April 19, 2009, 8:25 PM — When Cisco determined that the system it had for mining its huge repository of customer service request data could stand improvement, the company looked not only to its own employees for an answer, but also to students and faculty at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
The students over several months helped to devise an algorithm that reduces search time for data by about a third, providing Cisco with a way to potentially better serve customers in need of problem resolution.
It's projects like this that Cisco hopes to develop even more of as it looks to tighten its bonds with UCSC, which is no slouch when it comes to networking, as it's even installing its own fiber network. Cisco officials will celebrate the Network Management and Operations Lab (NMO Lab) that it has established on the UCSC campus today, April 17 (Catch the event live here). Joe Pinto, senior vice president of Technical Services at Cisco and a big supporter of the lab, is speaking.
The lab is designed to give students -- from undergrads to Ph.D. candidates -- a chance to work with Cisco engineers to solve real world network problems. Examples include white box testing for the collecting and analyzing of message flow between XML servers and clients, and working on support services for testing customer networks in advance to ensure they can handle VoIP traffic. About a dozen UCSC students are currently involved in projects with Cisco via such programs.
Patrick Mantey, a professor of computer engineering at UCSC's Baskin School of Engineering, says collaborating with Cisco has changed the school's networking curriculum, giving students access to "big networking equipment that heretofore had been basically talked about in a hand-waving way in the classroom because it's not stuff students used to get their hands on." He says the hands-on access to network gear has more than doubled the number of students in some network-oriented classes.
Cisco's work with UCSC has actually been ongoing over the past 4 or 5 years, says Ved Sharma, director of Technical Services at Cisco. "The lab is only a very small part of the work we do with the University of Santa Cruz," he says. (Sharma declined to get into how much money Cisco invests in its UCSC efforts, describing it only as "fairly significant," though UCSC officials said Cisco does fund at least one faculty position, plus intern and research assistant positions.)
Physically, the lab is on the fifth floor of the Baskin building in space otherwise occupied by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interests of Society (CITRIS), though in reality students frequently make the relatively short trek between campus and Cisco offices in Silicon Valley. The lab features a changing collection of gear and is currently set up to simulate a customer site so that Cisco can test out its Smart Care Service offerings.
"NMO Lab is a physical space, but it's also virtual," Mantey says. He foresees the lab becoming an extension of the overall UCSC network and even the general University of California network of networks.
Cisco funds plenty of research at other universities, including a project at Cornell involving router scalability. It also has labs at schools such as San Jose State University and Wichita State University. Cisco also works with schools through its Cisco Networking Academy, which provides online courses and supports lab activities.
