A few years ago, I had the privilege of attending the Cisco Customer Experience Centre at the Cisco headquarters in San Jose.
I have always felt that Cisco do a great job of customer updates, which is one of the reasons I made the trip.
In this blog, I wanted to share a few little insights into my visit, for those that may not get the opportunity.
San Francisco
I’ve worked with Cisco for almost three decades, starting in the dial up internet days, and moving on to ADSL design and commission.
I then got into a lot of service provider work, with BGP featuring heavily – it was pretty early days in the development of the internet, and it was great to be working with the technology at a time of such amazing change.
I’ve seen this logo on all the study books and equipment over the years – so was great to stand in front of the Golden Gate - especially when it’s a beautiful (if not a bit chilly day) like this one.
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The CCIE Lab
I passed my CCIE lab a little over 12 years ago now, so have been qualified a while.
The Customer Experience Centre includes a small exhibition, which is a real walk down memory lane for anyone that’s been working with Cisco long term.
John Chambers was at the helm of Cisco for a long term, overseeing a major transformation in the company and its fortunes. It’s only fitting that there’s a bust in homage to him at the experience centre – so I had to grab a photo with it!
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Cisco Briefing Centre
It was great to hear from the real worldwide experts in the centre of Cisco as to the company direction and ask some of those technical questions I’ve been itching to find out the answers to.
Think they might have been an NDA, but great to get the inside track from Cisco themselves.
One of the briefing rooms is shown in this image – hopefully you’ll be lucky enough to get to visit at some point.
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Equipment Display
Cisco has been around for quite a long time – so there’s some real museum pieces on display.
Seeing the legacy kit, it gives an interesting juxtaposition to the networking equipment we see these days – the really old red Cisco logo was 
interesting. Note the small “c” on the Cisco Systems box.
In case you can’t quite read that text on the left here’s a rundown on the Advanced Gateway Server – top end technology back in ’86
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Cisco Customer Experience Centre: Summary
For any Cisco network engineer that has spent hours, days, months – and in many cases years – poring over the books, getting to visit the experience centre was – well, a great experience.
A trip down memory lane on old equipment and see how far – and fast – things have moved along.
I hope this blog gave those that don’t get to visit the opportunity share a little of what a visit to the experience centre is like.
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