Berlin.
Europe's Europe.
Where someone thought of doing this so you can smile when paying to park your car:

Where this was also happening the week before the last:

In other words, the first Cisco Live for 2017 (and unsurprisingly the subject of this post).

But before I get into the details of the event, one small point:

Am I the only one who noticed how amazing the venue was?

I mean we are talking about some serious "form meets function" Bauhaus stuff. But the most interesting part was the way the keynote and presentation areas were left with an industrial and minimalistic feel that worked extremely well when the speakers were delivering their sessions.

Thank you Cisco events team and congratulations!

So between 20-24 or February, almost 13,000 people including customers, partners and distributors from Europe and around the world took part in tech talks, presentations, demos and so on. The sessions addressed not only Cisco products and services, but also a vast spectrum of industry and technology.

Cisco live was extremely rich in terms of the key takeaways and innovation. From a cloud perspective specifically, it was special;

It was an excellent opportunity to talk about our cloud positioning and story, breaking it down with our partners and customers. And I'm delighted to say we received great feedback.

(, we were also called the Switzerland of clouds shortly after )

So, what else went on at our cloud booth?

Exactly. Some asked for "the hybrid cloud management thingie". Others for CliQr. And others for "dragging and dropping apps to AWS and Azure". They all meant the same thing of course, and we had a live demo that was always busy. Even I was able to fire up an app that was running live in the cloud in 2 minutes. (Okay, it wasn't me, someone else was holding the mouse but still...).

Another area of our booth that got significant traction was Business Cloud Advisor (BCA). Bringing validation and actionable insights to our cloud story, BCA is the smart framework Cisco developed with analysts at IDC. It's designed to make use of data points garnered from interviews with more than 6,000 organisations across 31 countries and multiple industries, and provide insight and vendor-agnostic guidance to realise maximum benefit from cloud adoption.Take the BCA and you start with a quick self-assessment questionnaire after which you can request a complimentaryworkshop delivered by your Cisco partner and/or Cisco. And no, there is no catch here.

We also hosted various presentations from Cisco and our partner ecosystem at our always-busy (except for some reason when I was presenting) mini-theatre -from Cloud Professional Services, Cloud Security and IoT, to partner use cases with Wipro's RAPID OPS, Apprenda's Cloud-Native solutions and Outscale's High Performance Computing.It was also extremely interesting to see how large global service providers are now helping customers develop cloud strategies focusing on their strengths and expertise. Vodafone presented their vision from a global connectivity perspective, Sungard AS spoke on tailoring management levels for hybrid solutions to meet specific customer requirements, and BT discussed its global cloud integration role.

The cloud booth featured an area dedicated to Contiv, one of our latest cutting-edge innovations, as well as Cisco's contribution to the open-source community around containers and the work we are doing with Docker. Similarly on the OpenStack side of things, a live Metacloud demo was running to demonstrate how to unleash the power of IaaS in seconds, firing up managed compute resources for any DevOps teams within just a few clicks.

On a more personal note, I was amazed to see my fellow Greek friends from Space Hellas presenting their company's partnership with niche Big Data / analytics platform Web-IQ. I also saw my friends at Incelligent, an Athens-based start-up, presenting an innovative machine-learning / predictive analytics stack that can be used in a variety of use cases.

Last but not least, this final image captures my reaction (on multiple occasions) as I was preparing my best smile to talk all things-cloud to visitors to my booth,only to realize it was yet another technical question about howTetration works...

(I mean, WHAT is happening with Tetration!)