Who Was Crowned Cisco’s Mobility Madness Champion of 2018?

You’re good at your job. You know it. Your bosses know it. But, assuming that your friends and family understand what you do, does anyone else know that you’re a network rock star?

Cisco, with help from Spiceworks, wanted to make sure that you could prove how great you are at your job with a month-long competition that recently wrapped up called, Mobility Madness. Set up like the NCAA basketball March Madness tournament-only a bit smaller and without as many basketballs-eight IT pros were matched against each other to see who was the quickest in using Cisco Mobility Express to deploy a wireless network.

The winner walked away with a 65-inch, 4K television.

Here’s how we got our contestants: promoted on the Spiceworks website, hundreds of SpiceHeads answered a handful of qualifying questions and wrote some interesting essays proving that they had the right stuff to enter the tourney. The first 100 people to answer the questions correctly received a Mobility Madness t-shirt. From the contestant list was whittled down to eight lucky finalists.

These finalists were each provided a Cisco Aironet 1850 Access Point and were randomly matched up against their opponent to see whom could deploy their AP the fastest. The opening round was fast and furious as the fingers of these Wireless Warriors danced across their laptops hoping to move on to the second round.

Mike Snyder had the overall fastest Round 1 time as he completed his deployment in an astounding 5 minutes and 55 seconds.

When Round Two dawned, a new wrinkle was added as competitors were given another Aironet 1850 AP to deploy on their new network and other tasks.

John Belkevich was the speediest in the second round as he pulled off an amazing time of 4:09. Both he and Michael Perkins advanced to the final round.

In the Final Round, John and Michael were given yet another 1850 AP-that’s three free Cisco Aironet access points-and were asked to not only deploy the other AP, but create a guest access network. It was a tense match, but John ended up winning with a final time of 5:28 to Michael’s time of 6:37.

In the grand spirit of competition, John and Michael virtually shook hands and exchanged congratulations. As you can imagine, John was extremely excited about his brand-new TV and expects that he and his whole family will watch countless hours of sports and play video games together.

Didn’t get the call this year? Stay tuned because we’d like to make this an annual event and will be looking to crown a new Mobility Madness Champion in 2019. For now, learn more about Mobility Express here.