Carousel Industries Exec Shares His View On Cisco Live

Exeter, R.I.-based Carousel Industries Chief Technology Officer Jason Viera told CRNtv that Cisco is doing a good job communicating its message to the channel.

’I think Cisco is doing a really good job right now communicating where they are heading and what their roadmap looks like to the channel,’ he said.

His comments came after Cisco held its four-day IT education and training event in Orlando, Cisco Live. The conference featured a number of keynotes and speakers, including a moment when CEO Chuck Robbins brought Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene onto the stage. The appearance came months after the announcement of a partnership between the two companies.

’I’m looking forward to seeing how that looks moving forward in terms of what gets privatized right now. There was a lot of stuff that was kind of cloudy – no pun intended,’ said Viera.

Viera also said he found Cisco’s multi-cloud message to be refreshing.

’I really think as applications shift towards the public cloud and the consumption models change in our customers’ environments that it’s imperative that the network is flexible enough to work the requirements around compliance and security, as well as connectivity and also providing a very consistent foundation from an application perspective. So, being able to build out an application from an on-premises as well as the public cloud in a consistent matter.’

Viera told CRNtv that Carousel Industries is particularly excited about SD-WAN technology going forward, noting that Cisco’s acquisition of Viptela will play a big role in helping the solution provider bring the technology to customers.

’We’ve seen this pent-up demand for something that was going to be really innovative in our customers’ environments that was going to help simplify the way they interconnect to their locations and SD WAN fits that bill,’ he said. ’The ability to take the existing Viptela software and run it on existing Cisco routers is huge for Cisco and is a really clean roadmap for the Cisco customer base,’ he said.

For more of Viera’s interview, watch CRNtv’s video from Cisco Live.