Cisco Live Berlin 2016 thoughts

Cisco Live Berlin 2016 was held last week, 15 – 19 February 2016. I was one of the 12000 attendees of the event and this blog post is a short review about my Cisco Live trip.
Venue
The Venue was huge. There are a lot of huge halls with a lot of connecting halls. It’s easy to get lost, even easier then it was in Milan last year. But like every year, there are a lot of signs with directions placed all around the venue and a lot of Cisco people (this year in orange sweaters) are located on almost every corner to show you the direction.
Most of my breakout sessions and the keynote sessions where located in the CityCube, the newest part of the venue, there was one tunnel between the CityCube and the rest of the venue, it was sometimes a struggle to find this tunnel. With thanks to the Cisco people and all the signs, I was always exactly on time in the correct room.
Because of the huge venue, make sure you bring your best walking shoes. According to my App, I’ve walked about 65-70 KM during the event.
Keynote
Like always, the main event starts with a keynote on Tuesday. I was lucky to have a reserved seat in the hall, just behind the press. This reserved seating was arranged for Cisco Champions, which was pretty awesome (thanks to the Cisco Champion program)!
The keynote was our first introduction to the new CTO, Zorawar Biri Singh (who is, I’ve heard, also a great DJ). The keynote took about 1,5 hours and was great to see and set up pretty good. Personally in my opinion, there was little to almost no really new or big news announced. Besides that, I’m glad I was happy I’ve visited the keynote. There are two thing
s important to Cisco to summarise the keynote: IoT and automation/orchestration.
Lunch
The lunch was, like always good and a little bit german based this year. I personally didn’t like the airplane – lunch box on Thursday that much, but it was still okay. Hope to see the same kind of lunch on Thursday as the rest of the week, on the upcoming events.
The lunches took place in two huge halls. The lunch personal showed you the correct buffet to pick up your lunch. If you came early, you had to walk through bot halls through a line of lunch personal. That will give you that VIP treatment fealing you’ve always wanted.
Meeting people
Cisco Live is a great event to meeting old and new friends, especially when you’re active on some social media, it’s easy to find the people you’ve already been talked with online. The meeting village is the place to be for these kinds of meetings. There was a Cisco Champion Lounge which Cisco Champions and guests could use. This lounge was a great place to meet other Champions and social media people. I didn’t want to miss it!
There was also a Twitter leaderboard. The attendee with the most tweets with the #CLEUR hashtag by the end of every day came on the leaderboard and won a prize. I was the winner of the Tuesday leaderboard. Just a little fact: the leaderboard winners of Monday and Tuesday where exactly the same as last year in Milan. Lets try to do the same next year! But most important, I hope you’ve liked all my tweets and that it helped you following the Cisco Live event if you where not able to attend it in person.
With thanks to Lauren Friedman (@lauren) I was able to record another episode of Engineers Unplugged. The topic of this episode is about Cisco ACI. I’ll post a link as soon as it comes online. All I can you show you right now is the unicorn 🙂

That’s it! I had a great week. I’ve learned a lot during the breakout sessions. Besides that, I’ve met a lot of old and new friends and had some great talks with these people.
If you’re still not sure if Cisco Live is the event you should attend, just give it a try next year. I’m sure you’re asking yourself why you didn’t attend it before!

Hope to see you next year!