For the past 3 years I’ve been working at Cisco in what we call the SLED vertical. SLED = State Government, Local Government, K-12, and Higher Education. I have nothing but positive things to say about the entire experience. Its been very different than what I’ve been doing for the previous 10 years. The people were awesome and I am so happy I was able to meet and have such good experiences with them.
Previous to taking this job at Cisco my day to day activities for the last 10 years was more on the bleeding edge: Scientific applications running on Linux, Open Source, KVM & large scale out distributed systems. These last 3 years gave me exposure to VMware & Microsoft in the Enterprise. While they are not necessarily my favorite platforms to work on, it has really helped me understand them a lot better. I’ve also been able to learn a ton about Cisco enterprise products: Specifically UCS and Nexus. This has been great to be known as an expert in these fields. And those products I do like working on simply because: “They work”. What you don’t know I’m an expert? Ok, well, I can at least open a TAC case for you.
Starting in the next few weeks I’ll be transitioning to be working with the Cisco Cloud & Managed Services Organization. I am beyond thrilled to be working in this space. Or in the words of Fancy Nancy: Overjoyed. (Yeah, I have a kindergartner that we’re reading these now). My goal is to help transform Cisco into the type of company that people look to when they are trying accelerate application delivery. Specifically: How to do better Hybrid IT.
I’m looking forward to doing a lot more DevOps and get back to my programming roots. So you’ll see a lot more of that on this blog.
Currently, I’m reading a book called Lean Enterprise. I think it should be required reading for those that work in a large organization.
One of the things that struck home was this quote:
“Whenever you hear of a new IT project starting up with a large budget, teams of tens or hundreds of people, and a timeline of many months before something actually gets shipped, you can expect the project will go over time and budget and not deliver the expected value”
This quote struck me especially because when I read it I started thinking about this announcement. So that’s the warning. Its not as if Cisco is alone in trying to to transition to the next big IT movement. HP, Dell, and IBM are all trying to do it. I think Cisco can be successful in this if they can do one simple thing: Deliver outcomes that customers want.
I’ve taken my mission to do this with two easy mantras:
1. Develop solutions that customers want.
Lean Enterprise talks about how decisions are largely made by the HiPPO (Highest Paid Persons Opinion). I’m a fan a analytics and trying things out. See how they work and moving on quickly. I am hopeful Cisco can continue to develop this practice. I’ve seen it already with the Project Squared initiative that was received rather well. I’m a fan! I hope to see more like this from our cloud organization.
I have been very vocal about certain products and asking for use cases to make sure they are the kind of things I would want if I were trying to run a business. I hope to continue that.
2. Develop solutions in the open.
Instead of keeping all this back behind the Cisco curtain I want to push our company to develop everything they do in the open where people can see. Docker networking sucks? Security is immature? Perhaps we should create a framework that maturates it. Get a Mean Viable Product out there with as least amount of work as possible. If it works, expand it: See if we can support Rocket too. Make this open source, let our customers use it. If it provides value, move forward, if not scrap it. Facebook’s ‘break things’ and move fast mentality applies here. But unlike Facebook, I’m hoping our outcomes actually do better things than waste people’s time with clickbait with captions like “You won’t believe what happens next”.
I’ve been influenced a lot by the talks and discussions I heard at Dockercon. One that resonated is that middleware should be open and free. We server a greater purpose, get bigger buy-in, and move faster if people can try it for free. That’s not something a ‘software only’ company would like to hear. But if your company is focused on outcomes then it makes perfect sense. An outcomes company not only makes its money with support and services but with a platform people can build upon.
Looking forward to some fun times ahead!
Oh, PS, I had to share the best UCS Presentation I’ve ever seen. You won’t believe what happens next.
@vallard I clicked the bait.