Cisco Networkers - Toronto May 19 2011 Recap

Cisco Networkers - Toronto May 19 2011 Recap

The annual pilgrimage out to the Congress Center for a day of learning, sharing and collaboration was here once again. This was the busiest conference ever with lots of customers and vendors in attendance. The Cisco keynote speaker was Dr. Guido Jouret who provided insights into where Cisco is heading especially in the video and cloud network/computing space. The star draw was Mike Holmes of The HGTV show Holmes on Homes who brought a different spin on things. I was sure he was talking about the Human-Powered Deck being IP ready at one point.

The day is all about learning from the 25 speakers. I enjoyed the SIP Trunking where an excellent presentation was put forth with scenarios in a centralized, distributed and hybrid configuration. Thanks to Daryl Sladden for a copy of his Cisco Press book on the subject. MTS Allstream being a leading SIP Trunking provider for the past 8 years with many customers shows we couldn't care less about cannibalizing PRI rates or Centrex contracts. SIP is here to stay with some new announcements to be made soon. SIP offers cost savings and lends itself to cloud infrastructure very easily.

The other sessions I needed to attend included "Enterprise Cloud Computing" which is the entire buzz word these days and the Wi-Fi 3G offload solution overview. 3G operations was very relevant as many of my retail customers are looking for 3G backup in case of DSL line failure and it can use the new series 8xx routers.
This year Cisco ran an interesting iPhone and Blackberry app for the event called simply “Cisco Events”. I got a chance to try it and it was amazingly a lot of fun. It gave you program highlights, reference materials and a host of social networking apps. I was able to Twitter out comments throughout the day, post up onto the Facebook event site, and share with other users. You loaded it by simply doing a QR code scan with your iPhone.

Conference users were able to use their smartphones to "check in "their attendance at partner booths and Cisco demos to earn badges for a chance to win a Blackberry Playbook. What I found very interesting was they put the QR code at the beginning of the conference guidebook initiating an easy download onto their device and had users up and tweeting in no time. The app included a QR reader for getting more information at booths displaying their symbols. However, I know for sure most booths weren’t QR friendly but this feature is starting to catch on. This will be the new way to use the conference apps going forward and many others will use it and it makes a lot of sense. As an example, those in attendance at Blackberry World all got Playbooks with the RIM Conference app preloaded.

So at the end of a long day of attending the business and technical sessions you come to the realization that it definitely was a day well spent.