Bangalore: In keeping with the spirit of celebrating technology innovation at Cisco India, Cisco hosted the ‘Cisco Innovation Expo 2011’ at its Globalisation Centre East campus in Bangalore on the 14th and 15th of April, 2011. The event comprised exhibitions, demos, panel discussions and technology talks along three broad technology tracks: Borderless Networks, Cloud Services and Applications and Collaboration. The event saw over 2000 participants, including Cisco employees, customers and partners.

Speaking about the event, Wim Elfrink, Chief Globalisation Officer and Executive Vice President, Emerging Solutions, Cisco said, “Innovation and operational excellence are key to Cisco’s success. We stayed in India for quality, we invested for innovation and now we are creating a new market. The Innovation Expo 2011 is a great example of collaboration at Cisco with the whole India team coming together to showcase how the power of the network can truly change the way we work, live, play and learn.”

The event was kicked off with a keynote by Wim Elfrink, who spoke about Innovation at Cisco in India and how innovation is changing the way we work, live, play, and learn. This was followed by a session on Innovation in IT by VC Gopalratnam, VP, Information Technology and CIO Globalisation, Cisco. Over two days, the event included panel discussions on various innovation related topics led by senior Cisco executives.

The Innovation Expo captured the vision of ‘innovation with customer centricity’ by organizing the technology demonstrations around the solutions approach. This way, one could clearly visualize how the end customer would end up consuming the innovation. Over 260 Cisco and partner engineers set up 55 demo booths showcasing solutions around the architecture plays: Borderless Networks, Cloud Services and Applications and Collaboration as well as innovations in core technologies such as switching and routing.
Going beyond this, the event had a huge focus on encouraging innovation across all levels of engineering. Leading up to the event, engineers were encouraged to submit their ideas in three forms: Proof of Concepts (PoCs); New ideas as part of ‘My Idea’; and technology demos as part of ‘My Project’. The objective of the contest was to highlight the grassroots level innovation thinking and connected solutions/architecture level innovation. The contest witnessed overwhelming response. A whopping 300 entries were received in the areas such as collaboration, high availability, unified computing systems, security, energy conservation & other emerging technologies.

Before the event, the Technology Learning Circle series involved Cisco leaders working as mentors with a group of protégés. The mentors focused on specific topics around architecture plays. Multiple learning circles lead by 17 technical and business leaders were attended by over 400 engineers from cross functional teams.

The event focused on the following technology tracks:

Borderless Networks: The event showcased latest developments in the field of secure mobility, advanced video aware networks, seamless virtual office solutions, IPv6, smart branch, network automation and multi tenant solutions.

Cloud Services & Applications: Cloud based services framework is transforming businesses across several domains. Some of the recent innovations and compelling use cases to demonstrate Cisco’s deep expertise in the area of cloud innovation were displayed.

Collaboration: Communication infrastructure has evolved rapidly over the last few years and has seen an increased adoption of technologies like pervasive video, voice, IM, presence and Web collaboration. The Cisco Innovation Expo showcased a series of innovations that are commonplace in the communication industry today and highlight how business can be transformed.