The third annual Cisco IT Data Center Day put a spotlight on the Internet of Everything (IoE) market transition and gains of deploying an Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). Over 300 attendees, including 124 customers representing 85 different companies, attended the event held at our state-of-the-art data center in Allen, Texas.
The day was filled with keynotes, executive panels, discussion sessions, and a tour of the Allen data center. Attendees stayed connected at the event through Fitbits that tracked their movement throughout the day and tallied up user metrics such as the total average steps taken at the end. Lance Perry, VP of IT Customer Strategy and Success, hosted the event, providing insights and takeaways for all the keynotes. Top Cisco IT executives shared their perspectives on some hot industry topics: how IoE will change every company and business model, the importance of predictability in an IoE world where real-time feedback can actually be too late, and how IT can earn a front seat at the business table by enabling Cisco’s concept of Fast IT. John Manville, SVP of Global Infrastructure Services, led a lively executive panel that took customers’ questions. Christoph Nienhaus, a Cisco IT Regional Leader who attended the event, summarizes the executive keynotes in his blog.
Discussion sessions continued throughout the afternoon, as executives and Cisco IT experts explored ACI’s role in the future of the data center, and how the Cisco Intercloud Fabric for Business through hybrid cloud can help simplify infrastructure, ensure agility, adaptability, and security, and provide elasticity and scalability in the dynamic data center environment.
The number of C-level executives at this year’s event grew 150 percent over last year, and an overall customer satisfaction rating of 4.7 out of 5.0 underscores the success of this year’s event. Check out this highlight video for a glimpse at what attendees experienced at Data Center Day.
An interesting update on how things are progressing with IoE, it’s surreal and hard to imagine that real-time feedback would be considered of little use. I wonder if with everything connected, will the human race become lazy and too reliant on technology?
Your other question – is the human race becoming lazy and too reliant on technology? – that’s a great question, with no easy answers. A glib response would be: “That’s what people said about any major technology advance in the past – e.g. robotics in industry; computers; mechanised farm equipment; steam engines.” But they were right then, too. As we move further from subsistence living, we become more dependent on the interconnecting technologies that sustain life (and provide so much more than just sustenance). This interconnecting “grid” is both fragile (so many break points) and robust (so many redundant connections). As complexity (and redundancy) grows, to me it appears that the likelihood of a disaster decreases; but the impact of a “successful” disaster increases. I guess, over time, it makes sense to plan for some air-gapped alternatives to be built in parallel.
The point made is that real-time feedback is extremely useful, unless the real-time event is catastrophic; then predictive analysis and response is necessary to avert the catastrophe (a car accident, a network or power outage, etc.). But that predictive analysis and response is the result of real-time feedback, plus local analytics and response capabilities. So – they weren’t saying that real-time feedback was useless – its extremely useful. It’s just that its better when augmented by local, predictive analytics and response.