10 years at Cisco Live US, SD-WAN and Tech Field Day Extra
I just got home from Orlando, after two long flights with delays at each stop and reflected on another great Cisco Live event… with a smile on my face. The week of Cisco Live in the U.S. is one of our most intense weeks of the year, with many customer and partner meetings, dinners, speaking events and trying to learn new things to keep up with Cisco’s latest technology. We were also a Platinum sponsor with a 30’x30’ booth, where we ran continuous demos and customer discussions all day, Monday through Thursday. Here’s a picture of us, just before the World of Solutions opened this year.
Amazingly, this is my 10th Cisco Live U.S. while at LiveAction. My first event with LiveAction was in 2009. As I reflect back on the years, it’s really incredible to see our transformation. In the early years, we had a “tiny” booth at the back of the show floor and hoped attendees could eventually spell “LiveAction” much less understand and appreciate our rich visual analytics. At that time, we were “ActionPacked Networks!” and the product name was “LiveAction”. Here’s a picture of our booth from Cisco Live San Francisco in 2009.
The Customer Appreciation event was at Treasure Island in San Francisco. I remember it being cold, right on the water. Here’s a picture of us with Devo hats (you can guess who the headlining performer was…) I’m in the gray sweater and our CTO/Co-Founder, John Smith is sitting to my left with chopsticks in hand. (The gentleman to John’s left is LiveAction co-founder, Nelson Kanemoto and his wife Theresa.) Those were fun times!
Fast forward to 2018 and we’re still having fun! LiveAction not only attended Cisco Live US in Orlando (which is our biggest event of the year) but also Cisco Live in Barcelona and Melbourne. We are a key, eco-system partner for Cisco with deep integration in many technologies, including QoS, voice/video performance monitoring, AVC, IWAN, SD-Access and we are starting to leverage DNA-C as a platform to augment our NPMD capabilities.A major buzz at the show surrounded SD-WAN Viptela, all of their breakout sessions were completely full. We worked closely with Viptela, even prior to their acquisition by Cisco last year. This year we made huge strides to further empower network engineers to operationalize SD-WAN.
John Smith and I had the opportunity to present at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live. John presented the LiveAction LiveNX architecture, roadmap, integrations and visual analytics, along with the SD-WAN overview and use cases. I had the fun part of demoing the SD-WAN integrations and all the hard work of our tireless and dedicated engineering team.
In the demo, I was happy to show off our new visual analytics such as the geo-topology view overlayed with NetFlow conversations. I highlighted how network engineers can leverage LiveNX to verify their VPN/VRF topologies and also, a simple, 3-step process to troubleshoot a service provider brownout. Here are some screencaps and video from the demo.
Many of our customers are eagerly adopting new software defined capabilities of the network, like SD-WAN. They need this technology to drive toward digital transformation and keep up with the increasing demands on their business. As new, modern networks are being automated, network engineers need solutions like LiveNX to provide visibility into what’s happening. The human aspect is critical. Experienced network engineers are needed to verify the business intent is being met in this brave, new software defined world. LiveNX is that verification solution…
As our customers continue to march forward with digital transformation, we at LiveAction will continue to grow to meet their demand for visibility, to simplify the network. I can’t wait to see what the next 10 years will bring at LiveAction. I also wonder what the customer appreciation hat will be at the 2028 Cisco Live…
June 19, 2018
David Izumo, Principal Engineer – Technical Marketing
