3 Cool Tech Tapas We Found At Cisco Live Europe

I love traveling to Barcelona for conferences. Between Gaudi’s architecture and tech architectures, there’s really not much more I can ask for.

Walking into Cisco Live!, the first thing I encountered was the huge indoor fountain called the “Rain Wall”, which was built to raise awareness and celebrate Cisco’s Corporate Social Responsibility program.

Once I was finally able to tear my eyes away from that spectacle, I spent a lot of time going over the fine mix of booths, folks and a great deal of tapas I consumed every day (yum! I regret nothing!). Looking back at the experience, I realize there were a couple of notable trends worth mentioning. Some of them are the rising stars we’ve become accustomed to discussing, and some just a mere taste of what is to come.

Get Your Head Out of the Clouds

Stepping into the conference was quite a change of scenery for me. As someone who has, over the last few years, predominantly dealt with cloud technologies, I was now suddenly seeing actual hardware. As you can imagine, I was not so sure-footed at first, as I felt like I had stepped into some kind of alternate reality where people didn’t like chocolate and actually liked mornings. A significant portion of the conference was about the cloud, including hybrid cloud, but at the end of the day, the heart of the conference was hardware and networking-focused.

As a SaaS-based company, it seems to us that everything is happening in the cloud. In the real world though, interest and investment in enterprise data-centers are still going strong.

Everyone’s a Dev

Most of the network engineers I met at the conference are well acquainted with the world of software engineering. While they don’t define themselves (yet) as software engineers, the majority of them do write code as an integral part of their jobs. This is further amplified inside the conference itself by the huge DevNet zone focused on training and tooling CCIE’s (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert) on software development. Being excited to be part of DevNet ourselves, we posted this little Rookout tutorial online.

‍

‍

The Focus on Observability

Last, but definitely not least, AppDynamics hit it out of the park with the launch of two new features in the realm of observability.

The first was focused on full-stack observability through the integration between AppDynamics and the Cisco Workload Manager. This integration allows obtaining full-stack visibility from the hardware and the network, all the way up to app performance. The second was focused on business observability, seen through AppDynamics’s Business iQ in which they measure your software’s performance in dollar figures. Business and dev are becoming intertwined in a way that affects both sides’ metrics for the very first time, as I mentioned in my Predictions for 2020.

Our clients have long been experiencing this exact notion – that there’s a lot of potential combining code-level data extraction with new observability stacks. Understanding the code’s behavior rapidly, combined with observability and business metrics seems to be the cocktail du jour.

‍

‍

Sometimes It IS All Fun and Games

My experience at Cisco Live Barcelona really emphasized the importance of incorporating all aspects of technology. There’s really no limit to where we can reach, whether it’s by entering your talk by flying in on a jetpack or making it rain inside in the name of social responsibility. We need to aim as far and as high as we can and once we reach those heights: keep going.

I definitely now need a few weeks to rest my feet, but I’m looking forward to meeting old and new friends at Cisco Live Las Vegas in a couple of months!