After a three-year hiatus, Cisco Live returns to an in-person format. While the show has evolved over the years to appeal to line of business and corporate executives, its core audience is still the engineer that makes their living deploying and operating Cisco equipment. While much of the innovation at the show is in networking, over the years, Webex has become a more prominent part of the show.
It’s been three years since Cisco had an in-person version of Cisco Live, the massive user event that typically draws over 20,000 attendees. I’ve been attending the show since the late 1990s, when I was an engineer and have noticed a significant change in the content in the show. When I first started attending, the event was a hardcore technical show centered around Cisco. Today, the show has become more of an industry show that drives thought leadership in the areas of networking, security and collaboration, similar to what NVIDIA GTC is to AI, VMware VMworld is to virtualization, and Salesforce Dreamforce is to customer experience.
Zoom announced its quarterly results for Q1 of the fiscal year 2023 (FY 2023), and the results confirmed that its “land and expand strategy” is working. The company’s revenue rose 12.3% year over year (YoY) to $1.07 billion. It also reported two-quarters of sequential growth for its gross margin, which management attributed to optimizing usage across the public cloud and increasing the number of co-located data centers.
Two years ago, the entire cloud communications landscape got a kickstart when investors poured money into “work-from-home stocks,” which included the UCaaS and CCaaS providers. For example, Zoom, Five9 and RingCentral had peak market caps of $161 billion, $14 billion and $40 billion, respectively, compared to $28 billion, $6.8 billion and $6.4 billion today.
COVID-19 created a reset in the workforce, decoupling work from the traditional office location. This was the start of the Great Resignation, where an unprecedented amount of people moved on from their jobs in favor of better opportunities. Now more than two years into the pandemic, employee churn is at an all-time high.