The Cisco IT Booth – Cisco Live Cancun 2014

At the recent Cisco Live Cancun, Cisco IT setup a booth among other Cisco Partners including EMC, Panduit, NetApp, CITRIX, Alestra, and Cisco Business Units including Services, Security, Collaboration, and Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). This Cisco Live was mainly targeted to clients and partners of Cisco from Latin America.

At the Cisco IT booth, we were given the opportunity to tell our “Cisco on Cisco” story. By the evening of November 3rd, our booth was ready for client engagement. The Cisco IT booth was divided into three different topic areas:

Cloud Automation and ACI – Presented by Lalli Flores, Jonathan Miranda, and Erich Latchford. Presenters covered Cloud Automation (CITEIS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Lightweight Application Environment (LAE), ACI, and Security – Identity Services Engine (ISE).

Internet of Everything (IOE) – Presented and demoed by Yandhira Rosillo and Luis Altamirano – Topics covered were Cisco Maps and Conference room booking remotely via mobile device or laptop.

Unified Communications (UC) & Video – Presented by Greg Moon and Rafael Pardinas. The UC Video device demoed was conferencing of an award winning DX80 with a SX10 along with other remote endpoints all in a hybrid CMR (CMR + WebEx) fashion. The DX80 was connected to the call via wireless and the SX10 was registered and connected via CollabEdge.

Our day started by setting up the booth at 9 AM and closing out at 9 PM. We used Cisco Laptops, iPads, Cisco Televisions, and UC devices to showcase the demos and presentations. Along with the demos, we gave away Cisco gifts and also asked the booth visitors to fill out a survey. This helped us track demographics, requirements, and follow-ups.

The first evening of booth duty we had the largest number of partners and clients come by. The partners were from various backgrounds such as Sales, Marketing, and Engineering. That evening, we gave partners a general overview of the topics we were covering and the demos we were showcasing.

In the following days the throughput of clients that came by the booth was lower, enabling us to have true discussion around products, implementation, operations, and service models. We were able to give the clients demonstrations of products and answer any questions they had. We also asked about their implementation and their lessons learned.

Overall, the partners were equally interested in all three areas which were demonstrated. Most of them were still in the process of implementing Cisco products while some had heard topics like SDN and ACI for the first time. The overall experience of managing the booth was positive. We had 93% of clients and partners interested in future implementations and requesting for additional information and follow-up.