For me personally, this year's Cisco Live will be the most exciting event ever!  It comes after our Tetration Analytics announcement, the introduction of Cisco CloudCenter, and the showcasing of the latest generation of Cloud Scale Nexus fabric switches for Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI).  We have over 28,000 expected attendees this year, so I hope you are as excited as I am to make new connections and learn more about the latest "must see cool" innovations in data center.

In my first blog, Applications: The Reason We Have Infrastructure, I started explaining the relevance of ACI to the application teams.  And with CloudCenter, Tetration, and ACI demonstrations all being show cased at this year's Cisco Live, app developer and infrastructure operation teams have the opportunity to see firsthand the power of the model driven approach to software-defined infrastructure.

Key takeaways to consider as an app developer team when spinning up on the product:

• CloudCenter allows you to model applications once and deploy them anywhere, with enhanced security and visibility on ACI.
• Tetration Analytics helps you identify where your existing applications are, automatically create the application dependency maps to see them, and to create the application profiles for ACI simplifying the on-boarding of hundreds of applications.
• And ACI is the comprehensive SDN architecture based on a business-relevant application policy language to centrally manage and control the network fabric, services, and, especially, to govern and secure the access to applications and its data.

Take a look at our Cisco Live session catalog to learn about these open platforms - ACI, CloudCenter, and Tetration Analytics.  And keep in mind, all of them feature open interfaces for integration, and also share a common application policy model for describing application requirements.

Finally, I encourage you to come see my session at Cisco Live, Simplify DevOps for Application Centric Data Centers.   I will demonstrate how a common application policy framework enables application development teams to integrate and automate developer and operational workflows -a critical and necessary piece to supporting on-demand application deployment on the right infrastructure.  All of this is accomplished through open APIs in ACI and CloudCenter which, in turn, enables easy integration with popular continuous integration applications like Jenkins.

I look forward to talking to you at my session, and if not there, at the World of Solutions Campus for Data Center and Cloud / SDN.

And for those of you attending Cisco Live Las Vegas 2016, make a note to take in these must see sessions.  We will cover exciting new ideas designed to help you map your data center and cloud strategy to your business priorities:

Opening Keynote : Accelerating Digital Transformation, Chuck Robbins, CEO, Cisco Systems, Inc.

Schedule Monday 10:30am -12:00 pm

Next Generation Data Center Part 1: Analytics, Automation and Orchestration

Liz Centoni, SVP/GM Computing Systems Product Group, Cisco

Tom Edsall, Cisco Fellow & CTO Insieme Networks, Cisco

Ishmael Limkakeng, VP Product Marketing, Cisco

Joseph Pinto, SVP Technical Support Services, Cisco

Schedule Monday, Jul 11, 2:30 p.m. |Schedule Wednesday, Jul 13, 2:30 p.m. | Oceanside A, Level 2| Oceanside A, Level 2

Next Generation Data Center Part 2: Path to Cloud

Kip Compton, VP, Cisco Cloud Platform and Services, Cisco

David Cope, Senior Director, CliQr Market Development, Cisco

Zorawar Biri Singh, CTO/SVP, Cloud Services & Platforms, Cisco

Schedule Wednesday, Jul 13, 2:30 p.m. | Oceanside A, Level 2

Industry Keynote: Digitization in a Cloud-Native World

Val Bercovici, CTO, SolidFire, NetApp

Trey Layton, SVP, Chief Technology Officer, EMC

Sandra Rivera, VP, GM, Network Platforms Group, Intel

Zorawar Biri Singh, CTO/SVP, Cloud Services & Platforms, Cisco

Schedule Wednesday, Jul 13, 10:30 a.m. | Mandalay Bay Events Center, Level 1| Mandalay Bay Events Center, Level 1

Building Out Your Data Center and Cloud Strategy

Dhritiman Dasgupta, VP of Marketing, Cisco

Schedule Tuesday, Jul 12, 2:30 p.m. | South Seas A, Level 3| South Seas A, Level 3

Additional Information on Cisco Live Las Vegas:

Blog: A quick journey through all the excitement that awaits you at Cisco Live 2016

Cisco Live event site