Sometimes having a lot of choices is a good thing. For example, attendees at next week's Cisco Live! US in Las Vegas might treat themselves to a feast of many wondrous and sumptuous delights offered at a premium buffet.

But having a lot of choices when it comes to determining the best technology strategy for your company's IT for the next decade might be a daunting task indeed. I can relate. Today, our customers are navigating more and more choices as they populate their ever-growing technology operating toolkit. The variables and options are seemingly endless -on-prem, cloud-native, hybrid cloud, virtual machines, containers, bare metal, serverless, CPU/GPU, DRAM/SDRAM, SmartNIC, PCI Express, HDD, SSD, AI/ML, open-source, and so on and on and on.

I have to applaud these intrepid souls for even getting out of bed to make these decisions. These choices are difficult because the future of technology is being shaped and changed every day. Rightfully, many of these customers are worried about being locked into a bad decision that might haunt them for years.

Future-proofing is the solution

What I'm really looking forward to at Cisco Live! next week is sharing how Cisco is helping customers take some of the fear out of their decision making. One of the fundamental ways we at the Cisco Cloud & Compute organization are doing this is by delivering our products, solutions, and architectures with a vision to stand the test of time i.e., future-proofing.

At the product/solution level, the prime example is the Cisco UCS X-Series, a modular computing system that we engineered to be future-ready for the next decade, irrespective of what technologies emerge or even what technologies might fall out of favor. We designed the X-Series specifically to help customers embrace what's coming through a system in the areas of I/O and memory fabric, Server and Network, performance, accelerators (such as GPUs and SmartNICs), that support rapid innovation and enable simplified management from the cloud. For instance, my colleague Dattatri Mattur had an excellent write-up about the possibilities of liquid-cooling, a technology that the X-Series can readily adopt as customers demand.

At the operational, management, and architecture level, I offer the power of Cisco Intersight that can protect our customers' investments in their hybrid cloud choices for years in several ways. One, Intersight itself is SaaS-delivered, meaning that we are constantly innovating and offering new features and functionality with little to no manual re-configuration. Two, Intersight is API-enabled so that we can integrate with third-party platforms and provide new capabilities offered by our world-class partner ecosystem. Three, Intersight is based on a cloud operating model to provide simplified management, infrastructure, workload automation, and full-stack observability across the entire hybrid cloud. Intersight sees all and can manage all, from every single piece of hardware in a data center, to every containerized micro-service.

Decisions, Simplified

Future-proofing will be a common theme in many of the data center and hybrid cloud sessions we're offering at CiscoLive! To make those decisions simpler, here are a few sessions that I highly recommend you sign up for and attend:

• BRKCLD-2028:    Build your hybrid cloud with Cisco
• BRKCLD-3011:    Cisco and AMD -better together
• IBODCN-1551:    The evolution of compute hardware in a cloud-first era
• BRKDCN-2794:   How will the UCS X-Series hardware bring your applications together?
• BRKCLD-3010:    Blurring the line between rack and blade for modern applications
• BRKDCN-2310:   Full-Stack Observability: Managing the application experience with Cisco
• BRKDCN-2587:   Best practices for cloud and compute connectivity with the 5th Generation UCS Fabric and Intersight

The future of technology should be exciting, not scary. Our goal is to work with our customers so that they can confidently make the right decisions that suits their technology environment best. In fact, the hardest choice our customers should have to make next week is choosing among the 200 different desserts offered at that buffet I mentioned. I say you can never go wrong with cr