Where the Sun Shines, Innovation Grows: Cisco Live Orlando

It’s always sunny in Florida. Except late night. Course that’s when the real fun kicks in. Dining out. Music. Parties. Okay, and maybe some rest.

Cisco Live Orlando (June 10-14) will be alive with action and flowing with information. Want to learn about the future and what’s possible? You got it. How about everything you need to know about security? Yep. And what about leveraging IT to drive company reinvention? It’s going to be covered as well.

In fact, anything you can imagine related to IT will be there. That includes IT that transforms, connects, predicts, and enables. IT that is more robust, accessible, flexible, and mature. At Cisco, we call it intuitive IT.

I’m looking forward to walking the floor at the World of Solutions, where I get to experience firsthand how Cisco and our partners are working together to create new innovations. I’ll be on the lookout for innovations that can bring even more things online to build out our digital world.

I’m envisioning my grandmother’s pill bottle automatically ordering her refills and then delivering them to her via drone. Or crops telling farmers the perfect time to harvest, so fruits and vegetables are ready for sale at their peak. Even media detecting our mood and changing the entertainment they send our way.

Digital innovation is amazing. If we can imagine, we can create it. 

Off the floor, I’m excited about the presentations. I plan to stop by the IT Management track on Wednesday, the 13th, to listen to Bryan Palma, our SVP of Advanced Services. He plans to share his perspective on what it takes to be a game changer in the Gig Economy. This is one session you won’t want to miss.

Since Fortune introduced its top 500 companies list in the 1950s, only about 12 percent of the original companies remain. More than 90 percent have been bought by other companies, gone bankrupt, shrunk in size, or simply gone out of business. Bryan will address this reality and the opportunities ahead for IT to drive company reinvention.

I’ll speak the following day, expanding on Bryan’s theme to discuss how to embrace the decision economy. This is a must if your organization wants to thrive in our increasingly digital world. On average, nearly 40 percent of today’s top 10 market leaders will be displaced by digital disruption in the next five years, with a significant shakeout in the next 36 months.

It’s not just market leaders that will be hit. Forty-one percent of all companies are risk of extinction by digital disruption. But that doesn’t have to be the case. While only 25 percent of companies are actively responding to disruption, it’s not because they don’t want to. Some have decided to take a “wait-and-see” approach, while others aren’t sure what to do because they haven’t experienced this before.

I believe it all begins with understanding that digital disruption is changing the rules of value creation. I’ll share more about these new rules—and what your enterprise can do—when I speak on June 14.

Meanwhile, I’ll be around Cisco Live all week, talking with customers and partners. And looking for that next big thing to completely change our world. Hope to see you there. When I return home to Chicago, I’ll post a blog updating you on what I learned and experienced in sunny Orlando.