Cisco Networkers event kicks off

Around 1000 networking professionals have descended on Brisbane’s Convention and Exhibition Centre for the annual Cisco Networkers event.

Now in its 15th year, the industry event began with a keynote presentation from Guido Jouret, CTO of Cisco’s Emerging Technologies group.

Jouret said the global recession is a time of great innovation and the company’s focus is on new video technologies and visual communication, and on the role of IT as an “experience provider”.

“The time is now for IT to embark on a new mission, because the amount of change and the amount of opportunity that’s come into IT has never been greater,” he said. “The new mandate for IT is to position itself as an experience provider.”

Delegates were urged to embrace the changes in the workforce which were driven by the increase of innovation in consumer IT and use video collaboration to generate information to improve business efficiency and productivity.

As an example, Jouret highlighted this year’s federal government roll-out of Cisco telepresence systems across 20 sites to conduct COAG meetings, saving the government $280 million off its travel bill.

During the keynote, delegates were also treated to tidbits about the company’s global telepresence push into sport, retail and healthcare, and received a live demo of video networking from Cisco’s US headquarters.

According to Jouret, the time has come for IT leaders to rise to the challenges posed by trends such as virtualisation, video and globilisation. “These [challenges] will create new possibilities and experiences which are all enabled by the network,” he said.

Kathryn Edwards travelled to Cisco Networkers as a guest of Cisco.