From "Cisco Networkers" to "Cisco Live"

I just returned from Cisco Live Milan last week.  The previous time I attended the conference was in summer 2007 when I was representing VMware and the conference was still called "Cisco Networkers".

There has been a sea change in the conference:

• 6 years ago at the solution exchange floor, most I saw were switches/routers and SNMP based network management software; 6 years later I saw some complete data center management stack, including end to end compute, network, storage, and management stack.
• 6 years ago there was a first ever session on "virtualization", which was given by Jacob Jensen, then VMware's networking product manager who is currently running Nexus 9000 product; 6 years later, virtualization and cloud are part of the DNA of this conference.  Among many other things, the InterCloud product announcement showcased Cisco's ability to be thought leader in the cloud era.  

Networking is still an element of the conference obviously but it is no longer "THE" element.  Now I can see why the conference was renamed from "Cisco Networkers" to "Cisco Live".