Cisco opened its Live 2022 conference in Las Vegas with a keynote speech from its CEO and president, Chuck Robbins. The event, which drew an estimated 16,000 attendees and exhibitors, is a conference for Cisco, along with its customers and partners, which showcases technologies and innovations in the internet and networking. For the past two years, Cisco structured the conference as all-digital affair in consideration of pandemic concerns. This year it was live, with remote participants able to “attend” it on the web.
Robbins began his talk highlighting the changes the country and the world have undergone in the last five years: global trade wars and tariffs, the pandemic, war in Ukraine, supply chain issues and runaway inflation. He warned that this constant change and crisis will always be around and things really won’t ever get back to “normal.”
He also praised technology for how it helped keep the global economy going to through the pandemic. And business leaders were forced to become familiar with the new networking and internet technologies as they adapted to conditions imposed by the pandemic. The upside of this is that management is now aware of the tools it has to deal with four priorities Cisco first identified in 2019:
- Reimagining applications: Deciding how to acquire and deploy software, whether from a public or private cloud, from the software developer (SaS).
- Hybrid work: How to combine employees working from homes and the office and those are scattered all over the globe.
- Cybersecurity: With networks now going into offices and homes, as well as labs and mobile employees, cybersecurity experts have more to worry about and protect.
- Transforming infrastructure: The need for networks and computing power to be redesigned to match the changes in how data is handled and moved, the spread of employee working from home, and the growth of IIoT.
To highlight Cisco’s work with customers and clients, Robbins talked via the internet with Chris Farley, CEO of Ford. Farley spoke on how Cisco helped with Ford’s effort to develop the Mustang Mach-E, one of Ford’s first electric vehicles, and move more development and production to electric vehicles. One of the biggest changes Cisco is helping Ford with, one Fairly calls “a refounding of the company,” is to differentiate vehicles and make them “digital products” based on the software they use, which could be delivered over the web and updated on the fly.
This speech and others from the Cisco Live 2022 event can be seen below: