In my job as Cisco's Field & Sales CTO for Borderless Networks in the Cisco EMEAR Theatre, I have the privilege of working directly with many Cisco customers and partners. The majority of these folks are what you'd call "Technical Decision Makers" and CTOs. They're the IT leaders who do the planning, the strategy, and work on the evolution of their infrastructure.

And frankly, in my 20 years in the IT industry, I have never witnessed such a perfect IT storm!

We are in the midst of a time in IT, where, for most organizations, the current megatrends are having a profound impact on the relevance of their IT. This is felt in both the infrastructure technologies as well as the solutions required to support those megatrends.

The Megatrends we are seeing are BYOD, fuelled by an unprecedented proliferation of mobile devices, the advent of the Next-Generation Workspace, Video, Software Defined Networking, the journey to the Clouds (with both the multi-tenant cloud infrastructure as well as the networks required to access the various types of clouds), and the Internet of Things (as a subset of IoE).

What is unique (and forms the IT storm I was speaking about above) is that these Megatrends are all happening at the same time!

Yes, they pose some risks and challenges, but above all, they represent a fantastic opportunity to position IT as truly business relevant. All the megatrends above are about making the business more agile, aren't they?

Let me give you a few examples of what's hot on the agenda of the customers I am working with, and the questions they're asking:

1. With several key applications moving to the clouds, how do our customers ensure security and application performance? What if they deploy for instance Hosted Desktop solutions such as Cisco VXI, how do they ensure pervasive security?
2. How do they effectively address the mobility of their VMs between clouds? Or within a Cloud?
3. What do they need to take into account when it comes to Hybrid Clouds?
4. BYOD users are using wireless/4G devices to access video-enabled cloud- based applications, which are continuously offering higher video quality. This leads to bandwidth and service delivery constraints. How do they sustain the growth both of devices and video traffic with new capabilities such as new video codec, SDN for service delivery selection and so on?
5. How do they cope with the proliferation of devices on their network? They are currently looking at their unified access strategy as well as the next wave of WiFi technologies and services (802.11ac, Location Services, ...)
6. What is the Cisco ONE strategy? And how can network programming capabilities such as onePK help our customers provide services to their business in new and better ways?
7. How do they cope with the increasing complexity of their networks?
8. Knowing IPv6 needs to de deployed now to cope with the wave of IT megatrends, where do they start?

Let me ask you:

• How are you currently dealing with those megatrends?
• What have been the implications to your architecture and your business?
• What are you currently prioritizing? Which technologies are you currently considering deploying in your network?

Many thanks, and stay tuned!