The team at Cisco Canada is very excited about the upcoming Canadian Government Technology Event, GTEC at the Ottawa Convention Centre the week of October 17-20, 2011. Cisco Canada will be participating as a Gold Partner at the event with plans for an interactive exhibitor booth that will showcase new technologies and provide an opportunity for attendees to meet with engineers and specialists.
I am also very excited to be hosting a breakout session on Wednesday, October 19th at 2:15pm in Room 201 where we will discuss “The Next Five Years”. During the interactive breakout we’ll chat about what various new technology trends like the rapid acceleration of video adoption, consumer devices in the workplace, impacts of social media, data centre and desktop virtualization, mobility, smart buildings will mean to us as we build future networks. We will discuss some examples around how the availability of these new technologies are enabling improvements in lives of employees and citizens in areas such as healthcare, education and public safety. It is clear the pace of innovation is only increasing which will bring both significant opportunities as well as challenges as we seek to maintain resilient, scalable and secure networks. I look forward to a great conversation.
Attendees can expect to be able to see some of the latest technology and network advancements in our interactive booth. Some of the demos will include:
1. Virtual Experience Infrastructure (VXI) - As organizations are migrating some or all of their employees to virtual desktop environments (VDI), the challenges around rich media and providing scalable cost-effective data centre solutions and efficient wide area network usage models are critical. The VXI demo showcases Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), wide area network acceleration and collaboration tools that improve virtual desktop deployments.
2. Virtualization & Cloud – Demos and engineers will be on hand to discuss the latest trends in private clouds, hybrid public/private clouds, secure multi-tenancy, and network virtualization. These are all important topics as organizations seek to determine what applications and infrastructure they will run on private or hybrid clouds.
3. Telepresence – Cisco and CBCI Telecom will be running live Telepresence between their two booths to allow attendees to experience the HD quality of today’s Telepresence technology. Cisco will also be showcasing video interoperability and a wide range of video endpoints right down to desktop Telepresence.
4. Cisco Virtual Office (CVO) - Cisco has over 25,000 internal workers that work part or all of the week from home offices. We have achieved significant savings and greenhouse gas reductions implementing this program . By equipping emplyees with a CVO solution including Webex with HQ video, desktop video and secure home router with secure wireless we have been able to attract new talent and provide employees with improved work-life balance.
5. Secure Mobility - Security requires knowledge not only of device these days but identity of the individual, application awareness, location and time/day knowledge to provide a holistic security solution. With more and more pressure for allowing end-users consumer devices whether it be smartphones, tablets or laptops, the need for a holistic security architecture is even more important. Cisco will have on hand the Cisco Identity Services Engine and Cisco Prime Network Control System integrated with Entrust to demonstrate secure mobility.
6. Digital Media Solutions - The ability to create video content and distribute widely to the masses whether it be a town-hall meeting allowing remote employees to attend virtually or creating an enterprise digital signage solution has never been more easy yet advanced.
The Cisco team of engineers and specialists will be at the show all week and look forward to meeting with attendees and sharing our vision and new technologies. We also look forward to listening to your perspectives on where your challenges and solutions needing to go over the next five years and beyond.
