More From Cisco LIVE!: It’s Connected, Cloud and Cognitive

Posted 06/13/2019 by Bill Concevitch

The second and third days at Cisco LIVE! continued to reinforce the shifts and convergence within the workplace and the world of IT. A highlight came during 'Lifting the Limits: Data Center Straight Talk' with Roland Acra, Cisco's SVP/GM of the Data Center Business Group.

Any workload, anywhere - and nanoseconds can make all the difference in the world

Speaking to a packed room, Roland shared the novel idea that the data center is no longer a place - it's wherever data goes. This idea is a shift to very different thinking, meaning any workload, anywhere. Such thinking also presents new challenges. However, when these challenges are overcome, it leads to new and powerful business outcomes.

Paraphrasing Roland's powerful example, if a retailer can get immediate information about a customer into the hands of their sales associates in real-time, perhaps that stops the customer from leaving and making their purchase online. That was a 'wow' factor people were discussing as they were heading out of the session. Nanoseconds can make all the difference to capturing revenue in real-time and that's a real business outcome we all identify with.

Enabling the opposite journey

Roland also shared thoughts about the opposite journey that is becoming real and urgent. He refers to it as 'the requirement for the opposite journey.' Perhaps you're facing this challenge: You put a workload in the public cloud and now, with advancements in private cloud and the reality of the workload needing to be closer to the business and the customer, you need to bring the data back to Earth. It's a real issue that many in attendance were nodding their heads in agreement with.

Commvault's role in the Cisco ecosystem: Enabling the data journey in any direction

This led to an interesting side discussion: How to enable the workload journey in whatever direction is needed. Cisco enables it from the network perspective and eliminating nanoseconds of the journey helps increase revenue and retain customers. Commvault's role in the Cisco ecosystem is making sure it's all about the data in the workloads - ensuring it's protected and knowing what's in the data, so it can be served up for the final piece, and that's the cognitive aspect.

Massive amounts of data for AI - and compute power that can finally make sense of it

Artificial intelligence (specifically the machine learning subset of AI) is accelerating its positive impact on IT quickly. We see this in Commvault's own self-healing and self-adjusting backup, and Cisco is also applying ML to automate operations. The impact of AI has huge implications for business outcomes. It's all about getting the right data into the hands of those that need it faster with models that do the brain power work (remember the retailer example earlier?). For this to happen, the data needs to be served up in an AI-ready state, and this is where Commvault's role in the Cisco ecosystem goes way beyond providing the best enterprise recovery readiness in the industry.

The Hybrid Cloud Nirvana Executive Summit brings it all together

These discussions will continue after we all leave Cisco LIVE! this week. One place it will continue is in next week's joint 'Hybrid Cloud Nirvana Executive Summit' in Atlanta, bringing together senior executives with thought leaders from Cisco, Microsoft and Commvault. Watch for our blog next week for a summary of the powerful discussions at the Summit that can help you formulate your next steps in your data journey.

Bill Byron Concevitch
, Senior Solutions Marketing Manager at Commvault, is the author of 'Counter-Intuitive Selling: Mastering the Art of the Unexpected' (Kaplan Publishing) and 'Increasing the Odds: Sales Is Not A Numbers Game' (Mindset Press). He works with Commvault partner's sales teams in understanding and articulating the unique value of Commvault solutions.