The pressure is on IT leaders today to securely bridge different technologies and operational domains while enabling seamless user experiences. Platforms are essential to the flexibility, automation and visibility required to create these experiences, and unlock new innovations. In this session, hear how Cisco customers are using platforms to deliver unified experiences that simplify how they work, so they can focus on the work that drives the business forward.
Look for sessions on-demand at ciscolive.com. Follow ‘Cisco Live EMEA’ on social media and join the conversation using #CiscoLiveEMEA
Hello everyone welcome I am Rebecca Stone I head up marketing for Cisco networking and I am here to talk to you about unified experiences and and really I am so excited because in a few moments we’re going to be joined by a few of our customers who are really going to talk
About how they’re delivering those experiences to their end users how those experiences are driving differentiation for their businesses and that’s what we mean by a unified experience it’s an experience that a customer an end user a a teacher in a school has so that they don’t even have to think about the
Connectivity they don’t even have to think about the surprise and Delight of being able to experience something in a digital environment it just happens it happens happens like like it is on the slide unfortunately for many of you in the room who are the engineers behind those architectures and those
Experiences it is incredibly complex as you know there are many many hop skips and jumps that you have to take uh to ensure that that experience happens seamlessly and uh and that complexity has made it complicated for you to build it has made it complicated for you to
Maintain and it it it’s make you it’s made it complicated for you to ensure that you can see across the entire uh the entire experience to understand what’s going on and troubleshoot it that complexity is only increased by the fact that you think about the security uh breaches that could potentially happen
In all those different hops skips and jumps that’s where the power of Cisco networking Cloud comes in you heard Jonathan speak about it yesterday in the keynote hopefully you’ve heard heard it about it in a number of your sessions uh before today um but it’s really about
How we pull together all of the different components of the network to ensure that uh your wireless your switching your sdw and Beyond are really going to be connected in a unified way so that it becomes easier to automate to do the work from and uh from a security
Perspective to deliver those experiences that your customers are asking for and so without further delay I am excited to introduce our first Speaker Javier who is from Ro Javier why don’t you come up and join me on stage thank you it is so nice for you to
Be here um please take a seat Javier why don’t you start off by introducing yourself and and talk a little bit about your role okay so I’m an Enterprise architect at roads within the informatics organization of Roads roads is a company that creates medicines that agnostics and also healthc care data
Inside platforms to help patients have better lives mainly as an Enterprise archit in Road informatics my role is to help the business with the technology Transformations and Architectural strategies that are needed to support what needed in the business now what the patients will need in the future and you
Are really in the midst of a shift in your networking strategy is that correct yeah that’s correct because in the last year the pace of innovation has changed a lot the needs from the business we are leaders in personalized healthare which means also we have to produce generate
Move and compute large amount of data and also we have a lot of collaborations that all companies that put a lot of pressure in the network in the last years yep um so as you’re working on this network strategy you are dealing with a diverse set of customers that um
Might have different needs so why don’t you share a little bit about that and those different experiences that you’re having to manage for yeah I think like in probably many large Enterprises we have different customer profiles and when we were thinking about evolving our technology strategy for connectivity we
Thought okay I think it’s best to start with the customers what are really the customer needs and as we are an infrastructure platform we need to anticipate to their needs it’s not only what they need today but what they may need in the future no and they don’t
Need the same they have different needs no you have hybrid office users that in the last years we have seen that change a lot the way they work we call them hybrid because in fact they can be working at home or in the office and they are expecting a seamless experience
No matter where they are they consume a lot of software as a service Cloud application so probably internet is the network for them most of the cases but we have other type of groups like research and early development and these people really need a lot of flexibility
To connect things to our Network need a huge amount of performance capacity and if they have any hypothesis that they would like to test they may need to move a large amount of data from here to there to the cloud to on Prem and computed in high performance Computing
Environments no that’s a completely different uh need uh for that customer profiles then we have seen in the last years a lot of changes in iot with the pro proliferation of iot devices and also OT that used to be more isolated environments and now they need to use
The network to connect to the cloud to do analytics and things like that so that’s a lot a lot of change also in the network and how to introduce new protocols new technologies or new architectures from the network and the last one would be infrastructure teams now we are moving more on consuming
Infrastructure as it is consuming the Cloud providers which means we need to automate a lot and we need to promote things as S Services first and that’s also changing the way we provide services especially in data center Cloud these type of environments so there’s I
