We just wrapped up our virtual world tour of Cisco Live 2021. Teams from across Cisco presented more than 450 sessions and demonstrations on the best of Cisco’s technologies to a worldwide audience of over a hundred thousand viewers. Many people watched the online events from the comfort and safety of their home offices. Many other viewers were fortunate enough to have returned to their sanitized office and campus workplaces and participated from there with…

I still remember the day. It was a Friday in March 2020, just shortly after the world had changed. We stood in line, waiting to enter the drug store. After a walk home, with mixed feelings, we took the pregnancy test – positive. Wow. We’re becoming parents!   It was a good feeling, but not without fear or concern.   Still, we knew that there was no perfect time to become a dad or a mum. Either…

Time has buzzed by – especially if you are a Cisco honeybee. Last year, we installed beehives near our Research Triangle Park campus, in partnership with Bee Downtown and the RTP Foundation, to support the growing pollinator population in North Carolina, advance honeybee education across the region, and contribute toward the largest pollinator corridor in the country. Along with 100,000+ honeybees, our install was complete with signage, fencing, and three hand-painted hive boxes. Since then,…

In more than one conversation with large enterprise clients, we’ve heard the networking and infrastructure leaders responsible for managing the organization’s global WAN jokingly refer to themselves as the “Chief Hairpinning Officer” or CHO. At first blush, this provides a laugh. But there’s more than a bit of truth to this statement when you consider how much of networking professionals’ time, energy, and budget has traditionally been spent managing complex network routing decisions. These decisions…

Nearly all the US IT jobs lost in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic have come back, with IT employment enjoying eight straight months of growth. Of course, some of the replacement jobs were in IT specialties other than the jobs lost, as there has been a steady trend of declining data center and telecommunications positions in favor of software development jobs; that was true, even before the pandemic. At its worst, more than 100,000 IT…