Cisco are running their annual conference, Cisco Live in San Francisco and its their 20th birthday. Its huge with around 10,000 people I think and its up there with VMworld on interesting events for the year.

Some great bloggers are doing some daily video summaries which you can see at the Cisco DCN blog. They have Omar, Urquhart, the Hoff, Chad et al giving their views.

If you do the free registration for the Live Virtual you can watch many of the sessions on demand including the keynotes. I just finished watching John Chambers do his usual preacher session style which everyone seams to love.

Tomorrow is Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's chief technology officer. Like the contrast between Paul Maritz and Stephen Herrod at VMworld, the tag team between the business and the technical, we should see the difference between John and Padmasree.

However it looks like Padmasree has done the analyst briefings on her session already, as there have been many reports out today on where Cisco are heading with the cloud.

Just some of them are

• Cisco cuddles all clouds but one
• Cisco Won't Take on Amazon in Cloud
• Cisco’s Cloud: Services, Not Infrastructure
• Cisco Launches Services, Shows Off Its Hit List

The theme is that Cisco is not going to get into building their own clouds, apart from continuing to develop and broaden their SaaS play with WebEx.

For the rest of the cloud they are going to continue as they have always done, being an arms dealer to the rest of the industry. Cisco see the Unified Computing System (UCS) as one of the key infrastructures for carriers and hosting companies to take up to build out their clouds. Just like Cisco did in the Internet boom of the late 90's and early part of this century where they cleaned up providing kit to the Dot-com bubble, they are going to do it again in the cloud space. This is all similar to when you visit the historical mining towns, where you hear about the poor miners who did it hard, whilst the merchants selling them the shovels and pans cleaned up.

Be interesting to watch the full presentation from Padmasree when its available tomorrow. Its sure to be cloudy and worth watching.

Rodos

P.S. One session that was on today which would be great to review would have be James Urquhart on Intercloud, but its not available for free attendees, oh well.

ITMATO-2601 : Achieving the Intercloud: Trust and Interoperability in Federated Cloud Computing Markets

Session Abstract:
The role of the Internet in the future of Cloud Computing is one of today´s unanswered questions. While much of the conversation has been about "speeds and feeds", the need for network and computing services to enable evolution from siloed clouds to an open and federated "Intercloud" is just beginning to be understood. This talk will explore the concept of the "Intercloud", and the importance of trust and open interfaces to those who leverage it. Other topics include a roadmap from static data center architectures to truly dynamic "intercloud" architectures, as well as what enterprises can do today with virtualization and cloud technologies to prepare for that transition.

Session Speaker:
James Urquhart, Market Manager, Cloud Computing and Virtualization - Cisco