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Cisco – Cloud Ready Data Centre Webcast – Review

13th April 2011 by 3 Comments

As a customer, I watched about the first twenty or so minutes of the Cisco Data Center “Cloud Ready” webcast before it got too uncomfortable to continue. Really, it wasn’t comfortable or interesting viewing at all.

Those senior executives sitting on those chairs looked uncomfortable and not happy with the process. Never quite sure which camera to look at, working from scripted questions, and stilted responses. Using canned phrases as they ‘threw’ control of the conversations back and forth.

Cisco data center launch 1

They were all trying way too hard and I’m thinking they knew that this was going to look like crap. I can’t help but wonder how many hours of time was spent rehearsing and preparing ? How much money spent to build that studio in the background ? How much executive time was lost ?

How much video does Cisco want to produce before they realise they are truly hopeless at it. Valuable resources were pissed away in an attempt to make a media spectacle ? Why ?

It’s time that technology companies learn that you can’t make technology sexy. The CRS-3 didn’t change the internet forever. I record the Packet Pushers Podcast almost every week and I now how hard it is to make it sound good, have good content, stay interesting and have your guests sound natural and fluent.

Buying video companies didn’t make Cisco look cool.

Doing a mega-launch with the “Oprah style” chat format isn’t going to work unless you have professional actors and personalties to anchor the segments. I don’t think we want to see Cisco executives as actors, they should working hard to improve my products, support and slap some sense into Cisco employees.

Just because EMC had an ego marketing event doesn’t mean Cisco has to follow. I believe that the only winner from the EMC event was the career profile of the marketing executives and very little for EMC themselves. In fact, EMC got better marketing from buying the spot on “The greatest TED Talk ever sold: Morgan Spurlock” 1 on TED.com and that only cost USD$8000.

Nice try, but no cigar. 2.

  1. “The greatest TED Talk ever sold: Morgan Spurlock” ?
  2. The origin of the expression, “Close, but no cigar” most likely comes from the early 20th century carnivals when the prize for a game of strength would be a cigar. ?
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About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus

  • http://www.insearchoftech.com Matthew Norwood

    I can never figure out what Cisco is going to do in these webcasts. I am still trying to forget the one where Padmasree Warrior and some other Cisco exec(can’t remember her name) did a silly little demo and kept using the phrase “The Power of And”. I don’t think Cisco has figured out that they need to sell to technical people instead of CIO’s. Then again, technical people might ask too many questions and try to poke holes in the solution. On second thought, keep making over-produced infomercials. I’ll just keep issuing a refresh in my web browser on the Cisco website waiting for them to update the product listing.

  • http://sabotage-networks.blogspot.com Matt Bennett

    Not a fan of their videos at all, especially the video datasheets.

  • Rob

    Only watched one but the engineering videos with that loose and easy biker looking guy seemed pretty fun. That was the one on him introducing the ISR G2 series equipment. I dont watch executives though.