I’ve been back at Cisco for nearly two months and I’ve been doing my best to adapt from the startup culture I was living for a few years to the Cisco culture I was in for seven years. The good news is Cisco seems more agile than when I left; there is more collaboration and I see a lot of good things happening. It is great to meet so many new people and also work with many of my former colleagues. So while the first all-day meeting was certainly a shock, I’m not feeling disoriented.
As I mentioned, I’m not working strictly in Identity but will certainly be involved given my background. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about some of the meta-trends in IT such as software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud computing, virtualization, and the like. The impact on–and the value that can be derived from–the network regarding these trends is a very interesting space.
I did get a chance to get a dump from the ACS folks on their shipping 5.0 product. It looks and feels like a complete rewrite of ACS because it is. The UI is cleaner, the configuration steps more obvious, and the policy sophistication is far beyond ACS 4.X. There is plenty of work still to do but the gap between what we had at IDE and what ACS can do now is far more narrow. ACS also now does things that we didn’t do at IDE.
I am interested in talking to customers about their plans around SaaS, cloud, and virtualization (particularly desktop). If you are responsible for IT at your organization and can spare some time to talk with me live, I’d love to chat. My new email is my first name at cisco dot com.