Delivering IT services seamlessly, reliably, and at a global scale for tens of thousands of employees and contractors is never easy. And yet, Cisco IT makes it look easy. This makes Cisco IT special and a key part of our value as a strategic investor. At Cisco Investments, we are pleased to expose our portfolio companies to Cisco IT, so they can validate an idea or explore proof of concepts and pilots, with a Fortune 100 enterprise IT organization.
On December 15th, we hosted seven portfolio companies at Cisco headquarters for a comprehensive pitch day with Cisco’s CIO, Guillermo “G” Diaz, and his entire Cisco IT executive leadership team, who oversee key IT functions such as infrastructure and architecture, data services, and service delivery. They met with companies across IT management, security, streaming video, cloud management, and wireless networking, and gave them pertinent feedback based on their relevance to a large IT environment like Cisco's.
The conversation ranged from market segmentation, to value proposition development for enterprise versus service provider customers, to brainstorming on potential deployment scenarios within Cisco’s complex installed base of technologies.
Seven companies presented at the event:
Darren Kimura (Executive Chairman) from LiveAction, a visual analytics and network management platform.
Rajeev Chawla (Founder) and Raj Dhingra (CEO) from CloudVelox, a pioneer in cloud automation and orchestration software.
Todd Green (Founder) from PubNub, a secure global Data Stream Network (DSN) with easy to use API that enables developers to easily connect, scale, and manage realtime applications and IoT devices.
Pavel Gurvich (Founder) from Guardicore, an innovator in Data Center and Cloud security focused on delivering more accurate and effective ways to detect and stop advanced threat.
Richard Elliott (SVP) and Saimon Michelson (Director of Product Management) from CTERA, a company that turns private or public cloud infrastructure into scalable, secure, business-critical data services.
Dan Sahar (Co-founder & VP of Product Marketing) from Qwilt, that addresses the impact of streaming video on operator and enterprise networks with a cloud managed, unified.
Sujai Hajela (Co-founder and CEO) from Mist Systems, a wireless platform for the Smart Device era.
Two out of the seven companies advanced to the next stage of evaluation for proof of concept.
Based on the feedback we received from the presenters, the event hit its mark. Darren Kimura of LiveAction said, "Getting an audience with the team that operates one of the largest network production environments in the world was invaluable! It allowed us to hear how they view our solution, which we incorporated into our business and improved how we go to market." Sunalini Sankhavaram of Mist Systems remarked, “Great event to drive exposure within Cisco IT and access to a Fortune 100 customer!”. Rajeev Chawla of CloudVelox said, “Getting an audience with the senior Cisco IT team, and presenting our technology and solution and getting their direct feedback was very valuable.”
The presenters gained insight from Cisco IT’s feedback, and they, in turn, introduced Cisco IT to new and innovative technologies. Our goal is that this event is one in many that create an on-going relationship between our portfolio companies and Cisco IT.
