Cisco Live: We Are Ready. Are You Ready, Service Provider?

Guest Blog by Igor Dayen, SP Product and Solutions Marketing

June 7, 2015 was the day when Cisco Live was officially kicked off in San Diego. 25,000 attendees came together to open the next chapter in Cisco’s history. The convention center and surrounding area was buzzing with excitement, with conversations including and focused on security, service provider, app development and becoming digital, to name a few. An additional 80,000 joined Cisco Live online throughout the week.

John Chambers, Cisco CEO, emotionally delivered his 20th and final Cisco Live Welcome Keynote address where he shared Cisco’s vision one final time with our customers. The keynote featured a final demo session with Jim Grubb, where they showcased Cisco Connected solutions that are helping cities and companies around the globe go digital. John Chambers also took this opportunity to pass the “Cisco Leadership Torch” onto incoming CEO, Chuck Robbins when they sat on stage together and discussed Chuck’s priorities and goals for Cisco in the coming year.

While John Chambers delivered his welcome address, Rebecca Jacoby, Senior Vice President and Chief of Operations, kicked off the Industry Partner Keynote session with executive guest speakers from NetApp, EMC and Intel. She stressed that digitization requires a mindset shift in addition to a skillset shift, and announced three new certifications for IoE and cloud readiness to help expand our customers’ skills. It has been emphasized that Service Provider is a core enabler of the IoE.

At Cisco Live we made several noteworthy announcements, some of which were SP focused.

We made a significant announcement on SP Security and how we see it embedded across the extended network. We introduced the Cisco Firepower 9300 Appliance & Threat Defense for ISR. The intent of “Security Everywhere” for service providers is to minimize the complexity of managing security across a distributed organization and to increase threat visibility into the farthest reaches of global service provider infrastructures. By integrating security everywhere, service providers gain the ability to deliver the threat-centric security requirements demanded by today’s dynamic threat landscape and capture emerging business opportunities created by the rise of the Digital Economy and the Internet of Everything (IoE).

A week prior to Cisco Live, At TM Forum, Cisco introduced a new network service management tool to its Evolved Services Platform (ESP), an open, elastic, and application-centric network infrastructure framework that enables service providers to accelerate time to revenue while reducing the operational costs of deploying cloud-based services. We had an opportunity to demo new Cisco Evolved Programmable Network (EPN) Manager at the service provider booth. Cisco EPN manager is a key component of Cisco’s full multi-layer network service lifecycle management solution.

Innovation Talks – We had two Service Provider focus Innovation Talks that discussed how Cisco challenges customers to go through Business Transformation. Customers learned how service providers keep pace with the changing demands on network agility and responsiveness. Increase profits and improve business outcomes through virtualization and orchestration of network infrastructure.

“Service Provider Transformation through Innovation,” hosted by Nick Adamo. Senior Vice President, Global Service Provider

Presenters shared how Cisco enables service providers to transform experiences, their businesses and the architecture. The presenters challenged the audience to capture the opportunity to deliver speed, scale, and value to businesses in the IoT world. They discussed how service providers will play an increasingly vital role in delivering quality experiences and performance at the speed businesses and consumers demand as more services and applications migrate to the Cloud and as users grow to expect on-demand access to network resources. In addition this talk highlighted emerging technologies, trends, and unique opportunities that will transform the way next-generation services are developed and delivered and provide new value to businesses and consumers alike as the Internet of Everything comes online.

“How APIs are Transforming Networking and IT,” led by Susie Wee, Vice President and CTO.

The standing-room-only crowd in the DevNet Zone learned about Cisco’s whole stack view approach, OpenStack ecosystem of partners and Connected Mobile Experience solution to better engage customers. It was discussed how Software defined networks, the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing and the move toward DevOps are all presenting new challenges for developers, network engineers, and infrastructure engineers. APIs are allowing cross functional teams to work together quickly to transform IT systems. Susie Wee has also discussed her vision of the Full Stack Developer and how both developers and network engineers can add the right skills to their toolset to be effective in this changing landscape. Lastly, Susie Wee explored some of the new APIs and technologies that are key to this transformation, and discussed the opportunities that automation and programmability offer at all layers of the technology stack.

Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform: Building multi-tenant Service Provider clouds

Cisco and Microsoft jointly presented our new kind of engineered solution and GTM partnership that focuses on helping Cloud Providers accelerate a comprehensive set of cloud offerings. Solution demo highlighted the tight integration between Windows Azure Pack with Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) that automates the delivery of enterprise-grade cloud services and applications. Leveraging Microsoft’s experience with application reference architectures and Cisco’s advanced networking capabilities this solution increases profit potential and dramatically reducing total cost of ownership by enabling reliable provisioning, management and administration for Cloud providers and their end customers.

Cisco Advances Intercloud Initiative and Hybrid Cloud Innovation

We also unveiled our latest hybrid cloud software innovations and release of Intercloud Fabric with new security capabilities, increased manageability across clouds and support for additional hypervisors. By enabling flexible workload placement and consistent network and security policies across public and private cloud environments, Cisco Intercloud Fabric is taking the complexity out of hybrid cloud.

At Cisco Live!, 10 Intercloud partners—Cirrity, Datalink, iland, Long View, Peak 10, Presidio, QTS, Quest, Sungard Availability Services and Virtustream—announced their own new hybrid cloud services built on Cisco Intercloud Fabric and jointly demoed their capabilities with us.

Sessions and Demos

We had over 60 SP-focused breakout sessions that were all well attended.  Additionally, we developed 22 SP demonstrations for the World of Solutions, all focused on delivering business outcomes – enhanced agility, lower expenses, and more revenue – for our customers. Here is a list of the demos that we gave. If you would like to see any of these demos, please contact your Cisco Account Representative.

Overall, a clear message was sent and well received on how an industry must embrace digitization and focus on the opportunities that will create for us to grow SP business.  We emphasized that we need to change how we work with our customers, how we need to co-innovate, and how to work together to transform the experience, transform the architecture, and transform the business.

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