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2018 is the 25th year of Cisco Live in Australia. For me, it was my third year attending the Melbourne event as part of the DDLS team, with my (veteran) colleagues Michael Clark and Gary Duffield. It’s become one of the major highlights on our calendar here in Melbourne which I very much look forward to. It’s a great time for catching up with many of our clients, and for putting faces to names with some great people I hadn’t had the chance to meet with prior. It was great to see people from all over Australia, and I also spoke with a lot of fellow Kiwis who made it across the ditch for the week. All coming together with the common goals of networking (pardon the pun!), and to attend business and technical sessions i.e. lots of learning!
This year the theme was “You’re IT” – celebrating the superheroes of IT. As a huge fan of the Marvel universe, I was happy to support the theme, even if it wasn’t quite as colourful as a PAX or SupaNova event. This year Cisco superheroes from many varied backgrounds assembled for the week, and enjoyed an overload of information from the DevNet Zone, World of Solutions, Technical Seminars, Innovation Talks, and countless breakout sessions. Discussions covered broad topics including organisations making the transition to digital, hyperconnectivity, mobility, security, analytics, and cloud.
The key message for the week was that no matter what technology organisations are looking at implementing, the network underpins all of it, and it is the people that drive the technology. Cisco Live is certainly a celebration of those people. Thursday also marked International Women’s Day, and it was great to see a celebration of diversity in the IT field via the Cisco Empowered Women’s Network (CEWN) events of the day.
By Thursday, I got the sense that information overload was kicking in for a lot of attendees and we gave out plenty of DDLS M&Ms to help people maintain their energy levels. Many were looking forward to a big night out at the Customer Appreciation Event at Central Pier, with Jimmy and Mahalia Barnes lined up to entertain. Unfortunately this year I couldn’t attend the CAE (often a highlight of the week), but I heard that it was a great night out and there were a few bleary-eyed attendees on Friday.
After any major learning event such as this (similar to when you’ve just finished a five-day course), the key action is to now take away what you’ve learnt, apply the knowledge, and put it into practise. Often this is easier said than done.
If you got a taste for some of the topics discussed during the week and would like to learn more, get in touch with us and we can help facilitate some additional learning for you and the rest of your team. Perhaps start with our Cisco courses or something from the broad range of courses here at DDLS.
Don’t forget to save the date – 5th to 9th March 2019 – hopefully I’ll see you there at Cisco Live again next year!
Jordan MacLeod
Account Manager, DDLS
