CE Live! ™: All the CE Without the BS! ™

                                                                                     

The What

The CE Live! ™ broadcasts are designed to bring high-quality, contemporary technical and strategic perspectives to the worldwide networking community at large and to the 9,701+ strong (and growing) Carrier Ethernet Group membership in particular.

A defining characteristic of these broadcasts is that they dispense with, as our tag line says, “the BS!” Rather, they aim to focus squarely on the core technical, strategic, and business issues related to modern packet networking and “tell it like it is” by keeping the discussions free of spin and hyperbole.

The Why

The CE Live! ™ sessions emerged originally from the observation that many valuable discussions in the Carrier Ethernet Group are either unavailable to the community at large, or not in a form that is easily accessible, digestable, and understood.

For instance, interested professionals would first need know what they are looking for, then would need to join the Group, then would need to find the relevant thread(s) on the topic of interest, then need to review an entire discussion thread to understand the issue that was discussed, and even then would be forced to draw their own conclusions. Plus, if they were not a member of the Group, they may not even find some of the excellent information shared on the Group and may remain completely unaware of it.

The objective, therefore, is to provide insights and learning on the fast-changing industry dynamics that allows professionals to keep abreast of those changes, provides a forum for live interaction with peers (as guests or participants), and furnishes insights that enhance knowledge and enable them to advance professionally.

Thus, most topics of discussion typically come from, or are motivated by, posts from the members of the Carrier Ethernet group (which represents a microcosm of the evolving networking industry, with members from 123 nations and 2,236+ companies worldwide) over the weeks preceding a CE Live! ™ broadcast.

These are posts that generated a great deal of discussion, and are, therefore, worth summarizing in a broadcast for the larger community, often with the live inputs of the members that contributed to the discussion on the Group. Or, they are posts where much debate occurred, but a firm conclusion was not reached, either because the problem was too difficult to reasonably be discussed in a forum, or because an easy resolution wasn’t available. In all of these cases, the goal of the CE Live! ™ session is to present as complete a view of the issues/problems as possible, by sharing insights that professionals can apply in their actual day-to-day roles within networking. Alternatively, the CE Live! ™ sessions focus on the most contemporary or pressing technology issues that the members wish to see discussed.

The vision of the CE Live! ™ broadcasts is to become one of the go-to places where serious networking professionals of all hues and backgrounds (from the CXO’s to new professionals) come to get unbiased insights into the state of our rapidly evolving industry, and to engage in debate and discussion.

The How

Each CE Live! ™ session involves a short summary of the key issues that came up in the Group over the previous period (provided by the Group Manager, Dr. Vishal Sharma, Principal, Metanoia, Inc.), and then a deep-dive into one or more technical/strategy issues with invited guests that include group members that brought up certain discussion topics, or industry leaders discussing specific topics. Since the CE Live! ™ is conducted over Google+ Hangouts, each session is also available for live broadcast to an essentially unlimited international audience, and archived for future viewing.

Each session is typically pre-announced to the entire Group membership, and via several other social media channels, to make the larger networking community aware of its occurrence.