Tag Archives: #CiscoLive

The Silver Lining of Cisco Live

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Cisco Live 2022 Attendees by the big sign

Cisco Live was last week and it was an event full of both relief and worry. Having not seen any of my friends and colleagues during the Geek Summer Camp for since 2019 I was excitedly anticipating how things would go this year. While I was thrilled to see everyone in real life again there were also challenges that presented themselves by the end of the event that we need to discuss as well.

I could spend volumes detailing every little thing that went on but no one really wants to read that kind of discussion. I’ll just summarize some the stuff that I liked, some of it that I didn’t, and some bigger things that everyone needs to think about.

What Worked for Me

I was happy to once more be a part of the CCIE Advisory Council. We have been meeting via Webex for the entire pandemic but there’s just something about being in a room together that fosters conversation and sharing. The ideas that we discussed are going to have a positive impact on the program as we look at what the future of certifications will be. There’s a lot more to this topic than I can cover in just a quick summary paragraph.

I was a bit confused about the Social Media Hub hours on Sunday, so I resurrected my original tweet about meeting people right outside registration:

I had lots of people stop by that morning and say hello. It warmed my heart to see everyone before the conference even started. Thankfully, the Cisco Live social team came out to tell me that you could get to the Social Media Hub even though the show floor wasn’t open yet. I went in and grabbed a comfy chair to await the opening tweetup.

The tweetup itself was a good one. Lots of new faces means lots of people that are getting introduced to the social side of Cisco. That means the community is going to continue to grow and prosper. One point of weirdness for me was when people would introduce me to their friends and such by pointing at the Social Media Hub and saying, “Tom is the reason we have all this.” While that’s technically true it still makes me feel weird because the community it was keeps driving Cisco Live forward. No one person defines it for everyone else.

I enjoyed the layout of the World of Solutions this year because I wasn’t packed in with everyone else elbowing my way through crowded alleys trying to visit a booth. It felt like Cisco put some thought into having ample space for people to spread out instead of trying to maximize space usage. I know that this is partially a result of the COVID pandemic (which we’ll cover more of in a bit) but I wouldn’t be sad to see this layout stick around for a few more years. Less crowded means better conversations.

The keynote was fun for me, mostly because of where I enjoyed watching it. We put together a watch party for the Tech Field Day Extra delegates and it was more fun than I realized. We were able to react live to the presentation without fear of making a calamitous noise in the arena. I had forgotten how much fun the MST3K style of keynote commentary could be.

Lastly, the social media team knocked it out of the park. They were on top of the tweets and answering questions throughout the event. I have some issues with the social media stuff in general but the team did a top notch job. They were funny and enjoyed bantering back and forth with everyone. Social media is hard and doing it as a job is even harder. I just hope we didn’t scar anyone with our tweets.

What I Was Concerned About

Not everything is perfect at events. As someone that runs them for a living I can tell you little things go wrong all the time and need to be addressed. Here are some of the things that happened that made me take a few notes.

The communication across the whole event felt a bit rushed. Like certain things were announced at the last minute or were only announced in certain places. Nailing down the best way to share information is always difficult but when in doubt you need to share it everywhere. If you have access to social media, email, digital signage, and other avenues use them all. It’s better to overshare and remove doubt than undershare and end up fielding questions anyway.

There was some grumbling about the way that some of the social media aspects were handled this year. I think that sentence gets typed every year. Some of it comes down to the focus that stakeholders want to put on certain aspects of the event. If they want more video content that’s going to favor folks that are comfortable recording videos. If they want more long-form written items that naturally prioritizes those that are good at writing. No one is ever going to find the perfect mix but, again, communication is key. If we know what you want to see we can help make more of it.

