I have arrived in Las Vegas for Cisco Live 2017. My schedule is pretty full and I wanted to share some of what I’m looking forward to this year. One thing I’m not looking forward to is 112F temperatures outside! I’m glad I’ll be safely inside the air conditioned spaces.

The Social Scene

I have a lot of friends here at Cisco Live. Many fellow attendees, some exhibitors, and even a few Cisco Live staff. It’s great to see everyone and catch up on what everyone has been up to. We talk about tech, analyze the announcements, and just generally geek out. We often talk about problems we are having and help each other solve them, too. It really adds to the conference when it’s not only highly educational, but also fun! The Tweet Up that happens on Sunday evening is always a great time of catching up and meeting new people, too.

CCDE Techtorial

I’ll be attending the CCDE techtorial, TECCCDE-3005. It should be an informative day all about network design and how to think about network design. I don’t know that I’ll actually actively pursue the CCDE certification, but I’m interesting to see what I can learn from this session. This session will probably generate a lot of tweets!

On a related note, I’ll be taking a certification exam on Monday. Full conference attendees have the opportunity to take a certification exam at no charge, so I figured I may as well try out the CCDE written exam to see where I’m at. I don’t really expect to pass, but I am curious to see how I’ll do.

TFDx

Tech Field Day is running Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live on Tuesday and Wednesday. The sessions will be live streamed and recorded for later viewing. I’ll be busy on Tuesday, so I’ll have to watch Cisco’s presentations (starting at 8:30 Pacific) at a later date, but I’m one of the delegates for Wednesday’s presentations with OpenGear at 1PM, Paessler at 2:30, and NetApp at 4PM. I’m really looking to hearing what they all have to say and having the opportunity to talk with them during TFDx.

Meet the Engineer

Myself and a couple other Wi-Fi professionals have an hour to talk Wi-Fi with Jerome Henry. Jerome is a deep Wi-Fi expert, so I expect this that hour discussion is going to go by really quick!

Sessions

There are over 1000 sessions to choose from. Making these choices is hard! Here’s a couple that I’m most interested in:

• DNA Assurance: bring intelligence to your WLAN issues [BRKEWN-2032]
  Remember Jerome from the MTE session? He’s also an entertaining and informative teacher and this is one of his session. I’m still pretty vague on this DNA architecture, but if Jerome is giving a presentation on how DNA can help solve Wi-Fi problems, I need to see this.
• APIC-EM: Controller based policy and network automation – changing the future [BRKARC-3004]
  I still haven’t played with APIC-EM, though I’ve seen a few demos in the past. It’s time to see what this thing can do and how I can apply it to managing my own environment.
• IT Career Choice: Specialization vs Generalization [IITGEN-1002]
  This is a 30 minute panel discussion about the specialist vs generalist career decision with myself and two other Cisco Champions. It’s in the IoT Theater at 1PM on Tuesday. I hope those who attend find it interesting!
• Cisco SD-Access Wireless Integration [BRKEWN-2020]
  SD-Access is brand new Campus Fabric stuff. It ties into the DNA architecture and I know nothing about it. This session should fix that!
• Improve Enterprise WLAN Spectrum Quality with Cisco’s advanced RF capacities (RRM, CleanAir, ClientLink, etc) [BRKEWN-3010]
  Oddly, I don’t think I’ve ever been to this session before. It’s time to fix that and Cisco’s Jim Florwick is fantastic. Should learn a thing or two and will certainly have some existing knowledge reinforced.
• Cisco Live Network and NOC: Panel Discussion [PNLNMS-1035]
  This is always a fascinating discussion. The people who run the network for Cisco Live talk about how they did, the successes and failures, and share some fascinating statistics about the network and the way it was used. I usually hit this session about every other year. It really is amazing that they are able to support 25k+ attendees by building a network in about less than a week that will only be used for a week.

So, those are the things I’m most looking forward to. I’m sure I’ll find the keynotes interesting and there’s always new things to see in the World of Solutions. I’m sure I’ll be surprised by some great unexpected things this week.

FIN