Author - Ali McKeand CTO Office Innovation

This year was a super special Cisco Live EMEA for us at CAE, the chance to showcase our CAE Labs Sustainable Networking solution in the World Of Solutions! Joining me for the week was our dream team of Jake Meldrum, Jack Brighton and Ryan Glover who took to our exhibition stand every day and spent an amazing amount of time with people and our own customers, listening and understanding the challenges they currently face. 

• Cisco Store Tech Labs Tour
• CiscoTV Studio Tour
• Cisco AI Observatory in the Cisco AI Hub Zone
• AI-Ready Data Centre Tour
• Campus, Branch and Industrial IoT Tour
• Splunk Platform and ITSI demo
• Cisco AI Defence demo

Stepping into Cisco Live EMEA , I knew it was an exciting first day at an already packed Cisco Live EMEA.  My first stop was to the awesome Cisco DevNet Zone. The time spent here was focused on learning about their strategic priorities, development opportunities and the various innovations challenges we have been living and breathing!

My takeaway from this session was that this part of Cisco is the enabler for all things CAE Labs, ensuring that we can continue to build new experiences and automation capabilities for our joint customers. A real moment to step back and reflect on everything we have achieved for our customers' so far....and there is even more potential we can fulfill.

Next stop gave me the chance to fully immerse myself into all things sustainability.  Stepping away from CAE Labs and our own approach to sustainable networking, the zone offered the opportunity to learn about the different initiatives and programmes currently underway that help customers maximise their own opportunity to decarbonisation and evolve their way of operating. 

I was fortunate enough this year to be asked onto the stage as part of a panel session in the Purpose Pavilion. Talking to the audience about how CAE have operationalised various APIs to deliver tangible outcomes that removes energy waste, saves valuable OpEx costs and eliminates carbon emissions by optimising Campus and Branch Networks through the Cisco Networking Cloud platform. Part of the panel was to also share my thoughts during a fireside panel chat with the Cisco team focused on Sustainability and two other Cisco Partners making an impact. 

I also stopped by our stand in the Sustainability Zone and was blown away by their conversations and demos already taking place!  The team were next level and to see the engagement and interactions with people, it was personally, a very proud indeed!! 

To wrap up my first day, I had the pleasure of a great conversation with Matt DeNapoli from the Cisco DevNet team where during our live broadcast, we discussed the topic "the evolution of automation to AI", and what CAE Labs are exploring to enable and innovate around for our joint Cisco customers.

During our time at Cisco Live EMEA, we also held an exclusive Cisco Security focused event and dinner with our valued customers and the Cisco Security Executive team. Brought together by our Chief Technologist - Networks & Security Gisli Helgason, it was a great evening that I was fortunate enough to share the outline areas of software development focus for the CAE Labs team in 2025.

Throughout the week there is always an overloading amount of information but key themes follow throughout. For me, it was just how important 𝗮𝗻 𝗔𝗣𝗜-𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗰𝗵 is to product development from Cisco that enables Partner innovation creation that have a mature and solid Cisco DevNet practice. 

With many new use cases, features and capabilities being added across our software suite that we will be bringing to life and that will hopefully support our valued customers in many new ways!