I guess how you can think about it is for some of your employees your customers as you refer to them um some of the things have changed dramatically because of Co like everybody went home and there’s a lot more hybrid work and some of the things like your R&D has
Stayed somewhat the same but all of those are being really push forward by a a need for more digital of a digital experience correct yeah that that’s right okay and so when you as networking and it Ops are sort of thinking about those different models for how you are
Addressing your customers how are you doing that how are you meeting the beads meeting the needs of your business so one of the things that we consider is that we move we need to move for mindset from managing components to really manage platforms and treat them as
Products yeah so we can shift to focus more to what are the customer needs and and less to maintaining a life cycle of infrastructure Cod and things like that so we need one of the challenges is we have uh different customer needs that is difficult to harmonize so we need a very
Stable and robust CA but we need to be able to provide services on top in a much faster way no so we are approaching it in that kind of platform concept and uh we’ll see in the next slide probably this one so um for that platform we
Think there are four areas that we have to focus a lot on in order to get there no one is Automation and Sal Services because if you look at platforms you need to consume them in a self-service way and for that you need to automate a lot of the processes component and
Things like that that happen inside for that is not only about Technologies it’s Technologies skills is processes and we are adopting things like um DeVos practices or the neop sometimes we call it net devop sorry um and that takes time but that help us a lot to do things
That we couldn’t do easily in the past now we have good teams focused on on the automation we also have platforms at the DNA Center that help us to abstract some of the complexity of the infrastructure H in optimization and visibility is super important for us to continue
Optimize the infrastructure is not only about adding new things but also removing the complexity that is not needed and in order to optimize we really need to see what’s happening and for that observability network observability is also key and we are heavy users for example or products like
I there that really help us to understand what’s happening and sometimes even tell in a proactive manner other teams that where the problem may be yeah in terms of flexibility that’s another area for us that is super important because we need that stable core and then we need to
Have flexible services on top Technologies like catalyst sd1 is helping us in the water space but also other things like moving to abstraction of the um virtual segments in the campuses with EVP and bxl those are things we are pushing for because we think it will help us for the future to
Have that flexibility no and the last one I think is obvious for everybody you cannot provide a connectivity service if you don’t have security integrated in it no so here we have things like Access Control segmentation and also we’re trying to support a lot the the security teams moving the security perimeter to
Context and identity that we think is really key to simplify that I think it’s great that you’re you are really taking a completely different approach how uh I’m going to throw a question that’s not in not in one of the things that we researched and talked about but um how
Is that helping to change or how are you thinking about employee skill sets for your team and how that might change in because of the new direction that you’re taking sorry how how it would tend sorry yeah yeah for for employees or for the for for the employee for your employees
That are that are thinking about this new platform approach to networking yeah so I think uh for our employees we are developing new skills like in Automation and self services we need to be closer also to the business and understand their needs and help them to uh understand what are the possibilities to
Do some of the Transformations we have to do and we need a very stable core so what we need to do is that the core is really harmonized the quality of the software is very good because that help us to shft the focus and move our focus
More to the customer needs and less to maintaining our critical incidents and things like that AI some of the tools will help us with that but it’s more augmentation of what we can do yeah okay great well uh I really appreciate the time I uh I have shared uh with a few of
You in the audience that I was had the pleasure of joining you at Ro a few months ago and I just really think the transformation has been um pretty impressive and the way that you talk about it has been great so I really appreciate it you with you sharing with
With the audience today so thank you so much thanks for coming and then next up on stage I am happy to welcome Ed Green from McLaren Ed hi good to see you see you thank you for coming pleasure all right why don’t you start by introducing yourself and telling us a
Little bit about your role yes so I’m head of commercial technology at McLaren racing and uh like everyone in a race team I get to wear a couple of hats My First Hat is looking at our strategy road map and architecture across all of our racing series from F1 to Fe to
Esports and Beyond and then the second part of my role is to work and find partners that want to work with us and help us go as quickly as possible out on the RAC trck and you guys have been doing that now with us for almost like 2
Years now y uh so yeah it’s fun role yeah I had the pleasure of going with you to a race it was it was pretty amazing and it really opened my eyes I had heard you speak but actually being on the track and seeing the amount of
Complexity and work that you have to deal with and think about uh on a on a regular basis is is pretty a inspiring so if you wouldn’t mind sharing a little bit about hey race day is coming we’re a week away what do we have to do to get
Ready so it starts on the Wednesday ahead of a Grand Prix we um uh roll in our it data center so we have a a traveling mobile data center on Wheels which is kind of a bit weird and a bit unique uh and that rolls into the garage
