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A few quick observations from Cisco live, held in London this week.  
After the cringing opening - see below - Padmasree Warrior, global CTO gave an engaging keynote, a product demo that worked - cutting jitter on a video call to prove its switches provide better than 'good enough networking' and quite a cute green screen demo promoting telepresence.  
While there was nothing significant in terms of new products she did give some indication of the company's strategy.

Like all vendors data centers are key to Cisco's future, an area of excitment for Warrior. The future was never in gadgets. Equally the company cannot ignore cloud computing.

What was very interesting is what Warrior told me about the company's cloud strategy. It will deliver integrated security from premise to cloud - we were promised some announcements soon and "application intelligence with optimization, endpoint intelligence, location and policy." Data center management from the hardware to the application with emphasis on management and orchestration. The company's focus on the data center consists of its Nexus and Catalyst switches and routers and its converged UCS system which was never about building a new server, she said. 
"We will by and large offer cloud through a service provider," she told me. She said that to Cisco, the term service provider goes beyond telecoms companies into large services organisations and unlike rivals IBM and HP, Cisco won't seek to deliver enterprise applications in competition with these customers. 
Why build data centers when you can equip them?

It believes in video, a message it keeps hammering - even its press announcement for new switches opened with this message: "more than 50 percent of computing workloads in data centers will  be cloud-based by 2014, and global cloud traffic will grow more than 12 times by 2015 to 1.6 zettabytes per year —the equivalent of over four days of business-class video for every person on Earth." Whatever "business class video" is. 
As for the opening, there was a rather subdued atmosphere during the keynote not helped by the introduction. Attempts to entertain and enthuse an audience with some thumping music and flashing lights always ends up embarrassing. If you must you could check the Youtube posting - but really, prepare to be underwhelmed. It had the Why Factor? But not the X.