"Wow" Moments take the stage at Cisco Live Berlin

One of the key themes at Cisco Live Berlin last week, as well as across the tech industry, is "disrupt or be disrupted". One of the most exciting aspects of my role at Cisco is working with customers and hearing how Cisco's ACI and SDN technology comes to life through their voices and success stories -and how they are disrupting in their industry.

At Cisco Live Berlin last week, I had the great opportunity to meet with customers and hear them share their stories on and off stage about how ACI was disrupting and transforming their business models, IT organizations, and their networks. What's more, customers are so excited to share their ACI successes and innovations that they took to Twitter to share their "wow" moments with ACI at the#CLEUR Tuesday evening ACI Customer Reception, which was attended by packed room of 260 customers. Some of my favorite tweets were from @ThomasRaabo:#ciscoaciwow missing my fabric...See you soon#aci and @Martin_Lipka: CiscoACIWoW: when our non-network engineers started to design, test and configure hybrid cloud and data centre networks on their own!

The buzz continued Wednesday morning as 8 customers including Shutterfly, Keylane, University of Dresden, Sainsbury's, Halkbank, Pulsant, NBCUniversal and SAP took the stage with Soni Jiandani, SVP of Insieme Business Unit at Cisco, during her iTalk keynote, "Driving Innovation: A Path to Digitization, Speed, and Visibility Into an Application-Centric World." Each customer representing a different vertical market shared how Cisco's SDN solutions were a game changer in their organizations -and breathing in innovation, speed and efficiencies to move at the speed of business.

At the 10,000 ft. viewpoint, here's what each of these customers are doing to digitize their business; increase value to their customers; and create new revenue streams with their networks and infrastructure powered by Cisco Nexus and ACI innovations.

• Cisco's programmable fabric helps Shutterfly customers' move billions of photos off their phone and into the cloud to share their memories with a simple, scalable and high-performing network.
• 2 Supermarket retailer in the U.K., Sainsbury's, is taking their business digital to change the way they interact with customers and offer them new ways to buy groceries and goods backed by a converged infrastructure and ACI.
• Media titan, NBCUniversal, brings us movies, TV show, news broadcasts and theme parks that are in respect different businesses and require a data center environment that can offer the network as a service with automation and segmentation to move at the speed of business (and keep us consumers entertained!).
• Halkbank can address "just-in-time" delivery of simple banking applications to its wide range of customers across many channels, including mobile, Web, TV and branch tellers, while reducing the IT complexity associated with creating services to meet customer demands -including upgrading entire data center network fabric in just 10 minutes;.
• SAP is experiencing exponential growth in its cloud business with many cloud networks across the globe and using Cisco ACI to automate, scale and manage complexity to keep pace with customer growth.
• Technische Universitat Dresden, can spin up virtualized multi-tenant environments with a "plug and play" like model, reducing complexity and quickly serve internal customers faster and easier.
• With ACI, Pulsant is becoming an established hybrid cloud leader in the market, connecting the virtual and physical, simplifying operations and serving customer fasters, while also giving their provisioning, network and cloud engineers new career paths.
• Keylane, a SaaS provider for the insurance industry, can move huge volumes of data faster with more bandwidth and less switches with Nexus 9000, increasing time-to-market over the competition and future-proof the network to move to ACI.

Behind the scenes, these customers are dynamically changing their IT organizations and simplifying complex infrastructures -changing people, process and things along their digital journeys. That's the power of Cisco ACI and SDN solutions.

Got an#CiscoACI "wow" moment to share? Find us on Twitter at @CiscoCustomers and @ciscoDC.