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Daisie RegisterMay 30 20132 min read

Cisco Partner Summit: The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be

I’ve always thought when you want an amusing, down-to-earth reality check, you can’t beat Yogi Berra, like when he said – “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

Turns out, Berra’s quip isn’t just funny – it’s true when it comes to technology. Gordon Moore, of Moore’s law might agree with Yogi’s premise: The future of technology doesn’t just advance each year, it advances exponentially. And, that does change the future.

As the CTO at Iron Bow, understanding these exponential, sometimes revolutionary improvements is critical to helping our customers navigate what’s next. It’s one of the reasons I look forward to the Cisco Partner Summit each year.

After all, who better than world innovator, Cisco, to tell us how the future is different this year than it was last year? In terms of next gen technology – the Cisco Partner Summit is the place to see it, understand it and line up resources that will help us make it practical for our customers. It’s our opportunity to learn how to use what’s new to truly transform their operations and drive up ROI.

These are a few technology areas that are of particular interest to Iron Bow this year:

Security and Mobility… For many of our customers, we are finding that mobility and BYOD adoption are outpacing the integration of security controls. This is one of many reasons security has moved to the top of our agenda. We recently completed the Cisco Masters Security Certification Audit and are very interested to hear about new Cisco products that our Secure Mobility practice can use to help customers confidently embrace these trends.

Cloud solutions… Cloud is a growing business for Iron Bow, and a growing area of our subject matter expertise. We completed the Cisco Cloud Builder Partner Program last year, and Iron Bow is just one of a handful of companies in process for the Cisco Masters Cloud Builder Specialization audit this year. I’m hoping the Partner Summit will add to our repertoire with new solutions and strategies that will make cloud even easier to adopt, integrate and build upon.

The “Virtualization of Everything”… When trying to anticipate which technologies to plan for and how they will change today’s landscape, I think about the commoditization of the hardware layer. This will dramatically alter how we think about compute, network and storage. I’m particularly interested in hearing Cisco’s vision around Software Defined Networking (SDN) and how we should be investing to prepare our customers for embracing this down the line.

Cisco and Iron Bow have a strong history of successful partnership around new technologies, dating back to 1998 when we joined together to establish the Cisco VoIP lab. Since then, we’ve partnered on IP telephony, UC, collaboration and video. We have just begun our journey together partnering on security and cloud.

So, I’m looking forward to what new technologies and new partnership opportunities the Summit will bring to the forefront. As Yogi said – “You can observe a lot by just watching.” And, that’s just what I plan to do. I’ll see you in Boston where I’ll be watching what Cisco is planning next.

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