Cisco Live US 2017 - Preview from the view of a Collaboration Engineer

The Cisco Live 2017 US in Vegas is coming closer and the time to create the own schedule starts. Through my work as a Collaboration Engineer I put my focus on the Collaboration tracks offered at Cisco Live. This year my focus on Cisco Live is completely the general strategy of Cisco in the collaboration field and Cisco Spark.

The complete Cisco Spark Hybrid story is for me one of the game changers in the collaboration game. The integration in existing Cisco UC deployments in combination with the integration existing IT services are brining large value to the Spark offering. But the real changes will come with Hybrid Media and Hybrid Data Security.

The possibilities of Hybrid Data security with all the possibility to save the encryption keys of Cisco Spark conversations in your own datacenter on your own servers provides a large benefit in comparison with cloud only solutions. With this in mind I'm really looking forward to the session of Jonathan Rosenberg "Worried About Putting Your Data into the Cloud? Good, You Should Be" (session ID: INSCOL-1016).

Based on that focus the following sessions are my main focus

Technical Sessions:

The amount of sessions offered in the session catalog is huge. The benefit is that you can get the slides and recordings of most sessions after in the online library of Cisco Live, so you can access whenever you want. So I focus in my session selection on sessions where i have special questions to ask them to the presenter or sessions which will not be posted online like the Customer Connection Program sessions. 

Meet the Expert:
I scheduled already some Meet the experts sessions for me to discuss with them how we can bring Spark into the large scale UC deployments of my customers and which limitations are special requirements we have to keep in mind in such environments. Meet the engineer is always a good way to explain to the Cisco Experts what special needs and requirements you have for your environment. In the past it helped a lot to give the the Cisco Product Manager in the session a complete new view of my feature requests and how they would help to improve the product. Every attendee should use the chance and schedule a meet the expert session.

World of Solutions:

The world of solution is a great place to get into contact with experts of Cisco and Cisco Partners. You can see live demonstrations of technologies and products you have actually not in scope and you can discuss the possibilities for your solution directly with the experts. 

Customer Connection Program Roadmap sessions:
Those sessions are my personally highlight every year. Senior Product Managers of Cisco will give a preview for the the upcoming changes in the Cisco portfolio. The topics in Collaboration Track are among others Call Control, WebEx, Collaboration Strategy or Endpoints. The highlight of the session the the panel discussion session with the Cisco Product Management where attendees can ask directly questions or express their needs or problems they have.
This year the Customer Connection Program is extended to the Enterprise Network and Security Track and provides also sessions for those technologies. All Customer Connection Program sessions can be found in the Session Catalog by searching for CCP.

And at the end the most important thing at such an event is for me network. Talking to the Cisco experts, talking to my colleagues I normally don't see and especially to see the other Cisco Champions to connect to each other.