Tech Field Day covers a wide variety of events such as Mobility Field Day, Storage Field Day, Data Field Day, and now Cloud Field Day. Cisco presented at#CFD1 to a panel of 14 influencers and to a larger audience via live stream on September 14.

For those of you who haven't seen or heard of Tech Field Day, here is the breakdown: the top influencers (bloggers, podcasters, speakers, and freelance writers) come to Cisco to listen to a few experts talk about exciting topics in a presentation and discussion format. The influencers may ask questions throughout the presentation which makes the sessions more interesting and interactive.

Cloud Architect Bill Harper started off our#CFD1 sessions covering why private clouds are important in any company's strategy and how Cisco Metapod can help accelerate the cloud journey.  Bill covers the Cisco Metapod architecture and customer use cases for private cloud.  Bill covered new features in the latest platform release and also showed comparison to public costs.

Cisco Metapod Overview with Bill Harper Agenda:

• Building A Cloud Strategy
• Digitization Trends and Drivers
• Cisco Metapod
• Cloud Economics

You can find below the recorded session of Bill's presentation and the attending influencers questions and comments.

Noteworthy questions from the influencers (with time stamp included):

@TheJasonNash (8:00) You're providing the underlying infrastructure, a lot of companies do that, what about things above that? Getting organizations to the point where they can take advantage of things like OpenStack?

@JoshCoen (14:50) Outside of the Cisco name, what differentiates you guys from Platform9, and some of the other competitors that are doing OpenStack as a Service?

@TheJasonNash (33:25) Knowing that you manage the control planes, do you have access to the data plane? How does that work since you're controlling OpenStack?

To listen to more questions from the influencers watch the recorded session above and feel free to give you input in the below comment section.

Watch out for the next blog summary of Cloud Field Day where we cover Mantl with one of our Senior Cloud Services Architects.