Cisco Live is Cisco’s annual customer conference where Cisco claims you will build the foundation for your digital future. With the objective of transforming your outlook, your career, and your potential through learning directly from Cisco’s best and brightest, Cisco kicked off their series of Cisco Live events in Barcelona this week. Refreshingly, for Cisco customers and partners that could not make the event, the sessions were also broadcast live via the Cisco website – a simple mechanism often missed by major collaboration players. After all, this industry lives and breathes technology that enables and advocates mobility and remote working. On-demand sessions are also available shortly after the live sessions have concluded.
Cisco Live EMEA
The event was kicked off by David Goeckeler, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Networking and Security Business. His keynote message explained how as technology continues to change the future of business and humanity, Cisco remains at the forefront of the digital transformation era.
Cisco split their event into major technology tracks. These included:
- Cloud
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Collaboration
- Mobililty
- Data Centre
- Security
- DevNet
- Service Provider
- Enterprise Networks
Collaboration leaders
Aruna Ravichandran, Vice President of Global Marketing and CMO, hosted a collaboration panel where customers shared unique insights and use cases throughout the Cisco portfolio. As Cisco continues to expand its collaboration portfolio with deeper integrations following acquisitions of both Tropo and BroadSoft, the continued success of Cisco Webex Teams across messaging and telephony as well as meetings will be crucial to Cisco’s future if they are to retain their leadership status in the collaboration arena.
A recent study conducted by Info-Tech highlighted Cisco as leaders in team collaboration software. They scored third highest in the category, behind collaboration pioneers, Slack, and niche players, Asana. Perhaps the biggest win for Cisco in this report was scoring 0.8 higher than Microsoft. Cisco Webex Teams scored 8.3 with Microsoft Teams behind on 7.5
Something for everyone
As a non-techy, but someone heavily involved in the industry, sometimes these events can leave you feeling somewhat overwhelmed. Cisco even had that element covered this year as technical sessions were broken down into tiers of 1-3. Sessions ranged from basic to extremely technical and were categorised as follows:
- Customer Case Studies
- DevNet Session
- Innovation Showcase
- IT Management Session
- Walk-in Self-Paced Lab
- Instructor-Led Lab
- Panel
- Product & Strategy Overview
- Technical Seminar
Cisco Live also featured future-focused thought leadership sessions, gave customers and partners the opportunity to have one to one meetings with Cisco experts and participate in the Customer Appreciation Event.
The Barcelona edition of the series has received immediate positive feedback on social media.
“#CLEUR was amazing, loved it so much! I’ve met people I wouldn’t have thought about and got to know the human side of networking.”
The Cisco Live series reaches Melbourne in March, San Diego in June and concludes in Cancun in December – not a bad trip for a pre-Christmas getaway. For first time Cisco Live goers, Cisco even provide a proposal letter to convince your boss. Here’s looking at you, Rob Scott. I hear Melbourne is great in March.
