Welcome to Cisco Live US -whether you are attending in person or amongst the many thousands attending virtually this week, thank you for the opportunity to spend time together. As our largest of our customer gatherings every year, this flagship event has something for all types of our customers, most certainly including service providers.

On Thursday at 11.30 am local time in Las Vegas, please plan on attending or tuning into our Service Provider innovation-Talk session with Yvette Kanouff, who heads our service provider engineering team, as well as Joe Cozzolino who heads Cisco services. They will be discussing strategy as well as giving first-hand previews of many of the new technology and service innovations spanning fields such as virtualization, automation and orchestration that will enable so many of the new business opportunities we speak of in this forum. There also will be a range of other sessions throughout the week such as hands-on demonstrations and discussions with experts at the service provider area in the World of Solutions that can help to provide more insights as to what Cisco is doing and, even more importantly, what we can do together to help craft the next era of telecommunications. Should you be in Las Vegas, I hope to meet you there! (Carbon based lifeform interaction is far too much of a rarity these days...!)

New this year to Cisco Live is one of our next generation strategic partners, Ericsson. While many in our audience know them from their leading role with service providers (after all, they support networks that carry over 2.5 billion subscribers...), they also are playing an increasing role in enterprise and public sector segments which they will be focusing on this week. In fact, our joint partnership, which initially just focused on service providers, has moved into its second phase ahead of schedule to cover these other segments as well due to customer demand. In fact, while we have well over 200 active deal engagements with service provider customers, the enterprise and public sectors represent an incremental 10+% of the number of engagements, representing their recognition of the benefits delivered by our combined portfolio of technology and services. In fact, we've already won our first deals there, with much of the initial interest arising from IoT, which I'm sure Chuck will invariably talk about in his opening keynote Monday morning. I encourage you to learn more by stopping by the Ericsson stand this week, as well as taking time to visit so many of our other partners at the World of Solutions as all have some very compelling value propositions to help businesses of all types.

This is always a busy week, and it is both a renewal and in some cases a new beginning both with our service provider customers, partners, influencers and more. We're honored to be a part of it, as annually, this infusion of customer interest and activity represents a new beginning for us in many respects as well.

Viva Las Vegas, but more importantly, Viva to the future we can build together.