C-Scape 2008

For the last couple of years Cisco has fooled around with the format of the Industry Analyst meeting (now called C-Scape). Three years ago it was joint Financial and Industry analysts - a format I liked but apparently few others did. The Industry-Analyst-only version became less crisp (more focused on the "dialog" which isn't always a great idea). This year's meeting was transitional. Cisco hired a new head of Analyst Relations -- Melissa Selcher - from Sun, and then Melissa promptly went on maternity leave and just got back to Cisco a few weeks before C-Scape so C-Scape 2008 was driven by Terry Anderson (Mel's boss) and returned to the crispness of earlier versions, but sadly lacked any discussion of the current business (the base). There were some great customer presentations including the head of IT for the HSBC bank (the HSBC IT organization has 100,000 employees and an outside spend of $6B/year!) and the CTO of Verizon. Randy Pond, Cisco EVP of Operations, Processes and Systems gave a really clear talk on Cisco's decade long evolution to its current, unique "matrix" form of organization (Councils and Boards). And of course an exhausting set of deeper dive presentations and 1::1 briefing opportunities. Like Microsoft, it's really hard to keep up with Cisco since so much is going on in so many dimensions, but it's always fun to try!