Cisco Partner Summit - Day 3

Just a short post, as the Cisco summit just finished up. The day has been a blur, and I have photos still to post, but that may not come for a day or so.

This afternoon was a series of keynotes from senior Cisco execs, along with author Marcus Buckingham. The messaging was largely about reinforcing the primacy of channel partners to Cisco's success, and there must have been at least 2,000 of them there. Lots of messaging about the human network and how we're at an inflection point of IT becoming much more relevant to our daily lives.

Being Las Vegas, there was a Trekkie moment during Sue Bostrom's preso (their CMO) as she talked about how things like Telepresence have Star Trek qualities. Then, out of ether, Leonard Nimoy himself - Dr. Spock appeared! They had some corny dialog, and it was a lot of fun. He sure was a good sport! Too bad they had a ban on taking photos - I wasn't happy about having to leave my cameraphone off for these sessions. That was fun...

John Chambers gave his usual evangelical mantra and really got across the vision Cisco is trying to bring to the market, and how the channels have an unprecedented opportunity ahead of them. Interestingly, there was some messaging - not just in his talk - about how Cisco actually needs to be better known, which I found pretty interesting. He really got the point across about how Cisco has become the #1 vendor across 12 IT categories, and how no company has achieved this breadth of dominance in tech. Very strong focus on Web 2.0 and collaboration as being the drivers of growth, which was great to hear.

Also, John walked us through some very illustrative demos about how various Cisco solutions - like Telepresence and digital signage - will personalize our daily experiences. They recreated the experience of going to a ball game with all the Cisco touchpoints. I thought it was really well done, and especially liked how they got the baseball tickets to be sent to your cell phone and that actually served as your admission to the game. No printouts required. Very neat.

They're closing things down here, so that's all for now. Photos coming soon. Great conference - and next year it's Hawaii. Sure hope I'm in their good books for that one....

Technorati tags: Cisco Partner Summit 2007, Jon Arnold