The other thing that annoys me a bit, specifically about Las Vegas, is the land rush of sponsored parties. On Monday evening I was walking back to the Luxor to my room to drop my backpack and more than half the restaurants and bars I walked past all had banners out front and signs stating they were closed for a special event or booked until a certain time. While I appreciate that the sponsors of the event are willing to go out of their way to spend money and entice attendees to go to their party and hear about how awesome their products are it also creates an artificial crunch for other things. If half the bars are closed then the other half have to pick up the remainder of the hungry people. That means that a half-full exclusive party causes a two-hour wait at a restaurant next door. While this is nothing new in the conference community the lack of other options at the south end of the Las Vegas strip means you’re pretty much stuck taking a taxi to another hotel if you don’t want to wait to have a burger or pizza. In full transparency one of those parties on Monday was one that I attended for the Cisco Champions program but there were also two other parties booked in Ri Ra that night concurrently.

What We Should All Be Asking

Now it’s time for the elephant in the convention center. The reason why we haven’t had an in-person Cisco Live in three years is COVID. We were locked down during the pandemic and conference organizers erred on the side of caution in 2021. 2022 was a hopeful year and many conferences were back to being live events. RSA happened in San Francisco the week before Cisco Live. There were thousands of people there and a reported 16,000 people at Cisco Live.

The reports coming out of Cisco Live were that a lot of people tested positive for COVID after returning home. Cisco had a strict policy of requiring proof of vaccination to attend. Yet people were testing positive as early as Sunday before the conference even started. The cases started rising throughout the week and by the time folks got home on Thursday evening or Friday my Twitter feed was full of friends and colleagues that came back with the extra strength conference crud.

Thankfully no one has been seriously affected as of this writing. Most everyone that I spoke with has said they feel like they have a cold and are tired but are powering through and should be clear to leave quarantine at home by today. I, amazingly, managed to avoid getting infected. I tested every day and each time it came back clear. I’m not actually sure how I managed to do that, as I wasn’t wearing a mask like I really should have been and I was around people for most of the day. I could attribute it to luck but the logical side of my brain says it’s more likely that I caught it sometime in May and didn’t realize it so my body had the latest antibody patch to keep me from coming down with it.

Between RSA and Cisco Live there are a lot of people asking questions about how in-person conferences of size are going to happen in the future with COVID being a concern. RSA was tagged as a “super spreader” event. Cisco Live is on the verge of being one as well. There are lots of questions that need to be asked. Can a conference ensure the safety of the attendees? Are there measures that should be mandatory instead of encouraged? What value do we get from face-to-face interaction? And will the next event see fewer people now that we know what happens when we get a lot of them in one place?

Tom’s Take

I could go on and on about Cisco Live but the important thing is that it happened. No last minute cancelations. No massive outbreaks leading to serious health problems. We all went and enjoyed the event, even if the result was coming home to quarantine. I went fully expecting to get infected and I didn’t. Maybe I should have done it a little differently but I think a lot of people are saying the same thing now. I hope that Cisco and other companies are encouraged by the results and continue to have in-person events going forward. Not everyone is going to attend for a variety of reasons. But having the option to go means building back the community that has kept us going strong through difficult times. And that’s a reason to see a silver lining.

Opening Up Remote Access with Opengear

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Opengear OM2200

The Opengear OM2200

If you had told me last year at this time that remote management of devices would be a huge thing in 2020 I might have agreed but laughed quietly. We were traveling down the path of simultaneously removing hardware from our organizations and deploying IoT devices that could be managed easily from the cloud. We didn’t need to access stuff like we did in the past. Even if we did, it was easy to just SSH or console into the system from a jump box inside the corporate firewall. After all, who wants to work on something when you’re not in the office?

Um, yeah. Surprise, surprise.

Turns out 2020 is the Year of Having Our Hair Lit On Fire. Which is a catchy song someone should record. But it’s also the year where we have learned how to stand up 100% Work From Home VPN setups within a week, deploy architecture to the cloud and refactor on the fly to help employees stay productive, and institute massive change freezes in the corporate data center because no one can drive in to do a reboot if someone forgets to do commit confirmed or reload in 5.

Remote management has always been something that was nice to have. Now it’s something that you can’t live without. If you didn’t have a strategy for doing it before or you’re still working with technology that requires octal cables to work, it’s time you jumped into the 21st Century.

