LAS VEGAS. Some conference keynotes are noteworthy, some are just boring, then there are the ones that just go
…
well, bad.
I’m sitting in the final afternoon keynote now where Cisco’s Jayshree V. Ullal Senior Vice President, Data Center, Switching and Services Group is speaking. Ullal is responsible for $10 billion a year in Cisco revenues across the Catalyst and Nexus product line.
Ullal’s keynote was sabotaged by one of the worst things that can happen to any keynoter — bad audio.
Ullal’s microphone hissed and cut out frequently in the beginning of the session, then during a little break in her talk where she showed a video she got a new microphone.
The audio problems still remained though.
“Is it my hair?” Ullal asked in frustration out loud.
She was then forced to do what no modern keynoter ever wants to do, she was forced to stand behind a podium with a fixed microphone (that worked).
“This will be a little
constraiinging because I don’t know how to stand in one place,” Ullal joked. ” Hopefully our
Cisco data center runs better than my mikes do.”
For her comments, the Interop audience gave her some polite applause. And Ullal continued on. The gist of her keynote (that I could hear) was that today applications run with the network — in the future applications will increasingly run on the network itself.