Cisco Systems held its first all-digital person occasion, Cisco Live, this week. The on-line occasion properly was rescheduled from two weeks in the past, as a result of Cisco management didn’t need the occasion to distract from the social points created by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others. The fascinating twist is that Cisco’s occasion was compelled to go digital due to COVID-19, however that enabled it to maneuver it extra simply than a reside occasion.
Typically, my takeaways from an occasion like Cisco Live are technical in nature like “the cloud has arrived” or “virtualization is now mainstream” however this yr’s occasion was considerably completely different due to the social points going through the planet. Below are my high takeaways from Cisco Live 2020 – digital model.
Takeaway No. 1: Societal change is now actual
Racism, exclusivity and different points have plagued our nation and the world for many years, however nothing modified. It appears we’re on the verge of actual change, and the initiatives are being led by high-tech corporations that embody Cisco.
At the occasion, CEO Chuck Robbins (pictured) introduced that the corporate’s goal assertion was evolving from “Changing the way we work, live, learn and play” to “To power an inclusive future for all.” This requires a systemic change from everybody in each a part of our lives. During a Q&A with analysts, SVP and GM of Mass Scale Infrastructure Jonathan Davidson mentioned Cisco documentation would now not consult with grasp/slave and blacklist/whitelist, as a result of they’ve racial undertones. Github introduced the same initiative.
I imagine that social change is actual and I used to be glad to see Robbins use this time to debate these points as an alternative of simply speaking about Cisco. I additionally hope that enterprise and IT leaders make social change a part of the analysis course of once they select to a vendor. Let’s reward those that are main change.
Takeaway No. 2: The community issues greater than ever
It’s honest to say that the community has by no means had the identical stage of C-level curiosity because the cloud or functions. Just a few years in the past, CIO contacts of mine had been telling me firm executives had been all pushing to maneuver to the cloud. Today, only a few of these execs are pushing to evolve to SD-WAN or be sure that WiFi6 is deployed throughout the corporate. However, they need to be.
All of the constructing blocks of digital transformation–IoT, cloud, synthetic intelligence (AI), mobility and different tendencies–are community centric. The COVID-19-induced push to make money working from home has accelerated digital tendencies and additional elevated the worth of the community. In this age of social distancing and buyer expertise, the community permits us to attach clients to workers to info to functions. The selection of community vendor issues, and “good enough” is now not ok.
Takeaway No. 3: Agility is necessary for IT success
During his keynote, Cisco’s SVP and GM of Networking, Todd Nightingale acknowledged: “I believe this is a new world, and the new IT superpower is agility.” He then mentioned how agility is constructed on a mixture of insights and automation.
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