Well, here I am writing my first article for the CCIE Flyer and it’s on Cisco Live. The last time I attended Cisco Live, it was still called Networkers. That was long enough ago that I am not even quite certain which city it was in, but I think Chicago. So it is an honor to write about my return to Cisco Live / Networkers for the 3rd anniversary of the CCIE Flyer!! Great job to Eman and all of the writers for getting to this point!

At Cisco, I am a Collaboration specialist covering a multitude of elements making up our UC portfolio. Of course that meant I gravitated towards the Voice track at Cisco Live, which works out perfect for Eman since Jeremy already wrote about other areas of technology. For my sessions, I stuck to the advanced Voice track including Virtualization…

My first official session was Collaboration in the Cloud led by Jeremy Laurenson, a long time Voice guy and one of the lead UC engineers in the US. A few specific products were covered during this session, which included of course WebEx (MediaNet and the client), the WebEx Mail offering and Pulse. The tie in was the value back to the customer of offering advanced user services by leveraging an existing cloud for a simpler deployment and a lower cost point. Collaboration as a Service (CaaS) is going to be one of the next big things, so I would learn what you can and watch as things unfold. There will be many opportunities for all of you to specialize in this space in the months to come.

One of my areas of expertise has been around UC on UCS, aka the Virtualization of our UC portfolio. I had some insight into the Migration Strategies for UC on UCS led by Brandon Ta prior to Cisco Live, but wanted to sit in and see how it was received. This is certainly an area of growing interest and a key aspect of the CaaS offering. Customers for years have been asking how can they run our UC Applications in VMware. Brandon’s session did a great job of explaining the solution and what steps are necessary in order to migrate a customer from a traditional MCS server platform to a Virtualized model. If you are working on this effort (or plan to soon), I highly recommend getting a copy of the material to review. Brandon is a specialist within Cisco for migration and has shared some very important lessons learned.

The last session I would like to share about is Deploying UM with Unity Connection led by Chris Barlow. This session was one of my highlights given the topic! For those of you who work with our UC portfolio, we have been waiting for Unity Connection to handle Unified Messaging like Unity. Well, the wait is almost over!! Unity Connection has been evolving slowly over the years from more of a Commercial product to finally moving into the Enterprise space through both capacity and now a full UM feature set. Chris did a great job explaining both the architecture of the offering as well as how it compares to Unity in all aspects. This will help Voice Engineers better position Unity Connection within the customer base.

Overall, my return to Cisco Live was a great one!! I forgot how fun the venue can be, how much can be learned from some of the best experts out there and just how great it is to network with all of the engineers and CCIE’s that attend this event year after year! I plan to return in 2011 for a 2nd straight year and start working towards a NetVet. See you there as well!!!