I am looking forward to tomorrow’s kick off of the Cisco Partner Summit (#ciscops16) in San Diego, which kicks off tomorrow. Every year before the Summit begins, I feel I can confidently predict items that are going to be rolled out, as well as topics and offerings that will surprise me.
On the “confident” side, I am pretty sure we are going to hear A LOT about security. Cisco seems to have the only offering on the market that is a composite, integrated solution set across all four areas of cyber security – firewall IPS, network, email, and malware. Looking into my crystal ball, I will throw out a prediction that there will be an intriguing security guest speaker at the Summit this year.
On the data center side, my spidey senses are telling me Cisco will not stand on the sidelines in the hyper-converged data center market, which has grown at 129 percent year-over-year. In fact, it is outpacing cloud adoption by double the rate. If Cisco does not unveil its own flavor of a hyper-converged play, I believe they will have a connected play through their network or UCS server play.
Being a distributor with 18 of my own meetings set with partner principals during the Summit, I’d also like to see what is on my partners’ minds in comparison to what Cisco presents.
Only time will tell….let’s see how I do with my predictions.
