Cisco Live 2014 – San Francisco
Just wanted to take this time to talk about my experience at Cisco Live 2014, representing the Modcomp team.
It was a great experience and a nice way to meet with people that is in the same boat you are, Engineers that are seeing the same issues you see and others that have it all figured out (You want to be like them!!).
So just to get you started off the narration of this adventure, I wanted to start by adding few things that I think deserve to be mentioned:
I had my first session focused on Collaboration, and why not get started with some video technologies? – Which I have to yet master out for my upcoming CCIE Collaboration exam, but this one was different, and I mean cool different because we were kind off sort off introduced to H.265 (Been out there for almost a year), A video standard that in summary does same things H.264 does but with half the bandwidth, which was very interesting to see. I’m looking forward to start working on devices that support this new codec.
For more information on H.265, please follow this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding
For the Presentation go to https://www.ciscolive2014.com and look for the following: BRKCOL-2777 – Emerging Video Technologies: H.265, SVC, and WebRTC.
After that session I was rushing to the Yerba Buena Forum, to attend one of the lectures I had been waiting for quite a while, with Tony Mulchrone, a Technical Marketing Engineer for the Collaboration Technology Group. Tony talked about SIP trunking for over 2 hours and made it seem very nice and easy to understand (Which I have to confess, I was very intimidated by the protocol), However, he explained the basics of the SIP, the traces that you will usually get from CUCM and debug messages you will get from a Router configured with CUBE.
For more information on this lecture visit: https://www.ciscolive2014.com and look for: BRKUCC-2006 – SIP Trunk design and deployment in Enterprise UC networks.
The General Key Note with John Chambers, who had a very impressive speech, was enough to get me energized with Cisco Technology. He mentioned the many changes that ACI and SDN bring to the table, he was also kind enough to let us know that, as engineers we needed to step up our game and be prepared for all new stuff that is going to be here sooner than latter.
The World of solutions reception; it was really nice to see the Ford Mustang that was there, waiting for a lucky winner (Which I claimed to be the only winner but were not lucky enough this time!!). Lots of companies giving away cool stuff and offering their services, I was attracted by few of them, but the one that really caught my eye was the Collaboration booth from Cisco. They exposed the new EX’s line and few other gadgets, take a look at the pictures, I’m definitely not the best photographer but I tried.
For the rest of the days it was very nice to be able to mingle with lots of people from different places. My buddy @manfernan and I were hanging out in the Social Media Hub most of the days at Cisco Live, when we were not in the breakout sessions. We had a great time just talking about technology in general.
The Customer Appreciation Event, also know as CAE, was a really nice way for Cisco to demonstrate that they really appreciate their customers, Lenny Kravits was great and Imagine Dragons were also good, not really a big fan but people liked them too. here are a nice picture I got from the event, enjoy!.
I want to highlight few things that I think were the most impressive to me. The first one was how good and cordial, the ambassadors were with everyone at the conference from beginning to end, they did an amazing job, and I send you a big thank you to all of you involved into the logistics. And last the Cisco Live guest keynote with Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, the energy this guy transmits is contagious. He narrated how he started his company and the many ideas he was able to build just from that little and powerful idea of presenting videos to help others. I listened to him few years back when he was presenting to a similar audience and was very impressed.
About the Author:
Andres Sarmiento, CCIE # 53520 (Collaboration)
With more than 13 years of experience, Andres is specialized in the Unified Communications and Collaboration technologies. Consulted for several companies in South Florida, also Financial Institutions on behalf of Cisco Systems. Andres has been involved in high-profile implementations including Cisco technologies; such as Data Center, UC & Collaboration, Contact Center Express, Routing & Switching, Security and Hosted IPT Service provider infrastructures.