Cisco Live! US was different for our Service Provider Business this year. We showcased how Enterprises and Service Providers -anyone with critical infrastructure requirements -can reinvent their networks with intelligent, mass-scale networking and automation from Cisco SP....

What's changed?

• Explosive growth, i.e. 27 billion connected devices by 2021, means enterprise networks are getting bigger and need greater scale
• Modularity and small form factors in SP are now very applicable to Enterprise
• 5G -which will bring a host of new services for Enterprises, including Custom SLA based-slicing and "automatic turn up" for Fixed Wireless Access for automatic branch connectivity.
• Automation and network simplicity -needed in all networks and helps integrate once disparate platforms

Many of the challenges that enterprises face are the same for service providers- like scale, availability, and complex traffic engineering.  We see more and more enterprises draw innovations from across the entire Cisco portfolio -including SP technologies -as they build out their infrastructure.

Two places where the SP portfolio is a natural fit for Enterprise are:

• Mass-scale networking-when there is a ramp in number of devices, volume of data or both.
• Automation-leveraging operating system software across all platforms -addressing the need to lower opex, increase responsiveness, and to be more flexible and adaptable.

Enabled by innovations in silicon, photonics, systems, software, and architectures -Cisco's SP solutions meet the demand for scalable, trustworthy networking and optical transport. By ruthlessly simplifying the network through automation, running a Wide Area Network is as simple as adding a new server or application in a data center. Our goal is to enable Enterprise and Service Providers to employ SP solutions in a unified manner, and gain operational insight across the network.

Our live demos and presentations at Cisco Live! US focused on:

• Segment Routing to deliver secure, low-latency traffic-engineered services at scale;
• Do-It-Yourself optical transport to unlock the capacity of fiber between data centers and put legacy TDM equipment on the path to retirement;
• Advanced IOT solutions for Smart Cities.
• Crosswork Network Automation to enable Network DevOps while minimizing the human error element from operations.
• Managed Services Accelerator (MSX) platform to unify and simplify the deployment of all types of services, including SD-WAN, SD-Access, Meraki, and others.
• Security and customer experiences as enablers across all of our solutions

We're doing all of this while we keep an eye on the bottom line -by ensuring that mission critical can be cost optimized with pay-as-you-grow options, multiple sizes of form factors, and minimal power consumption.

Only Cisco can help build you a secure, intelligent, Mass-Scale network from the desktop to the wiring closet to the largest data center, and everywhere in between. If you weren't able to attend this year, hope to see you at the next Cisco Live US!