Today began with the earliest morning expected of us on the trip. We were expected down at breakfast by 0700 with a planned departure from the hotel at 0745. We were meeting with NetApp and they had given us the unique opportunity to chat with several senior engineers on their staff. We got to meet with Ryan Cartwright (Manager of the EBC Program), AJ Mahajan (Senior Director of AI Solutions), Justin Welch (Senior Solution Architect in Security) and Matt Brown (Senior Executive Director of NetApp on NetApp). They were willing to donate nearly 6 hours of their working day to host us and it was much appreciated. Ryan started us out with an exclusive ‘peek behind the curtain’ of their new Customer Experience Centre.

Although not fully complete the building was fascinating and included many pieces of memorabilia to improve the outcomes of customer meetings. We were led upstairs after the introduction and taken to the briefing rooms on the 7th floor. Our first presenter was AJ who took us through the work NetApp does in the AI sector and how they integrate it into their products to improve their options. Justin Welch was next up and he led us through the security aspect of modern NetApp. They have the most secure storage on the planet and we were lucky enough to be led through the system. NetApp bases its storage on 2 main rules, immutability and indelibility. This means they have to make sure the data they story is both unchangeable and not able to be deleted. They do this by utilizing multiple digital and physical Data storage facilities. They recommend having at least 2 physical storage facilities for data as well as backing everything up to a third cloud based storage system that can only pull data to it. This means that no data can ever be pushed and no one who gains access could modify or delete the existing data.

We had a short break after his talk to stretch out legs before disaster struck. Unfortunately the last person who was supposed to be talking to us, Matt Brown, had his car break down on his way in, luckily Ryan was able to find someone else walking around the building to fill in for him. Suren Ruhela works in Enterprise Storage and Strategic Operations and he took us through what he did in his position at NetApp. He explained how NetApp planned to adapt to the changing markets and wove in how AI will assist in doing this. He then took us through the 3 main types of storage that NetApp utilizes. He explained to us that the product NetApp offers is so advanced that it was more profitable for companies like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and AWS to just sign on instead of attempting to reproduce their own version of it.

After his talk concluded we were led down to the employee lunch area. It was a massive operation that took up an entire floor. There were multiple Cafes, restaurants and much more for the employees to choose from. Ryan encouraged us to sit with the engineers who were having lunch and engage/ask questions with them. Jake and I got pizzas and sat with a couple engineers who work on pushing new features and code repair. It was fascinating to talk with them and understand what a day in the life was like for the employees of NetApp. At the conclusion of lunch we took a couple photos on the terrace before heading back to the bus and preparing for our trip to Cisco.

The Cisco campus was absolutely massive. We arrived at the archival building and were taken in by the lead archivist. It was fascinating to look through the rich history of the company and how they developed their telecommunications business through their constantly changing work.

After the brief look back through Cisco’s history we were led ot the front and met with Peter Jones, who would be our guide for the tour. We were taken to building 18, which was a fair walk into the campus, and shown into the heart of Cisco design. We met with a couple of the hardware engineers who showed us their development cycle and how they gave the products preliminary tests. We were then shown into the main hub of testing where every Cisco board is pushed to the extreme. They are subjected to drastically different temperatures, power overloading, power spikes and much more to test their capabilities and their failures. It was incredible to see so much of the behind the scenes. After the tour of the facility we were led upstairs where Peter took us through his own history with the company and how it blossomed from the small startup to the multi Billion dollar operation it is today. Peter especially focused on how Cisco plans to adapt for the future and adopt AI into their own building process.

After the talk we bade our farewells and made our way back downstairs. There were some brief problems with our bus that were eventually solved before we boarded and made our way back. Our time at Cisco had gone longer than we originally expected and we decided to just do a simple dinner at In-N-Out again. Once back at the Hotel we dropped our bags off at the Hotel and then made our way back downstairs to In-N-Out. It was a pretty quick trip there and back, and everyone was very tired when we got back. We had a quick final debrief before turning in for the night. It was just Jake and I for Poker before an early night to bed.

Goodnight