Cisco Live Takeaways: The Evolving Networking Landscape

Last month my colleagues and I attended Cisco Live Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. The convention hosted over 1,000 education sessions and provided many opportunities to meet with other IT professionals. What struck me about the event was how the changing networking technology is reshaping collaboration solutions and the IT industry as a whole. From the viewpoint of a vendor agnostic collaboration architect at T2 Tech Group, I want to share some of the ways the new networking technology is changing the landscape for enterprise information systems.

Network intelligence and programmability

Automation is a hot topic in IT because it brings the promise of reduced costs for businesses and large nonprofit organizations. Future networking assets will have the ability to be programmed and will come with some elements of machine learning.

New network switches will be able to change policies and recognize devices on the fly because the technology can analyze and control network traffic. All these new features are because the network will be programmable, customizable and intelligent.

Network engineers will need to learn how to code

With an influx of east-west network traffic, cloud services, mobile devices and big data, more organizations will stand to benefit from software-defined networking. With software-defined networking becoming the new reality, network engineers will need to learn how to code to keep up with the customizable and programmable features in new network assets. This is a necessary skillset for future proofing one’s career and not being left behind.

Collaboration is still big

With an emphasis on WebEx and Spark, Cisco is still focused on making collaboration easy and seamless through its portfolio of collaboration products. Now partnered with Apple, Cisco is trying to make technology simple, and this is a boon to help with their collaboration strategy.

What’s your perspective?

I’m lucky to be part of an organization that emphasizes the importance of continued education because it is important to stay up to date with the ever-changing technology. I look forward to hearing more about what other teams are doing to prepare for the upcoming networking and collaboration technology trends.