High Gear

Opengear is a company that has presented a lot at Tech Field Day. I remember seeing them for the first time when I was a delegate many, many years ago. As I have grown with Tech Field Day, so too have they. I’ve seen them embrace new technologies like cloud management and 4G/LTE connectivity. I’ve heard the crazy stories about fish farms and Australian emergency call boxes and even some stuff that’s too crazy to repeat. But the theme remains the same throughout it all. Opengear is trying to help admins keep their boxes running even if they can’t be there to touch them.

Flash forward to the Hair On Fire year, and Opengear is still coming right along. During the recent Tech Field Day Virtual Cisco Live Experience in June, they showed off their latest offerings for sweet, sweet hardware. Rob Waldie did a great job talking about their new line of NetOps Console servers here in this video:

Now, I know what you’re thinking. NetOps? Really? Trying to cash in on the marketing hype? I would have gone down that road if they hadn’t show off some of the cool things these new devices can do.

How about support for Docker containerized apps? Pretty sure that qualifies at NetOps, doesn’t it? Now, your remote console appliance is capable of doing things like running automation scripts and triggering complex logic when something happens. And, because containers are the way the cloud runs now, you can deploy any number of applications to the console server with ease. It’s about as close at an App Store model as you’re going to find, with some nerd knobs for good measure.

That’s not all though. The new line of console appliances also comes with an embedded trusted platform module (TPM) chip. You’ve probably seen these on laptops or other mobile devices. They do a great job of securing the integrity of the device. It’s super important to have if you’re going to deploy console servers into insecure locations. That way, no one can grab your device and do things they shouldn’t like tapping traffic or trying to do other nefarious things to compromise security.

Last but not least, there’s an option for 64GB of flash storage on the device. I like this because it means I can do creative things like back up configurations to the storage device on a regular basis just in case of an outage. If and when something happens I can just remote to the Opengear server, console to the device, and put the config back where it needs to be. Pretty handy if you have a device with a dying flash card or something that is subject to power issues on a regular basis. And with a LTE-A global cellular modem, you don’t have to worry about shipping the box to a country where it won’t work.

Tom’s Take

I realize that we’re not going to be quarantined forever. But this is a chance for us to see how much we can get done without being in the office. Remember all those budgets for fancy office chairs and the coffee service? They could go to buying Opengear console servers so we can manage devices without truck rolls. Money well spent on reducing the need for human intervention also means a healthier workforce. I trust my family to stay safe with our interactions. But if I have to show up at a customer site to reboot a box? Taking chances even under the best of circumstances. And the fewer chances we take in the short term, the healthier the long-term outlook becomes.

We may never get back to the world we had before. And we may never even find ourselves in a 100% Remote Work environment. But Opengear gives us options that we need in order to find a compromise somewhere in the middle.

If you’d like more information about Opengear’s remote access solutions, make sure you check out their website at http://Opengear.com

Disclaimer: As a staff member of Tech Field Day, I was present during Opengear’s virtual presentation. This post represents my own thoughts and opinions of their presentation. Opengear did not provide any compensation for this post, nor did they request any special consideration when writing it. The conclusions contained herein are mine alone and do not represent the views of my employer.

The Conundrum of Virtual Conferences

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Okay, the world is indeed crazy. We can’t hide from it or hope that it just blows over sooner or later. We’re dealing with it now and that means it’s impacting our work, our family lives, and even our sanity from time to time. One of the stalwart things that has been impacted by this is the summer conference schedule. We’ve had Aruba Atmosphere, Cisco Live, VMworld, and even Microsoft Ignite transition from being held in-person to a virtual format complete with shortened schedules and pre-recorded sessions. I’ve attended a couple of these so far for work and as an analyst, and I think I’ve figured it out.

If you come to a conference for content and sessions, you’ll love virtual events. If you come for any other reason, virtual isn’t going to work for you.

Let’s break this down because there’s a lot to unpack.

