Meet Inderdeep from Cisco’s customer advocacy community

Our customers are the heart and soul of everything we do at Cisco and each one of them has an interesting story to tell! Our Q&A series allows us to shine a spotlight on some of our most passionate customer advocates in The Global Gateway community as we learn more about their stories and backgrounds.

You may be wondering: What is The Global Gateway? It’s a community for Cisco customers where they can build powerful connections, expand their professional and personal networks, and learn from top experts in their field. One of our goals with our advocacy community is to deepen our relationships with our customers and today, we have one of the friendliest faces in The Global Gateway joining us for a chat. I’m excited to welcome Inderdeep Singh from KPMG Canada.

Welcome, Inderdeep! Let’s kick things off by talking about what you wanted to be when you were 16 years old?

When I was in school, I thought I would become an engineer. Well, I never thought of any specific domain as I was unaware of the streams available to me at that time, but I ended up choosing engineering specifically in electronics. I started studying for my CCNA in my last semester of engineering and from then on it was very clear that the goal would be “Network Engineer.”

That’s a cool path to discovering what you want to do! Where did you start your career? And, what professional decision or opportunity helped lead you to your current role?

Well, I started my career with one of the small ISPs in India, then I worked with the large ISPs like Orange Business Services, British Telecom and later joined Cisco Systems. I grew professionally in various roles that included network support, implementation, and later, technical pre-sales.

I moved to Canada in 2019 and joined KPMG as a Senior Network Analyst, where I used my experience to help KPMG on various next-generation technologies on campus and in the datacenter. As I worked in almost every role, from support to technical pre-sales, and have now moved to a design and support role in KPMG, I have a holistic understanding of these issues from top to bottom.

Apart from my professional journey, I love to interact with people, and learn and exchange information and ideas about technologies. So, I started writing blogs to share my knowledge. In 2020, Cisco recognized my blogs and awarded me with the Best IT blogs award 2020 under the “Most Educational” category! I enjoy working with technology and I’m keen to keep learning. I am using these skills to make myself better every day in my current role, and I learn a lot when interacting with people on various platforms like The Gateway.

It sounds like you have worn a lot of different hats across your roles! I also think it’s pretty cool that you moved to Canada! So, you’re currently working for KPMG. How has partnering with Cisco helped your work both in your segment and industry?

Being ex-Cisco myself, partnering with Cisco makes me feel energetic! The partnership has helped me deploy most of the next-generation technologies like SD-Access, Viptela SD-WAN, and now Cisco ACI in the KPMG environment. The overall experience we got from Cisco and the team is simply awesome. We can now think out of the box to make whatever use cases we were thinking of happen. With Cisco being a leader in various portfolios, along with TAC support, it has been a huge benefit.

What’s been your biggest challenge in your company this year, and how did you overcome it?

It’s been a challenging year due to COVID. Most of our tax partners and clients in KPMG used to work onsite, and we never thought of everything starting with work-from-home (WFH) scenarios. KPMG is a large organization and the need to support WFH demands (for example, ensuring that our levels of security were sufficient) was a big challenge. In the end, we successfully added many services to support WFH users across Canada.

Another challenge was onsite visits, which were only partially approved until recently. This resulted in many projects being delayed. I hope we will get past these hurdles and will soon be able to connect onsite with people and attend events like Cisco Live.

Let’s move on to The Global Gateway! How would you describe this customer advocacy community to those who haven’t heard of it before?

It was excellent work done by creating The Gateway community, where you can express yourself, learn new technologies, and share ideas and feedback on various products and portfolios. You can even check the various use cases in different organizations to learn how they took successful steps towards next-generation solutions. Anyone who is a technology lover should join The Global Gateway to share ideas!

Thank you for that beaming review of The Gateway! You’re one of our community “Pioneers” and we really appreciate how active you’ve been since joining! What made you want to join The Global Gateway, and how has being part of this community impacted you both professionally and personally?

As a blogger myself, I do love these platforms where you interact with new people virtually and learn new things every day to grow personally and professionally. The Global Gateway is THE way to interact, share and learn new things about technology.

We’re almost at the end of the interview, Inderdeep, and we’d love to finish with three things you can’t live without?

Family, blogging, outdoor games, and the internet.

Thank you again for joining us, Inderdeep! 

You are welcome!

Read more customer advocate interviews

You might enjoy this interview with our Global Gateway customer advocate, Merin.

 

Join us in The Global Gateway

For our customers who have already joined us in The Global Gateway, say hello to Inderdeep if you haven’t met each other yet. And for those Cisco customers who haven’t yet joined The Global Gateway, consider doing so! You’ll be able to:

• Connect with peers in a gamified, online community
• Have an opportunity to meet with Cisco’s executives
• Share your feedback, questions, and best practices
• Get access to “insider” content and resources
• Grow your professional and personal brand
• Amplify your company’s success story with Cisco technology

Ready to get started? Head over to The Global Gateway and say hello!