2023-December-7

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Stories from the Stage

BY JENNIFER PRESTIAGIACOMO AND HELEN GALL

4 MINUTE READ · 6 MINUTE LISTEN

For 30 years, Chief Technology Evangelist Jim Grubb has shepherded Cisco’s largest customers through many technology milestones — all with his trademark verve for storytelling and humor.

Cisco technology has underpinned the tides of wireless, mobile, and video innovations. And Jim's expertise has been connecting that technology with our customers’ unique business needs.

Over the years, Jim’s most prominent role was as the longtime Chief Demonstration Officer, where he partnered with Cisco leaders to deliver more than 400 keynote demonstrations at industry, technology, and CXO events. These included Cisco Live, CES, HIMSS, NRF, Oracle World, Salesforce, DODIS, Cisco Partner Summit, and Cisco’s global sales meetings.

According to Jim, there were four key ingredients to each of his successful technology demos:

1. Connecting the technology to its relevant business impact
2. Elevating the human element
3. Adding in some humor
4. Creating that “gee whiz” factor to be the lightbulb moment for customers

Back when Jim joined Cisco in 1993, our product spectrum was singular, revolving around routers — three distinct models that we sold with unwavering focus.

“The reason that people were buying routers was because they wanted to get it connected to this new thing called the internet because that would allow you to send email from one company to another,” explains Jim.

“There was a joke about Cisco sellers and what skills you needed to have,” he adds. “And the answer was you needed to know how to put paper in the fax machine because that's how fast people were buying routers — literally. All we had to do was take the orders. It was a crazy time.”

Jim’s most memorable demos

One of Jim’s favorite demos that contained all four key ingredients was one he led at the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in January 1998.

The demo married together the nascent electronic medical record, an ultrasound machine, and a web browser.

On stage, before an audience of healthcare chief information officers, a nurse was giving a pregnant woman an ultrasound. The image of her baby projected on the big screen before awed customers.

As the curtains closed, Jim walked over to the other side of the stage, where there was a PC and a web browser. The audience sat in stunned silence as Jim showed them how a healthcare practitioner could connect live to the images using a web browser without ever having to leave their office.

“That was the gee-whiz factor because, at the time, people knew they could read the news with a web browser, but we showed them they could do so much more,” adds Jim.

Jim went on to give the ultrasound demo many more times, even to luminaries, such as former Vice President Al Gore and former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

In 2012, Cisco came up with a product called long reach ethernet (LRE), which allowed existing telephone wiring that connected an organization's offices to be used to network those offices together using standard Ethernet protocol without the huge cost of deploying fiber optic cable or limiting organizations to the bandwidth provided by modems.

Ever the storyteller, Jim labored over how to demonstrate the power of this innovation, which, as he put it, was just “a little box.” So, Jim decided to get creative and put a 10,000-foot spool of cable on the stage and ran LRE through the cable. But he didn’t stop there with the versatility of the LRE.

“I gradually revealed each of the materials that we used: Lamp cord, coax cable, battery cable from your car, and the last one, barbed wire,” shares Jim. “We literally ran Ethernet over barbed wire, and it was so much fun. People were just talking about it for days.”

Into the future

Fast forward to today, as Cisco embraces AI and automation to enhance network management, troubleshooting, and security to enable more proactive and efficient network operations.

Jim sees the future of software user interfaces becoming natural language interfaces where you speak directly to the software, and it delivers exactly what you want.

Jim illustrates this by mentioning a recent Cisco Live session where EVP/GM, Security & Collaboration Jeetu Patel demonstrated our new firewall assistant that's shipping by the end of this year that will allow customers to configure a firewall by voice commands.

“And, for those of you who know how hard it is to configure a firewall, this will be amazing for network administrators,” says Jim.

“Because all you have to do is talk to the machine. So that's the opportunity in front of us. Every one of these technology inflection points has made us more powerful as humans.”

Related Links

• The GrubbCast: Cisco Intersight
• Our Impact - CSR & Time2Give
• Cisco Purpose Report 2023
• Careers at Cisco

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