At the Cisco Expo UAE, the company and its partners came together to highlight key technology opportunities in the region.
Duncan Mitchell, senior VP, emerging theatre, Cisco presented a series of interesting facts at the Cisco Expo UAE, depicting what he called a paradigm shift in the adoption and use of the latest technology across the globe.
“More data was created during any 48 hour period last year than by all of humanity in the last 30,000 years and this will be the amount of data generated roughly every hour by 2020,” Mitchell said.
According to Mitchell, Cisco expects that more than 300 million passenger vehicles will be connected to the Internet by 2022 creating even more volumes of data and network traffic. “According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index 2011, by 2016, data networks will carry upto 130 exabytes of data. Around the same time, 60% of mobile users will generate more than 1Gb of mobile data traffic every month, while the Middle East and Africa will exhibit the strongest mobile data traffic growth of any region at a CAGR of 104%,” he added.
“While all these facts point to the inevitability of mobility and big data as key challenges for the future, at Cisco we consider these opportunities for innovation,” said Howard Charney, senior VP, office of the president, Cisco.
Charney added, “We at Cisco believe that the future is pervasive computing where all that we see as independent technology now, will come together into one cohesive whole enabling true ‘always-on’ functionality and connectivity,” Charney said.
During his keynote, Charney added that Cisco is hugely proud of its partnership with the Emirates government and is optimistic about the journey to achieving its strategic vision for 2030 and beyond.
Charney also cited the examples of companies like Emirates Aluminium (EMAL), the Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC), American University of Sharjah (AUS) among other organisations as leaders in IT investment and adoption in the region.
Cisco also took the opportunity to unveil the next phase of its Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI), an IT system that was designed to simplify desktop virtualisation and bring voice and video to the virtual workspace. The latest releases called Cisco Jabber and Cisco Quad are expected to help users collaborate directly from smart phones, tablets, PCs, virtual desktops, laptops and web applications.
“Having listened to our customers, the latest releases of Cisco’s unified communications solutions are aimed at enabling the provision of seamless experience on a range of devices and platforms, whether on premises or in the cloud. This approach further accelerates our strategic goal of enabling ‘any-to-any’ collaboration, while also making it easier than ever to collaborate with people inside or outside of an organisation. In a post-PC era, businesses need ways to extend mobile, social, video and virtual collaboration on any mobile phone, virtual desktop, tablet or internet-connected device. We are bringing that to life today,” said Wael Abdulla, collaboration manager for UAE at Cisco.
The networking company also announced the signing of a broad strategic alliance agreement with Citrix and VMware.
The agreement entails combining Cisco’s leadership in networking, data centre, endpoint devices and collaboration, with Citrix and VMware’s leadership in virtualisation and the delivery of desktops, applications and data. The alliance is aimed at delivering solutions that help enterprises conveniently and cost effectively deploy virtual desktops to millions of PCs, Macs, tablets, smartphones and thin clients. This alliance, according to Cisco, will also deliver data centre solutions that make it easier for organisations to deploy the infrastructure required to deliver IT as a service across multiple networks and geographies. //
