[irq]: techie interrupted

what I do now

It’s been a little over half a year since I joined Cisco as a “marketing manager” on the “architecture” team in the “data center & virtualization” group targeting “enterprise & mid-market” companies for the “central marketing organization (CMO)”.

Translated into english, this roughly means that I do outbound marketing for data center stuff. This includes marketing messaging and content that goes into white papers, presentations (internal & external), ads, etc. Because @omarsultan is my boss, I also get to cause a bit of havoc attempting to pull things into a “solving business problems” orientation vs the traditional “moving boxes” tack. It’s a quasi-technical, quasi-marketing, quasi-strategery, quasi-business job.

I like it. :-)

Omar’s put together an odd, far-flung team to shake things up:
- I’m from a big co-opetitive integrator and based in Brooklyn
- @sjschuchart’s a former analyst based in Green Bay
- @cloudclint’s a former customer based somewhere in northern Kentucky near Cincinatti

Cisco is not a small company. But, coming from IBM, the place feels like a damn startup. I was impactful immediately: working on useful things that’ve been integrated into all kinds of output all over the place from day one. I’ve been able to suggest ideas way outside of my domain and have them taken up.

Some things I have or am working on:
- flesh out Cisco’s cloud strategy for the enterprise
- a VCE white paper
- an enterprise private cloud white paper
- Data Center Business Advantage (what comes after Data Center 3.0) message, content, ads, etc
- presos given by execs to analysts, media, etc
- connecting various other marketing campaigns and stuff to DC Business Advantage
- vertical-specific marketing for healthcare, financial services, etc
- telling a better and better integrated services story