Cisco Live Berlin 2017: Enter the Millennials

This week kicks off Cisco’s 27 year running illustrious flagship event Cisco Live EMEA in Berlin, Germany. Cisco Live is nothing short of a ‘festival of technology.’ Offering the latest and greatest training and education on technologies crucial to driving business outcomes. With over 700+ sessions available onsite and online, there is content applicable to everyone from budding start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.

Cisco Live’s user centric approach serves the wants and needs of our loyal partners and customers. With the expectation of over 12,000 attendees representing 105 countries, Cisco Live will facilitate the demystification of market transitions we face within the IT industry. Whether it is evolution of infrastructure, APIs, digitization, security, or automation, Cisco’s experts will be on hand to impart wisdom on how to implement, manage, and monitor key technologies that underpin top-of-mind business imperatives. A key element in this knowledge transfer is the Cisco on Cisco team.

Cisco on Cisco is an internal team within IT that shares business opportunities and lessons learned from internal implementations of Cisco technology. This is key for our customers as they get first hand advice and insight into the challenges faced and benefits realized from implementing our own technologies.

This is my first involvement at Cisco Live where I will be interacting with customers and enhancing their experience in the Information Technology Management (ITM) program. This limited program directed toward technology leaders is in addition to their Cisco Live general access pass. This exclusive area is targeted towards IT Managers and professionals who are particularly interested in leveraging IT operations to build out their business capabilities. From C-suite executives to IT architects and operations managers, this learning track provides a wealth of resources, technology demos and educational sessions to imbue attendees with the ability to pragmatically surmount their enterprise challenges. Bringing energy and new perspectives within the ITM program are the IT Millennial Ambassadors. The IT Millennial program provides early-in-career Cisco graduates with the opportunity to experience their company through participating on the front line of the business, escaping their day to day roles and responsibilities for one week.

Myself and my fellow Millennial teammates from the United Kingdom—Harry Jones, Iman Diarra, and Laura Waller—are members of this unique squad. We are provided with fantastic exposure to Cisco technologies and placed in front of our customers and partners to learn directly from their anecdotes and experiences leveraging Cisco. The opportunities this great program provides speaks volumes to the value that Cisco sees in the cross functional collaboration of its employees. My role within Cisco is an IT Network Engineer working for Global Infrastructure Services (GIS) as part of the core operations team; responsible for working on managing and optimizing Cisco’s global internet backbone. As part of my contributions as a Millennial Ambassador at Cisco Live, I’ll be writing blogs, firing up our subscribers on social media, assisting with video editing as well as liaising and engaging with our customers. Laura will be operating the camera and encouraging customers to get involved on screen. Iman is our social media strategist, also helping out with photography, sharing the highlights and most exciting moments of the event. Harry will be our video editing subject matter expert (SME) taking care of the video editing and all things design related from a multimedia content perspective. We are all really excited for this opportunity and the ‘Time is Now’ to help our customers and partners learn the next steps required for them to continue their growth, success and prosperity in their business endeavours.