And it connects up our pit wall our engineering Island uh the uh Telemetry servers either side of the car as well as all the computer infrastructure inside that uh Mobile Data Center and the reason we take that with us is to compute all the Telemetry coming from
The Cars every single weekend and you know we’re building out our CEO’s office we’re building out rapid prototyping in the back of the garage um and we’ve got all this infrastructure to connect up um but the reason we also take the rig is then to take all the data coming from
The Cars um and last season that was just shy of uh 12 billion data points throughout 23 races and including on the driver correct yes okay um sorry to interrupt no no anything we can measure we will yeah uh and so all that data it’s captured at the track and then we
We relay that back to Mission Control in woking which is a sort of a pooll style uh NASA inspired way of helping us add decision- making to the race and so if any of you watch an F1 race and you see the drivers come into the pit Lane that
Decision is started back in woking in in England uh and that’s the reason the networking is so important for us uh in this place um but the garage isn’t no the garage isn’t like this the garage isn’t this like lovely green controlled office when you joined us it was like
40° in the back of the garage uh humidity was up at 90% it’s everywhere you shouldn’t build and run a data center um and we need the performance we need the latest switches so we’re pushing um you know our poor 93 hundreds to the to the edge and you’re very uh your team’s
Very helpful you know helping us with warranties and and looking at what we’re doing but also understanding how those switches are performing in these sort of weird and extreme environments yeah um I I mean one of the cool just little tidbits that I thought was like you’re literally measuring like um cycles of
Sleep for the drivers and for all of the pit crew and everything to make sure that you’re understanding what is the best time for them to go to sleep so that they’re going to have Optimum race day the next day so it’s pretty amazing when you think about the amount of data
That you’re having to to Really uh pull back and send to send to the offices so we try and stick to it as as best we can and I think just to paint a little bit of a picture for everyone too when you think about it’s it is just a cement
Hole and and it is it is really nothing when you are starting on day one and then you get just this tiny little space to work in because obviously most of the space needs to be for the cars so we’re running in about a kilm and a half of
Fiber 3 km of copper and some things you know we don’t normally think about but every time we take the the rack off the Lorry and we power up our data center we got to make sure it’s the same switch you know no one’s tampered with it in in
Uh in motion we’ve not had any sort of security breaches we travel to to all sorts of different regions around the world and so things like secure boot although you know you wouldn’t think about that all the time for us those things are important and we do use them
Pretty much every week when we’re racing yeah so um why don’t we talk a little bit more about security it’s not just about on at the race but obviously the data that’s sent back to the office as well as the office your security for all of your employees including your drivers
So why don’t you share a little bit about that yeah so one of the biggest um you know we we don’t really go and just and hack each other that’s a bad idea and uh there’s Financial penalties which are not a good idea to sort of try and
Take each other’s data or designs but what we do see is a huge amount of um IP loss from people and so actually understanding how uh you know if someone moves to another race team there’s um we have people um policies to help with that and quite long gardening leaves
What we really want to understand is where the data is going east to west across the building uh so some of the visibility you’re giving us through the network is helping us to understand exactly where the data is going who’s ACC accessing which systems at the right
Time um and then you know all that sort of physical security as well you know is my phone near the right access point near where my laptop’s connected if I’m doing MFA just the the levels of security and insight you can give us it’s not too dissimilar to Telemetry we
Get from the Cars you know there’s the stuff you want to react to live in real time if you see the engines getting a bit too hot um but there’s other data sets that you’ll look to optimize and improve performance as well so I think it’s it’s nice that both teams sort of
Share that culture great and last you talked a little bit about visibility it’s not just about visibility for security purposes but one of the things that I love and I see some of the Thousand eyes team and in the uh in the audience is um you literally walk around
With thousand eyes on your phone for the entire race just like there like basically watching it instead of the race so why don’t you share a little bit about how important that that visibility and insurances for you I mean I encourage everyone to watch the race it
Is really exciting but for me um we put thousand eyes across our uh track side and HQ environment in about two days um we did it ahead of the Montreal Grand Prix we had a very short Change freeze window uh and we started by putting it on a couple of Engineers um workstations
On the pit wall uh and then between sessions we expanded that um and what it helps you is during the race you’ll know if someone’s about to have an issue the worst is when you you know you get the someone lights up on the it channel on
The radio at track and they say hey the Telemetry is not looking quite right when you’re in the moment and you’re you know you’re racing all of that matters um with thousand eyes we get a really clear view of exactly what’s happening is it a database issue is it network is
There latency you know every racetrack we go to we’re taking a 100 megga Ms circuit so we don’t have huge amounts of bandwidth CU it’s it’s very expensive to pop it up for you know I’m asking for an internet connection in 24 and I expect about a one minute SLA so
