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Stephen Speirs

SP Product Management

Cisco Customer Experience (CX)

Stephen Speirs is part of the Cisco Customer Experience Product Management team. This team is tasked with developing major new professional service offerings for Cisco. Stephen has worked on a range of technologies - 5G, NFV, Cloud, Data Center, SDN, DevOps and more. Working with customers and partners worldwide, Stephen has over 30 years industry experience in software development, IT, Data Centers and Service Provider Network Management.

Working with and building a 30 partner consortium, Stephen brought to life the 5G RuralFirst project - potentially the world's most ambitious rural 5G trial - winning part government funding to take 5G to Orkney and Somerset in the UK. Before joining Cisco Services in 2009, Stephen was senior manager, product management, in Cisco's Network Management Technology group, where he brought to market the multi-award winning Cisco MPLS Diagnostics Expert product. In Cisco Services, Stephen drove development of the Cloud Enablement Services - rated #1 by IDC in their 2013 client survey.

Stephen is based in Cisco's offices in Glasgow, Scotland, and was "acquired into" Cisco in 2000 through the acquisition of Atlantech Technologies Ltd. Since 2019, Stephen has served as non-exec director on the Ofcom Advisory Committee for Scotland (UK communications regulator). Stephen has a BSc (1st Hons) in Applied Physics from the University of Strathclyde, an MSc in Digital Systems Engineering from the University of Heriot Watt, and an MBA from the University of Strathclyde Graduate Business School.

Outside of work, family, cycling, running, and skiing keep him busy. Since 2019, he has been a member of the Ofcom (UK telecoms regulator) Advisory Committee for Scotland. Believing in "Giving Back" with work-related skills, Stephen also is a guest speaker on the Strathclyde University MBA program, an advisory board member on MaaS Scoltand (Mobility as a Service), and a student project mentor with Dundee University's Product Management BSc/MSc

Articles

November 30, 2016

1

DATA CENTER

Top 5 Takeaways from the London Gartner Data Center Conference 2016

Over the past few years, I've attended Gartner's Data Center Conference in London (see 2013, 2014, and 2015 !). As always, it was...

October 13, 2016

1

DATA CENTER

Buying New Gear? Have You Invested in Operations Management to Assure Your RoI?

Are you investing in new IT equipment – or for that matter, any IT services including SaaS/Cloud services?  If so, I wonder how much you have invested in your operations management...

August 24, 2016

2

DATA CENTER

Go Slow to Go Fast: Why Cisco Services Invests More Up Front

There are 2 questions I am asked from time to time: The first is related to my job – “OK I understand what's involved in product development, but why do ‘service...

June 9, 2016

DATA CENTER

Yes Adopt DevOps But Don’t Forget The Pain of Re-Writes: My Biggest Software Lesson Ever

As we deliver more and more software projects in my part of Cisco Services, I have a keen interest in software development best practices.  And concerns on poor practices.  A...

March 16, 2016

SP360: SERVICE PROVIDER

Part 2: The Ski Centre Queues and the Service Provider Internet of Things Opportunity

Last week, in Part 1, I blogged about the bizarre association of queues at my local ski centre and unreliable access to cloud payment services. Being located in an...

March 10, 2016

1

SP360: SERVICE PROVIDER

The Connection between Long Ski Centre Queues and the Cloud: The Service Provider Internet of Things Opportunity

Back in 2010, not long after I started blogging here on Cisco.com, I discussed some of the challenges customers were fearing regarding the feasibility of cloud adoption. In my market...

February 3, 2016

2

DATA CENTER

The Most Boring Service We offer … And how to bring down a data center in one easy snip!

I do enjoy the (sometimes irreverent!) perspectives of some articles on data center in the UK publication “The Register“, and the story of how a data center change went wrong made me laugh, cringe and cry at the same time – the change being when an electrician cut the wrong wire and brought down a […]

January 12, 2016

4

DATA CENTER

Your New Year’s Resolution for 2016: Start with a Cisco Domain Ten Workshop

A few years ago, I wrote a series of blogs on Cisco’s Domain Ten(SM)  framework.  Since then, we’ve used this simple yet powerful analysis tool to help guide many customers on data center and IT transformation projects.  I personally found it quite notable that leading market analyst firm IDC, recognizing Cisco as the worldwide leader […]

December 8, 2015

DATA CENTER

Part 2: Ten Learnings and Observations from the 2015 London Gartner Data Center Conference

Last week I attended the 2015 London Gartner Data Center conference. In my first blog (part 1) on this event,  I covered some of my main learnings and...