Cisco Live

Date

Keynote:

Cisco live held at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Center was a tremendous success. It started off with the keynote presented by Carlos Dominguez, Senior Vice President, Office of the CEO, Cisco. The presentation was about the convergence of data and how it would change the way we drive cars, gather information and do shopping. A few examples were given, such as Nest thermostat, which allows you to manage the temperature of your home using mobile devices such as an iPhone or iPad. It also has an artificial intelligence engine which remembers the temperature set and turns itself down when no movement is detected.

An example for data convergence, solutions are being developed to have sensors in the humble lamp post. They will provide current information such as the weather, next scheduled public transport in the area and directions to it. They also will provide information on the traffic for people using personal transport. The challenges faced are to store the data specific to each individual and be agnostic on which personal device they are using to “control” and use the data.

Another example of personal devices changing the way we live, applications are being developed which map your current eating habits to what the doctors prescribes. The application not only provides the specific information about each meal but also guides you to the nearest place where you can find healthier options for the same type of food. And it charts what has been purchased and keep a track of your vital statistics such as time spent exercising, heart rate and blood pressure monitoring etc. All these applications and devices are using data which was unheard of 5 years ago.

Break-out Sessions:

The keynote was followed by technical sessions, which were related to Cisco Networking and Security, Unified Computing, Unified Computing Architecture, Cloud Computing, virtualisation and End User Computing. Most of these sessions were for the technical consultants and architects. There were also break-out sessions which were specifically aimed at the management level. These were mainly discussion sessions rather than presentations.

The technical break-out sessions provided valuable information and guided input into how cisco works specifically around network architecture and system architecture. The virtualisation stream of breakout sessions had solutions around VMware vSphere and Windows Hyper-V. There was a lot more focus on stateless computing and how to use Cisco UCS platform to manage stateful yet server independent solutions for virtualisation.

Solutions Lounge:

The Solutions Lounge was the area where all the Cisco partners presented their custom solutions for the customers. We had a booth of our own where we were talking about Cisco IAC and Cloupia products from Cisco and how they help the customer’s cloud strategy. The other notable solutions were offered by major partners like VCE, Telstra, NetApp to name a few. The interesting part (apart from the actual solutions being spoken about) was the varied games and promotions that were run by each partner. Most of them had an iPad as the prize, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering how popular they are.

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