Cisco sells network kit, right? Well, yes, and quite a good business it is too 
. But if that was all we, and our partners and customers, were about, we’d not be the company we are today, and we would not be so fortunate as to have the fantastic support of the people who have been central to making us so successful (22,000+ of whom shall be attending Cisco Live June 7-11).
What Cisco is really about, and why our partners and customers want to do business with us, is that we focus on outcomes. We actually provide an amazingly wide selection of IT technology and services, and, with our roots in infrastructure, we really do understand IT from the bottom up, as it were.
Most importantly, we have evolved with, and, indeed, have driven the evolution of, the IT industry as a whole. We were able to do that, and shall continue to do that, because we understand, deeply, as an enterprise, as an organisation with 10,000+ people dedicated to R&D, as a provider of professional services, and as a Cloud Services provider, the imperatives of efficient and joined up IT service development, delivery and operations.
Nowadays we call that joined up notion of IT services “DevOps”, which is the conceptual, cultural and technical embodiment of the ability for an organisation to bring together developers, operations, delivery and monitoring of IT services, with automated processes and capabilities that span the IT service chain.
The DevOps movement has gripped the imagination of, and has driven the requirements for, those who strive for efficient IT outcomes for the business. We are no different in our goals, but we are perhaps different in that we have made a very significant investment, with our partners, to make DevOps a reality across the whole of the IT stack, from layer 2 to layer 8.
We shall be telling the story of DevOps today, and our investments and capabilities, with our partners, in the DevNet Zone at Cisco Live. We have a wide range of theatre sessions, and pod based demonstrations, covering DevOps automation, integration, tooling and culture from partners such as Ansible, Chef, SaltStack, Vagrant, and speakers including Scott Hanselman, Matt Ray, Mitchel Hashimoto, Adrian Cockcroft, Gene Kim, Damon Edwards, Gaurav Manglik, and Helen Grenier.
We shall also be telling our own story of how we have evolved our DevOps understanding and capabilities as we have built out Cisco Cloud Services, and the team behind that. If you want to understand what your team would need to go through to make the transition to a DevOps capable organisation, then understanding how we did, and are doing, that too will help you.
This is but a small slice of what you can expect to see in the Zone. We look forward to seeing you there!