Thoughts from Networkers at Cisco Live – Day 2

Thoughts from Networkers at Cisco Live – Day 2
By Patrick Ancipink
Greetings from Barcelona! Here’s a few disconnected highlights mid-way through Networkers at Cisco Live!
After saying it every year for the last decade, could this really be the year of VoIP? It is the most popular topic at our exhibit and attendees are talking about voice in the same sentence as Cisco Telepresence, desktop video, and other latency sensitive communication apps. We heard some good anecdotes from some attendees that were starting to run into VoIP quality and consistency issues as their deployments scaled. Management and visibility still doesn’t seem baked in early enough in far too many unified communications initiatives. And it’s starting to smart.
Congratulations to T-Systems for winning the Cisco Innovation Award last night! The category was Most Innovative SP Service Offering and their winning service is the Application Performance Management offering (of which NetQoS products are components.) They brought the crystal award into our booth today and we are honored to display it.

Left to right: Arabella Mansky (Sr. Product Manager), Ralf Wanders (Manager, TSS – Solution Design, WAN and APM) , Alfred Fueloep (Solution Design – TSS Solutions & Implementation), Surender Narayanappa (Systems Management Specialist)
Along with CA’s Steve Guthrie, I presented a session that looked at the network performance implications of very high rates of virtualization and cloud adoption. The attendance was very good and we confirmed (again) that the network team is generally included at the tail end of virtualization initiatives, but it’s getting better. Several attendees worked for enterprises that had successfully virtualized over 70% of their server infrastructure and everyone seemed above 20%. One gentleman from a communications server provider that is, of course, getting into cloud services, posed the question of the day for me:
How are vendors like CA changing their pricing and consumption models to deal with elasticity and the constant reprovisioning of the cloud?
This individual is seeing too many vendors trying to maintain peak usage or infrastructure-based pricing models and they are just too brittle for some dynamic cloud services.
The mostly Spanish-inspired musical entertainment on the exhibit floor was a bit loud at times, but it eased the mood considerably. And who doesn’t like a Conehead?
In case you were wondering, all of the NetQoS backpacks are gone. We had massive turn out from our promotion and handed out 500 backpacks in less than one day. It’s not at the scale of Network Rockstar T-shirt insanity at Cisco Live! in the States, but this more intimate affair really appreciated a good quality backpack to lug their souvenirs home with them from Barcelona.