers advice to anyone wanting their own career in technology.

We're always working to build stronger relationships with long-term, established players, but in the new partnerships we've announced this year, Ideal is also investing in new and exciting technologies. In Rubrik, we've added a partner with something truly disruptive: an appliance-based, converged backup offering that's so 'right' it's a wonder nobody did it before.

I want to explain what it does and why it's brilliant.

We all know the Internet of Things (IoT) is coming, but a recent conversation made me realise that for some of us, it's already arrived. A colleague here mentioned that he'd got something like 20 connected devices on his home network. That seemed a bit of a stretch, so he listed them. After we'd enumerated computers (5), phones and tablets (5), Kindles (2), Audio and TV kit (4), network hardware (4), IP cameras (2) and a printer, we'd arrived at 23 devices, all on a single home network.

Our series of interviews with women who work in IT and the technology sector was started by co-founder Claire. It's a response, in part, to the lack of female applicants for our job vacancies - a particular problem when it comes to technical, hands-on roles.

Marena Karasevich has just such a job: she's a Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) and a 2017 Cisco Champion, responsible for network design and maintenance at a Canadian college. What advice can she offer women looking for a similar role?

Late yesterday, Cisco announced a new MDS 9700 series director module. For those who don't know, directors are an extremely high-end switch, designed to form the backbone of a fast storage area network (SAN) in the data centre. The MDS 9700 series already has industry-leading scale and performance, and with the new 32Gbps module the largest now supports up to 768 by 32Gbps fibre channel ports, operating with full-duplex aggregate of 48Tbps - astonishing.

Regular readers will know we've written a lot about the software-defined network (SDN), from explaining the concept in a two-page customer briefing, to building up a bricks and mortar analogy for what it actually means in real life. Inspired by Cisco's recent launch of Campus Fabric, I wanted to take a look at what comes next - and why we need it.

2016 was a year full of highlights for Ideal, and if its first quarter was anything to judge by, 2017 promises just as much excitement. Since January we've welcomed two new directors, many new starters and two new technology partners - reassuringly, we're still focused on our trademark excellence. With more events and announcements in the pipeline, here are five highlights from our year so far.