Information Ingestion

Conferences are first and foremost about disseminating information. Want to learn what new solutions and technologies have been launched? It’s probably going to be announced either right before or during the conference. Want to learn the ins-and-outs of this specific protocol? There’s probably a session on it or a chance to ask a professional engineer or architect about it. There’s a lot of content to be consumed at the conference. So much, in fact, that in recent years the sessions have started to be recorded and posted for consumption after the fact. You can now have access to a library of any topic you could ever want. Which comes in really handy when your boss decides in November that you’re going to be the new phone person…

Because all this content has been recorded and published before, transitioning the content to a virtual format is almost seamless. The only wrinkle is that people are going be recording from their home instead of a blast freezer ballroom in the Mandalay Bay. That means you’re going to need tighter control over things like environment and video recordings. Your people are going to have to get good and talking and setting up their screens to be effective. Most good presenters can do this already. Some need some coaching. Most are going to need a few takes to get it right since they aren’t going to be editing together their own video. But the end result is going to be the same. You’re going to have great content to share with people to be consumed over the course of days or weeks or even months.

Keynotes are a little bit harder to quantify in this content category. They are definitely content, just not for tech people. Keynotes are analyst and press fodder. It’s a packaging of the essence of the event in an hour-long (or longer) format designed to hit the important points for tweets and headlines. Keynotes are very, very, very rehearsed. No one tends to go off the script unless it’s absolutely necessary. Even the off-the-cuff remarks are usually scripted and tested for impact ahead of time. If a joke fails to land, just imagine the three others they tried that were worse.

But keynotes at a virtual event can be more impactful. Because you can do some editing you can put together different takes. You can inject some emotion. You can even use it as a platform for creating change. I specifically want to call out the Cisco Live keynote from Chuck Robbins this year. It wasn’t about tech. We didn’t really hear about protocols or hardware. Instead, Chuck used his platform to talk about the drivers of technology. He stood up and told the world how we need to use our talents and our toys to build a better world for ourselves and for everyone around us. Chuck didn’t mince words. He postponed Cisco Live by two weeks to highlight the struggles and causes that are being shown nightly on the news. He wanted us to see the world he and his company are trying to help and build up. And he used the keynote slot to push that message. No flashy numbers or sparkly hardware. Just good, old fashioned discussion.

Virtual Hallways

Every positive thing should have something corresponding to balance it out. And for virtual conferences, it’s the stuff that’s not about content. Ironically enough, that’s the part that I’ve been so steeped in recently. Sure, Tech Field Day produces a lot on content around these events. I’m happy to be able to be a part of that. But the event is more than just videos and slide decks. It’s more than just sitting in uncomfortable chairs in a meat locker nursing a hangover trying to understand the chipset in a switch.

Conferences are as much about community as anything else. They’re about seeing your friends in-person. Conferences are about hallway conversations about random topics and taking a taxi to a bar halfway down the Vegas Strip to meet up with a couple of people and some person you’ve never even heard of. It’s about meeting the co-workers of your friends and pulling them into your circle. It’s about sharing hobbies and life stories and learning about the crazy haircut someone’s kid gave themselves right before they left.

Community matters to me most of all. Because a conference without a community is just a meeting. And that part is missing virtually. I did my best with an attempt to do Tom’s Virtual Corner with our community. I was shocked and pleased at the number of people that joined in. We had over 50 people on the calendar invite and over a dozen connected at any one time. It was wonderful! But it wasn’t the corner that we know and love. It’s not that it wasn’t special. It was totally special and I appreciate everyone that took time out of their day to take part. But there are some things that are missing from the virtual experience.

I’ll take myself for example. I have two problems that I have to overcome at events:

  1. I’m a story teller.
  2. Other people need to talk too.

If I get on a tear with number one, number two won’t happen. At an in-person event it’s easy enough for me to deal with the first one. I just pull interested people aside for a small group conversation. Or I wait for a different time or another day to tell my story. It’s easy enough to do when you spend sixteen hours around people on average and even more well into the night with friends.

However, those above things don’t really work on Zoom/Webex/GoToMeeting. Why? Well, for one thing you can only really have one speaker at a time. So everyone needs to keep it short and take turns. Which leads to a lot of waiting to talk and not so much for listening. Or it leads to clipped quips and not real discussion. And before you bring up the breakout room idea, remember that mechanically there is a lot of setup that needs to happen for those. You can’t just create one on the fly to tell a story about beanbags and then just hop back into the main room. And, breakout rooms by their very nature are exclusionary. So it’s tough to create one and not want to just stay there and let people come to you.

