Besides being a stupid name and a boondoggle, can anyone tell me what the point of Impact is?
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Flying 15,000 people into Las Vegas reafirms Cisco's commitment to Net Zero and Sustainability.
If you're going to have large events, Las Vegas is the place to do it. Las Vegas is a convention town and all the hotels and hotel/casino's have staffs that do nothing but support conventions. They handle ton's of logistics for groups if they don't want to handle it themselves, or have corporate teams to handle it.
For instance, my Dad was in the Navy during the Korean War and one of the ships he served on has an annual reunion. They like having it in Las Vegas because it's easy to get flights there at cheap rates because the flights are almost always full & therefore cost effective for airlines, the hotel handles mailing out invitations & processing the RSVP's and arranging rooms at a discounted rate because they're using 150 rooms--well, at their age now, it's down to 10-20, but it was between 150-200 when the crew was all retired in their 60's--, and since many guests arrive in batches, the hotel provides a shuttle bus to pick them all up. Since they were all just visiting & doing tourist cr-p, and sitting around in a ballroom w/ lots of 10 person round tables visiting and catching up on what's happened since the last reunion, the logistics needs for the ballroom is just water, coffee, tea and the typical morning danishes, so it costs the hotel next to nothing and they can rent out the ballroom making great profits.
The casinos & hotels make it super easy for people to do group visits closer to their costs than other places because they know the guests will, on average, leave more money at the casino tables than they'd have made if the casino wasn't there and they charged the same rates as hotels in other places.
Most convention attendees don't go places further than walking distance, so they're not burning lots of gas taking individual taxi's all over town, so that's a Net Zero plus compared to other towns.
If a company has to have a sales event, then Las Vegas is a much getter place to have it than Orlando, NYC, etc.
It's a party. Sales eats it up. Cisco should cut Impact instead of employees!!
This is such a useless event, most of the work actually happens after the event, not sure what the value is anymore, the world has evolved
Isn't what Cisco Live is for? Why do they need both? Seems like a "double boondoggle"!
Cisco never had good sales people.
Everyone knows all the good sales people left for competitors or resellers years ago
The majority of the ones remaining either have a bad reputation in the industry or are happy working part time with a side gig
So many opinions from non-sales people as to the value. Just remember who puts the gasoline in the revenue engine...google "a few good expenses" video...brilliantly explains to the non-sales folks as to why we have these events. BTW..ELT is taking the joy out of Impact with restrictions on what can be expensed and the sessions are a mess.
Once upon a time, it was an opportunity for sales to come together, learn about the new technologies that were being rolled out, hear the overarching corporate messaging so we could synchronize our pitches with the corporate message and, of course, blow off some steam and get rewarded on stage and with events (like concerts and the like).
Then, technology caught up and instead of dragging 20,000 people to a central site, we leveraged our technology to do that and we did that for almost a decade.
Then earnings turned around and Cisco decided to return to the centralized sales meetings: learning sessions and demos during the day and parties at night.
What really happens, is that you badge into sessions then slide out to go to the "bathroom", then hit the casino or the links or something else. Visit the parties thrown by the company and ones thrown by partners.
Cisco should go back using their technology and push the messaging out. Impact (aka GSM and NSM) is massive hole into which Cisco pours money. They then ask people "Did they get value from the meeting?", they all answer "Yes" so the gravy train of a free week in Vegas continues when, in their private thoughts think "What a waste of money!".
Flying 15,000 people into Las Vegas reafirms Cisco's commitment to Net Zero and Sustainability.
Sales bring in the bacon. Do not forget that.
Impact sales 4 day party cost $500M+ of stockholders money to feed CEO's out of control EGO