Live from Cisco Live!

This blog is live from the floor of Cisco Live in London. The highlight for me this year in London has been the introduction, with our partners Ping Identity, of the Identity Cloud Connector, built on onePK, as part of the Cisco Cloud Connectors family of solutions. I’ll go into that in more detail below, but first some other highlights.

Yesterday we delivered a full day workshop on network automation, including EEM and introductions to onePK. Bruno Klauser, Joe Clarke, Jason Pfeifer, with me in a supporting role, helped  29 attendees through a series of exercises to help them get the most out of the extensive automation features on our platforms. The attendees must have liked it, as the score was 4.61/5. Well done guys!

The buzz here in the World of Solutions (WoS) is great. We have onePK demonstrations in the Data Centre and Borderless Network architecture zones, and we have been talking to customers and partners non-stop, all day. The Open Network Environment (ONE) strategy has really gripped people’s imagination, and it has been very exciting, and fun, to engage in some serious conversations about what ONE can do for our customers’ businesses.

We have come a long way since announcing ONE at Cisco Live in San Diego six months ago. We have our first partner led solution with the Identity Connector, which you can see in the Borderless Networks location in the WoS. I talk more about that in this video interview with Chris Ceppi, Director of Corporate Development and Alliances at Ping Identity, also.

Ping have been a great partner, willing to see the potential of combining the power of our network platform with their identity platform for federated identity. When we started discussing this shortly after the ONE announcement, I thought we could make it in time for the next Cisco Live, but it took a lot of hard work from the Cisco team and Ping to make it happen. I am so impressed that we got this together in such a short space of time. The willingness of all to give it their best really illustrates the potential of what onePK can enable.

What we are introducing today, with the Identity Cloud Connector, is the start of a conversation: about how our customers and partners want to integrate network identity and context; and the extensive capabilities of onePK and the Cloud Connect Toolkit, with Federated Identity.

We had in mind some specific use cases to enable ease of deployment of federated identity for eco-system partners connecting to the “enterprise as a service provider”, and for adding federated identity into branch office platforms. The identity connector will also be a key architectural control point in our evolving cloud security platforms.

After talking to customers here on the WoS floor, and in customer briefings, it is clear that the potential application for the Identity Connector, integrated with onePK, is wider than we anticipated. It always pays to listen to customers.

You can hear more about the space of Federated Identity and Cloud Security in the panel (PNLSEC-1009) on Wednesday 30 at 16:30 GMT. We have a very distinguished and experienced list of panel members, and a lot to talk about. So I look forward to seeing you there!