As expected a lot of talks, sessions and interest this year about the reality of the  cloud deployment and hybrid cloud  at Gartner DC Las Vegas.

Cisco is now perceived as a very credible player in cloud -In fact a quick electronic poll  from the audience during one of  the key notes speechs ranked Cisco as the number 2 amongst the vendors.

As a proof point of Cisco influence in the cloud computing evolution, bothDavid Yen , Cisco SVP & GM Data Center Group, andJohn Manville Cisco SVP , Global Infrastructure for IT, presented Cisco vision and achievement in terms of infrastructure and foundation for cloud  : Network programmability , and convergence infrastructure are at the core of the efforts driven by these Cisco executives and solution teams to deliver robust infrastructures for both our customers and Cisco IT organization.

If you are interested to know more about these sessions, stay tuned. I will post in the following days on this same blog the  slide decks from David and John ,as well as two short and very  interesting videos that I did these days:
-One one hand a short dialog between Giuliano Di Vitantonio, Cisco VP Marketing Data Center and Cloud,  and David Yen.

-On the other hand a summary of the presentation by John Manville (see introduction blog from Omar Sultan Living with the Programmable Cloud)

Along the same lines , I also invited a panel of bloggers and tweeps , who attend Gartner DC  to share with us their reaction to these presentations and  their view on the current challenges faced by the IT organizations.

In this video you will hear fromPresidio Steve Kaplan(@ROIdude),VCE Jeramiah Doodley(@jdooley_clt)  ,Cisco Jason Schroedl(@Jschroedl)  andTodd Brannon(@tobranno) .

"After years of years of lack of competition, all of sudden IT have to face the cloud ..."  In a couple of sentences, Steve depicts the challenges that CIOs have to deal today, as they are squeezed between business units looking for responsiveness, cost reductions on one side, and end-users of the other side, spoiled by instant gratification provided the service providers and other OTPs .
Referring  to David Yen presentation, Todd talks about the programmability of the infrastructure , point reinforced and expanded by Jeramiah.  " The programmability without context has limits to how far we can use it to solve the business problems we started  with .."

At this point, Jason moves to the rational and benefits for the cloud deployments of the Cloupia acquisition by Cisco . Watch the video to better understand the logic  but also to listen to the last part of the conversation dedicated to workload, right processes and right governance in the context of hybrid cloud.

You  may want also to take advantage of our coming webcast and see how industry peers are doing to solve the very challenges Cloud adopters face. Tune in to the webcast UCS : Foundation for Cloud on December 6 at 9:00 am PST  to hear from Cisco UCS customers Xerox and FICO Corporation, about how and why they used it in their Cloud environments.