Direct from Cisco Live 2011 in London!
By Jay Stephenson, Director, Worldwide Strategic Alliances, InfoVista
We were pleased to be a part of Cisco Live London this month and enjoyed the opportunity that the meeting offered to build and maintain relationships with the fine people at Cisco.
Cisco Live is always a tremendous opportunity to discuss new market trends and learn where the industry’s leading network vendor is taking us. As such, many of the Cisco sessions focused on new solutions for advanced network management, technology convergence in carrier Ethernet and video enabled architectures, plus hosted communication and collaboration opportunities for communications service providers.
John Chambers’ keynote was most enlightening. In his opening remarks, he commented that innovation has never moved at a faster pace—and neither has competition. Every company, (particularly those in the US and Europe that are burdened with the high cost of labor) has to identify ways to change productivity and drive innovation and competitive differentiation, or be left behind. He positioned that the network will be the platform for that change, fueled by collaboration, network enabled transitions, and the advent of “real” broadband leveraging social networking to change business models worldwide.
As Chambers’ presentation progressed, his vision of the future focused around cloud, video, and collaboration. We saw a demo of the connected classroom and the use of evolving technology combining voice, video (Tandberg), CIUS, WebEx, application sharing, and more. Cisco is proposing a full product line that integrates with several key partners to enable service providers to deliver public and private cloud reporting. This includes the release of a new Nexus product line with, which in tandem InfoVista is aligning its roadmap to the Cisco strategy by providing a comprehensive solution for cloud-ready virtualized architectures.
InfoVista is also tracking and developing against a number of the key market trends discussed at the event. As the progression and acceptance of Carrier Ethernet continues, Cisco is playing a key role in defining use of the technology, and InfoVista is continuing its alignment with the Metro Ethernet Forum and Cisco to enable the right levels of performance management to help ensure the technology can be leveraged in a timely manner. Ethernet in the Mobile Backhaul is a great example of where Cisco and InfoVista are collaborating.
Back in our booth, attendees were very interested in InfoVista’s Unified Communications Assurance Solution, which expands performance management support for Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution and provides a complete set of capabilities for holistic monitoring of the network and virtualized infrastructure, services, and applications of Unified Communications and Collaboration environments.
Overall, the show was a success and attendance was strong and we are planning to attend next year, also in London in 2012—just in time for the Olympics! And although the actual meeting is over, the virtual show continues. Click here to listen to sessions, download content, and chat with CISCO’s virtual staff!
