Cisco Live EMEA 2019: we are changing the old IT bike on BMW in the clouds

Cisco Live is the annual global conference of the American vendor of IT and telecom solutions, without which it is difficult to imagine the modern high-tech landscape. Tusovka IT professionals, review of the achievements and the presentation of new products, endless workshops, lectures, round tables and anything you wish. The Linxdatacenter delegation also visited the Cisco Live EMEA in Barcelona in late January. A brief overview of the report - in our first post on Habr. Go!

Let's make a reservation right away: the second part of the material will be released, which will be devoted to the information collected by our group at technical sessions.
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On Cisco Live, everything was organized around the four main components of a good conference:

• Learn - the educational part of the panel sessions, trainings and meetings 1: 1,
  
• Explore - industry dialogue with partners in Cisco Showcase, Partner Village, Technical Solutions Clinic and DevNet Zone,
  
• Connect - communication with Cisco engineers and colleagues on a wide range of relevant topics.
  
• and, of course, Have Fun - rest from the business part in all imaginable formats, participation in the Customer Appreciation Event, receptions at World of Solutions and #CLEURsocial.
  

We went through all the circles of Cisco Live 2019 and here are the main observations.

What Cisco Live Always Begins

Inspiring story about the future from Cisco.

The Keynote session performed by the company's executives was ambitious, inspiring and moderately serious. We listened to stories about how Cisco, like the Enterprise ship crew, is surfing the universe for new technological solutions. The main message was concrete and realistic:

• Soon there will be nothing, some solid clouds. We at Cisco are well aware of this, we are preparing for this, and as proof - our new cloud-oriented solutions and products. One word, universal Cloud Adoption - SD-WAN, HyperFlex, Cloud Center, etc. This explains the company's new slogan - Bridge to possible, that is, clouds as a bridge to completely new opportunities for business development.
• Maximum simplification of the processes of interaction with the IT infrastructure. Even more easy-to-use and user friendly: there are risks in this evolution, but this is inevitable. From the bike, we immediately transfer to the salon of the latest BMW model - both of them, in principle, deliver from A to B, but consumer experience is incomparably different.
• Everyone decides for himself what and how to adapt to his practice and on what scale, based on his tasks and taking into account the pros and cons of traditional and new solutions.

What we have seen by expanding our stand in Partner Village

The place where hyperconvergence and virtual reality meet.

There is a serious gap in the perception of information about technological innovations between the vendor and the business community. At the very least, information about new developments and their capabilities is not spreading at such a rapid pace as the vendor and its partners would like, and how this would be useful for the business.

At Cisco Live 2019, we were convinced of this once again and quite vividly when serious businessmen approached our booth with rollers about the operation of the Cisco HyperFlex platform and asked to tell them from scratch what a hyperconvergence platform is, how it works, why it is needed, etc. But this platform is not a novelty by the standards of the market. We emphasize - these are not random passers-by on the street, but an IT audience at a serious technological event. In this light, we are not sure that everyone present appreciated the scale of the news that Cisco ACI was supported in Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

What they saw and wondered

We saw the most diverse audience, which can only exist in one event, as well as dozens of interesting solutions at Partners Village - and that was awesome!

• Partner village
  
  In fact, in the "partner village" there was a lot of banal in the spirit of "look at our new telephony at Cisco", but even here you could find real diamonds. Note the VR project on Cisco HyperFlex, very similar to the Portal game. The quality of graphics is incredibly high, the line between reality and virtual reality is blurred very quickly. A lot of cool solutions for recognizing faces and facial expressions, Face Recognition-projects are a trend, as well as various solutions on drones. We were particularly impressed by the stand, where the drones needed to be carried out by a certain route, but not by direct control, but by programming their flight in advance. Honestly - our team did not cope with the task, but it was fun!
  
  
  A place for relaxation and important negotiations.
• Gallop on data centers
  
  Google introduced a cool entertainment activity with the motive of data centers. You take pictures at the company's booth and send yourself a snapshot that follows through several Google data centers around the world. The route is displayed in real time, and in the photo there are stamps with transit points. Everything closes on the data center!
  
  
  Our photo tour of Google data centers.
• Digital all
  
  Digital even became paint: we saw a digital spray can of spray paint and painted our logo on a special surface. An interesting effect and an interesting experience: by the way, EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE WALLS is painted in Barcelona. Only sliding doors, plastic and metal panels, but not the walls of buildings.
  
  
  Art is not our main talent :-)
• And then the quests
  
  Our team managed to participate in the "professional" quests from Cisco: on network technologies and data centers. In our favor, one successfully completed quest - of course, in the data center, because here we have no equal :-) Not without various different types of healthy lifestyles. For example, it was possible to “screw” a smoothie on a stationary bike or charge the phone. In fact, hellishly difficult task: to wind even 1%, it was necessary to give everything 100%.
  
  
  Hard work on the extraction of food.
• Prizes and gifts - in the studio
  
  Every day there was a huge amount of raffles of really good prizes: iPhones, action cameras, tickets to Disneyland, etc. Alas, we did not get a single prize, but we will try next time!
• Social networks are offline
  
  Separate mention is worthy of Cisco Social Center. The center monitors the posts of participants in Cisco Live 2019 in social networks - collects and processes statistics with a complete breakdown of all possible segments and directions. That is, it forms a complete SMM-portrait of the event in real time: what they post most about, what they like the most, what is the trend, what stands are the hottest. Excellent idea and professional performance, and also a vivid illustration of the capabilities of advanced IT solutions.
  
  
  Find yourself among many people.
  
  I was impressed by the detailed visualization of the work of the Wi-Fi network in the premises where the conference was held: the most crowded points, migration flows and other patterns of the audience’s life: a truly lively, lively event. At the same time, the event network and the city network are integrated into each other - the company helped Barcelona with building the network and supports seamless connectivity.
• Look inside
  
  Stands with Cisco network products consisted of transparent boxes to demonstrate the internal design of devices. In particular, we noticed that the connectors from the pin form factor in most devices were transformed into a more practical format of flat connectors, which are much stronger and easier to use when assembling components into a single system. The engineers breathed a sigh of relief.

Summing up: proved to be, looked at others and at the world of high technologies, including all the techno-large-tech represented by Google, Intel, Nvidia and many others. It is difficult to name the advanced technology companies that were not there.

That's all, next time we will share insights from technology sessions and discuss issues of network security and platform manageability. Ask questions and stay in touch!