It’s it’s really expensive and um you know having that Insight means that you’re not fearful when the engineer presses the button and says hey this doesn’t look quite right you can understand the differences we can also start to surface some of that information to the engineers sat in this building in in
Woking and it means they know what the their colleagues on the pit wall are having to deal with as well so just giving people that visibility that Insight being quite transparent with it uh you know much in the same way you guys have been in across the security
World uh is really important and then at this place as well uh we’re just going to a brand new network we’re putting in um an entirely new 6E uh 100 Gig to the access layer seeing as fast as we can possibly go and now knowing that we can
Get thousand eyes you know on the switch and seeing exactly what’s happening um that gives our team a lot of confidence and we can respond quickly okay last question is just what are some of the things that you see coming for how your partnership with Cisco is is going and
Some of the exciting things about Cisco networking Cloud uh so for us networking Cloud um You full upgrade at the office is exciting uh we’ve got a full platform approach so we use maraki to deal with our guest traffic at the racetracks we use uh Mai in the garage to provide our
Team and Engineers um but back here at the office being able to like you know take your foot off and no quas policies and just go as fast as we can across the network that means that Engineers won’t have to you know think or be concerned we know what they’re doing they’re
Staying on our Network um and we’re going to give them you know every bit of resource they need to go design the fastest possible car and then just the I think the constant iterations that your teams are pushing for us that’s exciting so you know it
Sort of moves away from these big lumpy drops and now we’re moving into this sort of constant Evolution and if you look at the F1 car um if we launched a car much in the same way as you launch a product and we didn’t touch it for a
Season even if we won the first race we’d be at the back of the field by the end of the season yeah so it’s fair to say if you don’t innovate you’re going backwards um and I think that’s sort of a shared DNA between the two of us
Awesome thank you so much Ed I really appreciate it um thank you I was was telling Ed he definitely has converted me to be an F1 fan with McLaren so thanks Ed um last but not least sanir I would like to welcome you on stage sanir
Is from BT and he’s going to talk a little bit about uh sustainability is initiatives with BT thank you for joining us my pleasure absolutely um so if you wouldn’t mind just again starting off by introducing yourself and your role with BT yeah absolutely so sa I’m
The global head of su stainability for business art BT my role is made up of two components really so one is to embed sustainability by Design into our core products including our network products uh and the second is to help our customers leverage our technology some
Of which is built on Cisco to help our customers achieve their own sustainability Ambitions great and uh one of the things that I I was talking to Colin another one of your uh colleagues uh a few months ago and he was telling me about some of the
Initiatives that you have done for your own infrastructure before even you’re thinking about your customers so would you mind starting off with that and some of the the challenges that you were seeing and some of the upgrades that you went through over and are continuing to
Go through over the next few months yeah absolutely so uh very recently we launched Global fabric uh Global fabric is our new international uh Network for connectivity um it’s built to help customers innovate at PACE uh we use the three s’s when we talk about um Global Fabric and that’s um secure multicloud
Connectivity at scale and at speed now it’s built on uh Cisco devices so we use the NCS infrastructure and we deliberated for a number of months in terms of specifically selecting the right devices and the right partner and we did that on the basis of sustainability so by averaging The Cisco
Infrastructure within Global fabric uh we’re able to reduce our energy consumption by approximately 78% so effectively we’re about we’re able to do much more with less power y uh but the positive aspect of that actually is in terms of what does it mean for our customers because yes you
Know BT deploys this network we pay the energy bills it’s contributing to our Ambitions but actually if you’re a customer consuming Network Serv Services then our impact is your impact within the supply chain so by being able to reduce the carbon footprint of global fabric by Approximately 80% our
Customers benefit by having a lower scope 3 supply chain impact from BT yeah and I think what’s what’s great is as a customer of Cisco like not only are you seeing the sustainability and uh impact of that reduced power and and the carbon footprint but also the fact that it’s a
Cost it’s a pretty 78% is a pretty massive cost savings as well so um so I think it’s like it’s it’s it’s good for the planet and it’s good for the bottom line right uh uh so um so as you started to do that upgrade as you started to
Think about hey we’ve seen this benefit we’re going to pass it on to the customers how are you doing that what are the some of the offerings that you have built in order to pass on to the customers yeah very good question so I mean the the first thing is just
Thinking about what the network can enable so um one of the big things around Global fabric is sovereignty so we know customers have certain requirements when it comes to uh how the data is managed uh where it resides um but alongside that there are some uh geopolitical issues and you know
Customers want to ensure that the the traffic paths the slas ETC are maintained um during these geopolitical challenges so uh Global fabric has the ability to root traffic uh to avoid some of these GE political challenges uh but also to um ensure data sovereignty is retained so that’s one aspect another
Area we’re looking into is um coming back to sustainability um leveraging the Data Insights that we actually get from traffic coming through Global fabric um we can build a deep understanding in terms of what is that data used for is it critical and look for rooting in
