Sunday, July 10, 2011

Cisco Live 2011 Day One (Collaboration, Mega Trends)

SAN JOSE, CA - MARCH 23:  A sign is posted in ...Image by Getty Images via @daylife
I'm attending my first Cisco Live conference. This is one of the reasons I'm very busy. Between foraging for food, studying for a certification exam, going to the various sessions and walking too and from the conference there is just enough time for sleep and little else. Cisco Live is in Vegas this year and if you've been to Vegas you know it's big. Huge, monstrous. It can take a day just to get from one end of your Hotel to the other even if you don't stop to gamble. OK, maybe I exaggerate but not by as much as you might think if you've never been here before.

Here are some statistics to show how large this conference is

~14k attendees
~40k virtual attendees
~200 partner exhibitor/sponsors
~550 sessions

I attended a session today that was focused on collaboration. Here are some things I learned. Note, these are my almost raw notes. Hopefully there were not errors but if there were, assume I made them.

Notes (GENCOL 1001, Collaboration)

We are in the post PC Era. Hardware platforms no longer matter.

There are 500K daily activations of Android based devices.

If Facebook were a country it would be the third largest in the world. 50% of Facebook users login several times per day.

YouTube has 48 hours of video uploaded per minute

Our personal and professional lives are being impacted by these trends.

10 billion downloads in the three years the Apple App store has existed.

Open standards, integrated collaboration services. Open standards make it easy to support collaboration across different platforms. This is one reason we're in the Post PC era.

Business drivers: The mobile trend in an enterprise setting. July and August is traditionally holiday time in Europe. 63% of workers this year are planning on logging in and conducting work remotely. This is a major shift/change as anyone who has tried to deal with a company in Europe during these months will know. 

Cius (Cisco's Tablet) Cisco is positioning it as an enterprise tool. It has a higher level of security and access back to the enterprise with integrated collaboration services. Enterprises can develop and push applications as well in a secure way. Runs Cisco Jabber. A complete UC client that runs on various platforms including PC, MAC, Android, Smartphones. Does not lock you down to one device or type of device.  "People should not be locked down around one type of application or type of device".

WebEx runs on many types of devices as well. Including Android now/soon.

The world is getting mobile, but social as well. These are both mega trends. Customers form opinions not only by way of company marketing but also how customers communicate perceptions by way of Twitter, Facebook, etc. Many companies are reactive. Cisco uses SocialMiner to prioritize and locate things being said in the social space which gives companies an opportunity to be proactive.

The world is also getting virtual. This is a mega trend. There are two drivers. Security risks are one. Having data on the mobile device is a big risk. TCO is the other. Operating a wide variety of PC's and devices is very expensive. Providing a virtualized platform mitigates both these concerns.

Bringing rich media to virtual clients is tricky. Performance is important and it is complicated to get the level of performance people expect. 

Another mega trend is Visual. We are moving towards a more visual focused world. Visual is becoming more integrated into business processes. Cisco is moving towards a single architecture. The communication manager is the platform for Cisco's entire architecture across the entire range. Video Everywhere. All devices will be video enabled. IP phones, tablets, etc. MX200 is a full fledged telepresence system. Engineered and priced lower to increase the reach of telepresence.

Any to Any interoperability. We should take this for granted. Would the Apple iPhone have been successful if you could have only called other people with iPhones? All communications should take place through open standards. Customers must demand the use of open standards.

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