In February every year IT industry’s collective thoughts turn towards Berlin where Cisco hosts its annual European conference, Cisco Live Europe or CLEUR. VCE/EMC had a major presence at the show as the Diamond sponsor and it was a great opportunity for us to connect with our customers, partners and peers.
IT transformation in the digital age was firmly on the agenda. Cisco Live show theme ‘We’re ready. Are you?’ forced participants to take a pause and think about the state of their IT. The overarching theme was explored in various keynotes and breakout sessions which were all designed to highlight how customers and partners can leverage the dominant technology trends of IoT, mobile, analytics, network and data center automation, and Cloud while protecting against expanding security threats.
The show theme strongly complemented the VCE/EMC theme, ‘Redefine Infrastructure’ highlighting that a robust and a scalable infrastructure provides the best foundation for modern data center. Our booth was a hive of activity with a constant stream of visitors wanting to learn more about our products and solutions.
We hosted two breakout sessions. First was a joint session hosted by Tom O’Reilly, CTO EMEA and Antony Smith from RenaultSports F1, a long standing VCE customer. The session highlighted how CEOs are increasingly seeing IT as a driver of digital business innovation and growth responsible for survival in markets with emerging disruptive forces. This presentation addressed technology market trends, the current state of enterprise data centers, and how technologies such as software defined, converged and hyper-converged platforms can help customers plan and architect their next generation data center. Having an F1 customer present a real life use case where Vblock Systems™ was foundational to the company’s high performance and scalable IT environment that supports its need for big data and real-time analytics was the highlight for me.
Jointly delivered with Paul Carr from Cisco, my session focused on how Cisco and VCE are extending converged infrastructure market leadership through the Vblock Systems. As VCE, EMC’s Converged Platforms business continues to innovate and build its market leading converged and hyper-converged portfolio – I’m extremely enthusiastic and excited about our continued partnership with Cisco. My thoughts were echoed in a recent blog by Frank Palumbo, Senior Vice President at Cisco where he outlined our continued joint successes.
Cisco Live this year was even more special as we launched our first ever jointly engineered EMC and VMware hyper-converged Infrastructure Appliance – the VxRail. Its appearance on the booth caused much excitement and interest from the attendees.
A full house for both the sessions, it was exciting to see that our messages resonated with attendees who actively engaged in the post-session Q&A. If you want a deep dive on any of keynotes and breakout sessions, you can access them here.
We are at Cisco Live in Melbourne, Australia, 8-11 March 2016. So if you’re down under and attending the show, be sure to drop by our booth.
For now it’s Auf Wiedersehen from me!