Author: johnathanw

For the final day of the Cisco WEP, we presented our pitches to a panelist of various Cisco employees, including the leader for Systems Engineers in the region. No winner was declared, but it seemed like the employees were very impressed with everybody’s presentation: there were multiple times that people said these presentations are better than what people they work with make.

I appreciate the work that Tracy did to put this project together, as everything that we learned showed up today: almost every single Cisco architecture that we learned about was discussed today.

Today, part of what our group did was hear a Q&A panel of people currently in the CSAP program (Cisco Sales Associate). These are all people who are pretty new to Cisco, so their answers to questions about what they like relating to Cisco Culture were much more varied than those of the experienced Cisco employees; the meeting ended abruptly, as we didn’t really know what all we could ask those in training, meaning I didn’t get a picture of them: however, they quite literally had a variety of backgrounds, most of them virtual backgrounds downloaded as a preset in WebEx.

These are some of the virtual backgrounds usable from WebEx software; the entire first and second rows were used.

Today, part of our day was listening to Rachel Nusbaum, an extremely young manager at Cisco, about leadership. What was most interesting to me was her process towards becoming a leader: to be able to succeed as a leader, the toughest step seems to be getting a chance to fill a leadership position. She talked (like we’ve been told before) about the extreme importance of connections: as a result of being in some convention with other women in positions at Cisco, she got to make a good impression on a VP in the future area she got promoted to; typically, when someone gets promoted, they have to move to a different area, as the odds of the person directly above you stepping down when you want to move up are minimal, and this was no different.

She has 2200 connections on LinkedIn; by far the most out of everyone I’ve seen so far in this program.

 

In the afternoon today, Previn Wong and Hannah Midkiff (a SE and Account Manager duo) presented about branding and networking; one of two presentations we had today that wasn’t really about Cisco as much as it was about working as a whole. Much of the presentation was focused on LinkedIn: social media centered around work and connections. We were told about the significance of creating a LinkedIn, yet were also told that, as high schoolers, we are far ahead of the curve: according to Hannah, she was told in college to delete everything she had from high school on her profile. She told us to have a more nuanced perspective about what to put on there, saying that if you’re really proud of something (like she was of her SAT score), keep it on: a LinkedIn profile is your personal place to brag about how great you are.

 

To start off our presentation, we were given a Kahoot (Claire won), apparently very popular at Cisco, not just CA.

Today, we were introduced to various security products; we already know Umbrella (CA uses it), and others have already discussed secureX, so that leaves Duo to be discussed. Duo is a pretty simple product introduced to us today, mainly involving the implementation of two-factor identification in software applications; to help understand the product, we were shown a demo about office 365 products integrated with Duo.

 

A picture of the demo from Cisco Duo’s website… you can try it yourself by copying the link and putting it into your browser:

https://duo.com/partnerships/technology-partners/select-partners/cisco

Duo, we additionally learned, requires all software to be updated to the latest version (with 7 days notice, meaning you have seven days to make your updates before bad things happen). If seven days pass and your applications aren’t updated, Duo blocks your access to these applications, no matter your ability to complete the two-factor identification. This has caused both the presenter, Pablo Gross, and our host many issues throughout their times at cisco.

Today was filled with introductions into some of Cisco’s main architectures: areas of focus for which Cisco has a variety of products; often, entire companies that were purchased recently and incorporated into the Cisco framework. Cisco Meraki is such an architecture: purchased in 2012, Meraki features routers which, through connection to a WAN (wide area network), are all connected to the same cloud and therefore all accessible by Cisco Service (and all routers and Access Points are accessible from one spot by the consumer). Another key feature of cloud-connected routers is that sending instructions that are wanted throughout an entire system, not just one LAN, is made easier: instructions only have to be stated once on a higher level, increasing efficiency and ease of use for the consumer. Cisco Meraki is the simplest of the three architectures we were introduced to today, but there is still much more to it than is explainable in text.

The next architecture introduced was Cisco’s Data Centers: Data centers are, as the name implies, where data and applications are kept (centered) in an organization, and Cisco’s specific Data Center products/services were way too complex for me to understand in the 30 minutes we had with Jack Calvert, a Cisco employee tasked with explaining it to us. To briefly gather what I did understand, Cisco has a variety of products that help a company’s Data Center become more secure & quick, relying on innovative technology such as high-speed switches and analytical applications for the consumer organization; because of the complexity of data centers, Cisco also has a huge market providing services in this area, like implementing and maintaining state-of-the-art security in addition to the servers themselves.

To finish our introductions for the day, we were presented a demo on AppDynamics, another company recently acquired by Cisco (2019), which provides an interface for software developers to quickly manage their applications (mainly to quickly find exactly where problems are occurring with transactions). AppDynamics features a layout that isn’t that hard to navigate, an impressive feat when dealing with data transfers, making it a very successful product despite its more niche demand than the other two products.

A picture of Cisco employees’ diagram of where data is getting transferred to, with the end goal of setting up the layout for AppDynamics. As is seen… this gets pretty complex.

Essentially, today was all about understanding the products that we will eventually have to pitch to a hypothetical CA inquirer.