With attendees continuing to swirl around the jampacked conference center hosting the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) in its third day, there’s not so much a question of how to find an interesting and informative interviewee as who it will be.

Jeff Frick, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, talked with Liz Centoni, VP/GM SP Access for Cisco Systems, Inc., in which they discussed the Penelope mascot Cisco had developed for the event, the company’s focus on diversity and progressions in connectivity opening up new fields of opportunity.

Aspirational and inspirational

“This is an incredibly inspiring place to be,” Centoni said. “The scale that’s here, that Anita Borg sponsors, is tremendous.” With such a sizable gathering of women working in the tech field, Centoni felt that GHC had an aspirational effect, as well as an inspirational one.

As she put it, while seeing a few successful women in tech could be inspiring, seeing such a large cross-section of them in various points of their career and across a wide range of tech focuses provides a sense of what can be worked toward by any of the visitors.

Cisco connections and careers

“Grace Hopper is supposed to be about your professional development,” Centoni pointed out, also mentioning the event’s dual roles as a job fair and informational nexus. That share of information and perspectives works both ways, as Centoni sees it.

“We want the young women, who are early career, mid-career, to come in and talk to the women who are already at Cisco,” she explained, as Cisco has a deep interest in understanding where its potential future employees are coming from in their professional and personal backgrounds.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Grace Hopper Celebration of Woman In Computing. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE