Many business thought leaders in financial services and retail are exploring how best to leverage their branch assets to up and cross sell customers while improving the branch office experience. These thought leaders are collectively thinking in terms of Intelligent Branch solutons, which from a real estate and staffing point of view is a smaller footprint but rich in IT. Bruce Mazza, Director of Branch Solutions and Tony Kleckner Practice Leader for Financial Services both of Avaya join me to discuss what I call Branch 2.0 and how it addresses and solves the main concerns of retail and banking executives.

Kim Niederman, CEO at Anagran, a developer of intelligent flow-based products for next generation networks joins the Lippis Report podcast. Network traffic such as P2P, IP video and VoIP traffic is increasing exponentially creating congestion and poor application performance. Flow management is a congestion management/avoidance scheme that groups’ different traffic classes by flows to assure application performance. In this podcast we discuss Anagran and its value proposition.

On Jan 28th Cisco announced its Nexus data center high performance switch while the day after Juniper announced its long awaited arrival into the LAN switching market with its EX-Series of Ethernet switches internally called Hurricane. Zeus Kerravala, of The Yankee Group and I analyze Juniper’s LAN switches and Cisco’s new Nexus 7000 data center switch. It’s a 20 minute podcast, but its worth the time. Enjoy Nick