All the world's a stage for demo guy Jim Grubb.
All the world’s a stage for Cisco demo guy Jim Grubb.
Cisco CEO John Chambers often gets topical during his trade show keynotes. At a recent event, he spent several minutes outlining a litany of IT headaches facing the U.S. healthcare industry, and of course, some of Cisco’s high-tech aspirin.
“And now I’m going to ask Jim Grubb, my friend and business partner for many years, to come up here and show us, in less than 10 minutes, how all these technologies I’ve talked about today are going to solve all the problems in the healthcare industry.”
Everyone’s had a demanding boss at some point – but c’mon.
Anyone who has seen Chambers speak a few times knows the routine: part state-of-the-industry address, part sales pitch, part revival meeting. And then there’s the product demo. This is what Grubb, Cisco’s chief demonstration officer, has handled for the past eight years, at as many as 60 events per year.
Much of the schtick involves Grubb showing off new technology while Chambers comments and makes gibes:
“Are you nervous, Jim? You seem a little tense.”
“This must not fail, Jim, because that’ll be embarrassing for me and you.”
“It’s OK if you mess up . . . I’ll just fire you.”
Grubb, 43, always appearing on cue with an “Oh, gosh, me?” smile, fills the stage with his physical presence and contagious laugh. He says the jokes and big-bad-boss warnings are all part of the act.
Setting the scene
The demos usually involve Chambers and Grubb acting out a real-life scenario – a doctor’s office, a retail store, a construction site – where Cisco technology is featured.
“We write jokes and certain lines,” Grubb says. “But we don’t hard-script most of it.”
Grubb has demoed Cisco technology all over the world. Audiences have included Mikhail Gorbachev, former leader of the Soviet Union; former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; President Vicente Fox of Mexico; and former Vice President Al Gore.
But Grubb doesn’t know much about stage fright. He studied music at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, concentrating on voice performance, and took part in community theater for many years.
Tinkering and invention are also part of Grubb’s background: his granduncle invented the lock boxes that real estate agents use to store house keys in homes, and his mother ran the family business, selling the devices part time when she wasn’t teaching school. She purchased a Northstar Horizon PC, which Grubb used to teach himself programming, when he wasn’t fooling around with his ham radio set.
After leaving college to start his own computer company, Grubb ended up working at Digital Equipment Corp., working his way up from order processing to systems engineering, giving product demos on sales calls. During a visit to the U.S. Postal Service, a major Digital account in the late 1980s, he discovered it was using routers “from this little company called Cisco” to tie together its VAX network.
This led Grubb to the West Coast and a consulting engineering job at Cisco. Eventually, he moved up to manage some product lines. In 1996, he did his first demo with Chambers: an IP video demonstration “that was incredibly complex, with a rotating stage, all these plasma screens – it was ridiculous, but we pulled it off.”
After that, he got a call from the CEO’s office.
“It wasn’t a direct invite,” Grubb says, “because business units are not supposed to poach people from inside the company. They asked if I knew anyone who might be able to help John give demos and presentations.” Grubb says it took him a few days to realize what they were asking. Since then he’s been on the road with Chambers.
“Some things are the same, like the hotels and the steam-tray food, but everything else is always different,” Grubb says. “Following John around the world has been like getting an MBA; I’m like a fly on the wall in so many customer meetings. . . . And it’s just a lot of fun. I get to play with all the toys.”
Close calls
Having access to the latest network technology – the toys – is not all fun and games. Grubb says he works constantly with his staff to boil down complex network technology into an understandable 15-minute presentation, often working with gear fresh from Cisco’s labs. And as any network pro knows, Murphy’s Law and Moore’s Law often clash.
Recalling some of his closest calls, Grubb describes a wireless technology demo he devised two years ago for an audience of CEOs at a high-tech summit held at a tony Pawleys Island, S.C., resort, “where the steam-tray food was actually good.”
The demo showed how RFID and 802.11 gear could interact. “We set that whole network up, and we rehearsed. Then the next day, it just stopped working,” Grubb says. After hours of troubleshooting, he was about to give up. But the next morning, on demo day, it all came back to life.
The only explanation had to do with the King of Jordan, who was in the audience, Grubb says. The entire hotel was under heavy security and surveillance, “and we thought the FBI was using some sort of ultrawideband communication devices, because you can’t use a radio scanner to listen in to those things,” he says. The G-men’s high-powered wireless gear drowned out Grubb’s lower-powered 802.11 and RFID demo, the theory goes.
But onstage flubs are rare. Grubb’s discipline is fault tolerance and security.
“We put a lot of effort into making sure things don’t break,” he says.
Grubb and his staff create an entirely closed LAN for their network demos separate from the convention center or hotel facilities hosting the event. PCs and servers are required to have a back-up machine that can instantly take over in case of a lockup. Load balancers and redundant links are standard.
He learned many of these lessons the hard way, of course.
Cisco officials were at a ritzy, golf-centric executive event in Spanish Bay, Calif., where Grubb and Chambers demonstrated VoIP technology. Chambers, holding a digital phone set, was to connect to Grubb, who was using VoIP. “When John picked up the phone, there was no dial tone – PacBell had just come in and disabled that extension on the hotel’s PBX,” Grubb says.
Grubb now takes his own mini PBX on the road when demonstrating interoperability between VoIP and TDM networks.
Nothing’s doctored
As for the Cisco gear that takes center stage in these demos, Grubb says, “We do some hardening of things,” in order to ensure the box on display runs smoothly for the audience. But he insists the gear is not doctored, dressed up or dumbed down for show.
“We don’t do anything to the products a customer can’t do in real life,” he says.
Even with his unique background in stage performance and networking, Grubb says there’s always stress.
“There’s plenty of it,” he says. “You’re working at odd hours, just like any network professional.”
Grubb and his staff sometimes have only a few days, or even a few hours, to set up a demo. Chambers sometimes does not know the demo’s content until the day it occurs.
“The closest John has ever come to getting angry with me was an event in Japan,” Grubb says, where he and Chambers were again demonstrating that tricky VoIP technology. Chambers was talking into an IP phone, linked to the public address system. The PA system worked, but Chambers couldn’t hear his own voice on the handset. Grubb recalls Chambers being frustrated, thinking that the demo made the technology look rigged.
“I was trying to convince him that we can hear him through the PA,” Grubb says. After a brief back-and-forth, Grubb recalls Chambers saying, “Jim . . . let me make a suggestion” – to use another handset.
“Sometimes I have to remember that it’s his show, not mine,” Grubb says.
Those who have seen Grubb in action say they look forward to the demo portion of a Cisco event.
“The way he does presentations, with his timing and humor, he really pulls them off well – better than most people I’ve seen,” says Jim Wilson, network services manager for Henderson, Nev. Wilson has watched Grubb at the last five Cisco Networkers customer events. “He does steal the show [from Chambers] sometimes.”
“Some CEOs can have a large ego; they can be demanding,” Wilson says. “To be up there like [Grubb] is, in front of thousands of people and your boss, and to know that everyone’s watching if you screw up – it looks like a tough job.”
At the most recent Networkers Show, over a lunch of steam-tray chicken and vegetables, Grubb denied having the toughest job in networking.
“I wouldn’t say it’s the easiest either,” he says. “The nice thing is that John trusts me and my staff enough to let us go off and build these things, so he can worry about running the company.”
