Raymond Lacoste

Raymond Lacostehas dedicated his career to developing the skills of those interested in IT. In 2001, he began to mentor hundreds of IT professionals pursuing their Cisco certification dreams. This role led to teaching Cisco courses full time. Raymond is currently master instructor for Cisco Enterprise Routing and Switching, AWS, and ITIL at StormWind Studios. Raymond treats all technologies as an escape room, working to uncover every mystery in the protocols he works with. Along this journey, Raymond has passed more than 110 exams, and his office wall includes certificates from Microsoft, Cisco, ISC2, ITIL, AWS, and CompTIA. If you were visualizing Raymond’s office, you’d probably expect the usual network equipment, certifications, and awards. Those certainly take up space, but they aren’t his pride and joy. Most impressive, at least to Raymond, is his gemstone and mineral collection; once he starts talking about it, he just can’t stop. Who doesn’t get excited by a wondrous barite specimen in a pyrite matrix? Raymond presently resides with his wife and two children in eastern Canada, where they experience many adventures together.

Brad Edgeworth, CCIE No. 31574 (R&S and SP), is a systems architect at Cisco Systems. He is a distinguished speaker at Cisco Live, where he has presented on various topics. Before joining Cisco, Brad worked as a network architect and consultant for various Fortune 500 companies. Brad’s expertise is based on enterprise and service provider environments, with an emphasis on architectural and operational simplicity and consistency. Brad holds a bachelor of arts degree in computer systems management from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. Brad can be found on Twitter as @BradEdgeworth.