Abstract: What do you know about Cisco? What are they doing these days? Could Cisco be relevant to my education and interests? You might know us from our routers/switches and other lines of networking hardware, but there is much happening here that most are unaware of. Cisco’s roots are in the hardware space but has since grown into the software space – touching many technologies such as security, IoT, collaboration, data center, and even education. In this talk, I’ll be covering some of Cisco’s history and origins, what our company is doing today and growing towards, and provide some insights into my job and how industry trends in software engineering shapes the work I do everyday.

Short Bio: Ralph Keyser is a Software Consulting Engineer at Cisco Systems in RTP, North Carolina. Over the last 5 years at Cisco, his work has focused on customer data center automation, creating one-touch solutions for customer-facing and internal applications. In Spring 2020, he graduated with his BS in Computer Engineering at NCSU and is currently pursuing his MS in Computer Science at NCSU with a focus in Data Science.