Terms of the greenest path so um Global networks they’ll operate in multi multi- regions and every region has a different grid intensity factor and that’s a really important component to thinking around how you lower your carbon emissions as a customer so by leveraging this capability within Global fabric we
Have the ability to help customers make choices active choices in terms of uh how they root their traffic and where they’re rooting it to a to remain that sovereignty but also to be as sustainable as possible and you’re doing that all via um an SDA a software defined architecture is that correct yes
So um we have a global fabric uh application or or a customer portal where customers can log in and make changes to their service in hours not in weeks like um Network Services used to operate uh but alongside that we also have the ability to enable customers to
Leverage apis as a way of uh configuring their Network as they would like best for their applications and best for uh uh their organization and um innovating up pace yeah um we talked a little bit uh not just about sustainability but another very Hot Topic at Cisco live
This year is AI so what are some of the ways that uh you are using your new network and and uh and your new approach um and and how you’re approaching AI as infrastructure and how you’re building it into some of your products perhaps
Yeah so I mean uh one of the example I gave there was around routing traffic that’s based on the data we collect within the network and that delivers the outcomes when it comes to sovereignty and sustainability so uh AI is a key enaer to uh us offering that to our
Customers but in terms of where else we’re leveraging um AI well um we when it comes to developing networks in the customer environment so when we’re putting in landing infrastructure or when we’re putting in sd1 we have the ability to look at uh how customers are using their Network and the outcomes
They want to achieve when it comes to sustainability and um we leverage AI as a way of helping organizations to make smarter decisions around when they turn devices on and off across their land infrastructure that’s a reduction in energy usage carbon footprint but also cost savings um I hear a lot from our
Customers that as part of their sustainability Journey or decarbonization Journey they want to look at optimization in terms of their fleets uh their supply chain and their built environment and in all of those examples we’re leveraging the capabilities of AI to help customers make smarter decisions around uh let’s
Say for Fleet um do you idle modes uh the best paths to to travel that’s the most sustainable in buildings uh when do you need to have your heating and cooling uh running and when should you not have your heating and cooling running and that comes from the ecosystem play because we leverage
Capabilities like Cisco spaces to understand occupancy as an example and then we we Leverage The Wider ecosystem within Cisco to plug into building Energy Management systems and use the occupancy data as a way of helping customers optimize uh their built infrastructure for Energy Efficiency it’s awesome uh one of the questions uh
That I I’m hoping you can answer which I asked Javier as well is how how do you think that this is transforming the way that your employees the ones who are are helping to build and think about these Services how are their skill sets changing what are what are you looking
To transform within your own organization in order to address some of these needs yeah really good question I think the first thing is purpose instilling a sense of purpose within the uh we call it the employee value proposition some others may call it the colleague uh value proposition I think
Once you have that sense of purpose which in our case it’s BT wants to connect for good right that’s that’s that’s our purpose and sustainability is at the heart of that so when we talk about embedding sustainability into the networks that then becomes a core component of the employee value
Proposition they are delivering an outcome for BT and an outcome for our customers that has meaning for um the planet and and for uh BT as a as a company so that’s that’s the first thing and then just talking about unified experiences we’ve talked a lot about collaboration we’ve talked a bit about
Security in um with Javier but actually how do you bring that together to create a seamless experience for our customers um you know we’ve always historically from a networking perspective talked about security we’ve talked about resilience you know all the key kpis and SLA parameters that everyone cares about
And expects from networks but all of a sudden you’ve got an additional Dimension sustainability yeah and with digital growth with the explosion of uh gen over the next few years we’re going to see an increase in compute power we’re going to see an increase in data
Centers all of a sudden we can bridge that gap for customers between the key things that they relied on the network for with the new sustainability parameters and that’s a completely new dimension it’s something really exciting for for our colleagues and as I said it instills purpose within our organization
Awesome all right well thank you so much it’s it is a really great call I think to to see BT driving towards us and not only within their own infrastructure but for their customers as well so thank you so much for your time I really appreciate it thank
You so thank you all I really appreciate you all joining us I think the three big takeaways that we have to think about are one heard consistently pretty much is a platform approach to how we are moving forward and preparing for the future of the network the second is
Really that transformation of employees and the third is that Cisco networking cloud and our approach helps to develop some of those core themes inclusive of um of security sustainability and that platform approach so if you would like to learn more and continue the conversation please click the QR code um
And we have a few sessions that are going to be available and you can always check us out in the hub for more information thank you [Applause] everyone