Tom’s Take

This is just a small part of the missing aspect of virtual conferences. Sure, your feet don’t hurt at the end of the day. I’d argue the food is way better at home. The lack of airports and hotel staff isn’t the end of the world. But if your primary focus for going to events is to do everything other than watching sessions then the virtual experience isn’t for you. The dates for Cisco Live 2021 and Aruba Atmosphere 2021 have already been announced. I, for one, can’t wait to get back to in-person conferences. Because I miss the fringe benefits of being in-person more than anything else.

Tom’s Virtual Corner at Cisco Live US 2020

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One of the things that I look forward to most during Cisco Live is the opportunity to meet with people. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve been to a session during the conference. My work with Tech Field Day has kept me very busy for the past several Cisco Live events. But at the end of the day I enjoy strolling down to the Social Media hub and talking to anyone I see. Because people make Cisco Live what it is.

The Legend of Tom’s Corner has grown over the years. It’s more than just a few tables in a place where people hang out. It stands for a community. It means a lot to so many different people. It’s about meeting new friends and catching up with old ones and feeling like you belong. For so many, Tom’s Corner and the Social Media Hub is the center of Cisco Live.

And yet, we now live in extraordinary times. The plan we had for what Cisco Live would look like for us earlier this year is radically different right now. Prohibitions on travel and meetings in large groups means we will be experiencing Cisco Live from our homes afar instead of the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. The sessions we attend will be online. The keynotes streamed without seating and traffic directions. Although the office chairs at home will probably be more comfortable than conference seating.

But what about that in-person aspect to things? What about meeting up at the Social Media Hub and hanging out with all our friends? Well, the social media aspect to the event is going to be even more important now. Twitter and Slack and iMessage are going to be our primary forms of communication. We’re going to be twice as social even without being able to be around people thanks to the need to use programs to connect. But it’s not going to feel the same without being able to see someone.

A Virtual Corner

Because things are so crazy and because we’re not all going to get to be in the same place this year to hang out at Tom’s Corner, it’s time to bring Tom’s Corner to the virtual landscape of Cisco Live. Thanks to the power of Zoom and the patronage of Tech Field Day, we’re going to be holding Tom’s Virtual Corner at Cisco Live US 2020!

With the power of the revolution of technology and video chat we’re going to have the option to hang out and chat just like we always do! Granted, we’re not going to have to fight over places to sit this year so it may be better this way. Also, less walking! We’re going to have the meeting running from about 8:00am PT through 1:00pm PT so don’t worry if you can’t join right at the start. I’m sure there are going to be people coming and going all day.

In order to be a part of Tom’s Virtual Corner at Cisco Live US 2020, you’re going to need to send me an email at tom@networkingnerd.net or a DM on Twitter with the email address you want the calendar invitation sent to. Yes, that’s a very manual process. But given the number of people that like to invade Zoom calls this is a necessary precaution. Just send me an email with the title “Tom’s Virtual Corner Invitiation” and I’ll make sure you’re on the list. After that we can get everything going just like if we were hanging at the actual corner.

This is supposed to be a fun time to hang and enjoy the company of each other in a format that is hard to replicate, so a couple of ground rules:

  • Disruptive attendees may be kicked at the discretion of the hosts.
  • Follow Wheaton’s Law as the Prime Behavior Directive. If you have a question about whether or not you’re violating that law, you probably are.
  • Be respectful of your peers and friends. Make this a positive experience for everyone. I don’t want to have to be the fun police but if that needs to happen so be it.

It’s that simple. Be cool, act cool, and we’ll have fun.

Tom’s Take

I’m going to miss the Social Media Hub this year. I’m going to miss my friends and I am also going to regret not getting to make new ones. But maybe we can salvage a bit of that spark this way. We might miss the sign pic or the crazy antics that happen with giant Lego figures or tiaras or unicorn masks. But we’ll be there in spirit and that’s what counts. And, if nothing else, the tenth anniversary of Tom’s Corner next year is going to blow the roof off the place!