Reflecting on Cisco Live 2025

Cisco Live this year was in San Diego, which has one very strong benefit of being a "you can dress in layers and be comfortable inside, or out" conference city this time of year as opposed to the last 3 years of desert heat in Las Vegas. Having been around the block 9 times now and having attended the event in Orlando, Las Vegas, and San Diego, San Diego weather wise by far is my favorite location. 

Typically this is the one conference a year that work can send me to as it has proven beneficial to the amount of learning and (more importantly, in my opinion) in person networking I am able to squeeze into the week.

The adventure started for me early Saturday morning with a flight to San Diego that landed sufficiently early to give me a day or so to acclimate and also some time to relax before the absolute fireh
ose of education, professional networking, and social events that happen during the week. This year, I linked up with Eric, who I met a few years back at Cisco Live Las Vegas 2022 and we spent a good portion of the afternoon exploring the insides of the USS Midway. A word to those who may visit this museum (an aircraft carrier), it is very large and can easily take 2-3 hours to fully explore, so where comfortable shoes and be prepared to potentially walk in circles a few times. After spending a reasonable amount of time in the Midway, we hiked down North Harbor drive to the convention center to pickup our badges, backpacks, and T-shirts before the rush of people that normally shows up Sunday morning or Monday. After picking up our badges (whoa... NetVet lanyards were red text on white this year), we spent a few minutes attempting to get our bearings around the convention center to see if we could find the NetVet Lounge and the Social Media Hub (more on this later). Though we were able to get a rough idea of location for each, neither space was "open".

Sunday morning started off with finding breakfast at the convention center, which was offering it on the 2nd floor outdoor patio. For anyone who has been to San Diego for Cisco Live or another conference, one thing you may not be warned ahead of time is how bold the sea gulls around the convention center get in terms of trying to reappropriate your meals. Rest assured, between the Cisco Events team and the San Diego Convention Center staff, there were several raptors patrolling the outdoor meal spaces provided by a nearby raptor rehab center. The shear presence of these raptors spooks the seagulls enough to keep them at bay. Pictured below are a Eurasian owl and a falcon that both showed up shortly after breakfast service started.

Sunday also marks the start of the preconference 4 hour technical seminars which typically are a deep dive into a specific subject area (e.g. wireless design, switching architecture) and tend to be both a combination of the information that is mentioned later on in the week in various breakout sessions as well as tidbits of information that may not necessarily be touched on in breakout sessions. Of the sessions available, I attended TECEWN-2007 "Wireless design for a wireless first world" which provided a good foundational refresher of some fundamentals of Wi-Fi design and deployment best practices that are vital to any Wi-Fi network and also some Cisco specific products. On particular product that was touched on during this session and for some, has been a long time coming is the Meraki Campus Gateway, which looks a lot like a CW9800H1, but is running different software under the hood. The remainder of the week was filled with sessions specific to both Wi-Fi design and configuration/troubleshooting practices on Cisco's controller based architectures as well as a few sessions on wireless security and Cisco ISE.

One aspect of the conference that was noticeably lacking this year compared to previous years is a space known as the Social Media Hub, where Cisco's social media team has a lounge like space for attendees to unwind and recharge in between sessions, but also to give a space for folks who are active in social media to interact and exchange things like stickers. This year, there was a social media "lounge" across from the sails pavilion that didn't have much outside of some oddly arranged seating that didn't lend itself to allowing groups of people to socialize and no Social Media Hub desk or point of presence outside of a X/Twitter leaderboard screen. The whole gamification of social media and the #CiscoLive hashtag didn't seem to be as heavily leaned on as it was in years past given the significantly lower number of tweets that even those on the leaderboard had. As the week progressed, I found myself wondering if it was worth the effort to try to land on the leaderboard or just tweet when I remembered to tweet. Another aspect of the conference that seemingly vanished into thin air this year was a closing keynote session with some sort of motivational speaker or famous actor, instead it kind of ended on Thursday afternoon with most of the main activity areas being shutdown around 2PM. 

In closing, the week was a blast in terms of learning about the new technologies coming down the pipe from Cisco in the wireless space as well as several surprise announcements on the wired/LAN switching side of things. The breakout sessions were full of information and some time to interact with some of the brightest minds at Cisco. Though the social media presence from the conference itself was lacking, I was able to spend much of my down time catching up with several individuals that I only really see at Cisco Live. Is heading out to Las Vegas for Cisco Live next year in the cards for me? Of Course! Do I hope everyone I have seen in the last few years continues to attend? Hopefully, but the general consensus surrounding the conference this year is "things are very much not the same". Stay tuned for some deeper looks into some of the new campus wired and wireless products.