Answers on Cisco's Cert Announcements Here at Cisco Live

IPv6 Migration is Big; Attendance up

In the last day or so here at Cisco Live, I've heard John Chambers talk in a couple of settings, and had several conversations with folks who work with Cisco certs. Today I'll toss out a few more thoughts from the show that I think might be of interest.

From the General Session with John Chambers

In no particular order, just some interesting factoids:

Top 5 priorities for Cisco:

1. Core: Route/switch/security/mobile
2. Collaboration
3. Data Center/Virtualization/Cloud
4. Video
5. Architectures

There are 84,000 Cisco certified partner employees.

Cisco went from entering the market with the Unified Computing System (UCS) to 17% US market share and a 3^rd place position in 18 months.

15,000+ onsite attendees at Cisco Live this year, up 32% year-to-year.

An interesting stat: Video was 50%-ish of Internet traffic in 2010. 2014 projection: 91%.

New in Certifications

I asked folks in the Cisco certification booth what was newly-announced here at networkers. As a brief aside, over time, Cisco seems to announce more and more big cert announcements at times other than at big events like Cisco Live, but they have made such announcements in the past. For instance, CCNA was last changed by Cisco in 2007, and they announced those changes at Cisco Live in the summer of that year.

The one announcement at the show is essentially a reorganization of some existing specialization certs into two new categories: collaboration and video. Why? Cisco's research (with numbers to support it included in the preso at the show) suggest that the skills for collaboration (which includes voice) and video both lag behind the growth rates for those technologies. John Chambers specifically mentioned Video as one of Cisco's top 5 technology priorities as well. But none of the individual specialization certs changed this week, although many have been refreshed over the last year.

Check this link, and look down below the career certs to see the new categories, and link to any of those specific certs.

Not New in Certs: CCNA

I did ask about CCNA, and the answer was that Cisco is not announcing certification changes in these areas here at Cisco Live this week. But why ask?

First, CCNA hasn't revved in four years, so I asked at the show, just like anyone else could, just to get the official answer, so to speak. Of course, the official answer does not say anything about whether they'll announce something next week, next month, etc, and I certainly will never speculate as to timing of any such future announcements. But Tuesday of show week has come and gone, and Cisco didn't announce changes to CCENT or CCNA. 

IPv6 May Finally Start Rolling?

In yesterday's post here at Network World, I mentioned a full room of 800 for an IPv6 deployment session. Later, I heard a quote of that session, offered twice, drawing over 1400, which is almost 10% of the attendees of the conference. I thought that was a pretty impressive percentage. Maybe it'll finally starting flowing out to Enterprises...

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