Each year in March, IT professionals, industry analysts and media from across Asia Pacific head to Cisco Live! at the Melbourne Conference and Exhibition Centre (MCEC) to hear how tech giant, Cisco, is enabling digitisation at every level, from SMB, public sector, through to global enterprise.
This year’s event, attended by a record-breaking 7,300 delegates from across the region, held more anticipation than ever before for Cisco, as it geared up to switch on the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games, the largest sporting event Australia will host this decade.
Cisco teamed up with Optus to provide the network smarts for the Games, with a network spanning 1,900 kilometres from Cairns to Coolangatta.
This was also a particularly special year for Cisco Live! as the conference celebrated its 25-year anniversary. As explained by Ken Boal, VP of Cisco ANZ, during his opening keynote speech, “25 years ago the network was changing the world, now the world is changing the network and at the heart of this amazing change is every person who builds, designs, connects or secures the network sitting in the audience.”
The hot tech topic of Cisco Live this year, and the latest innovation transforming networking is Intent-Based Networking, a new approach that enables a network to use automation and machine learning to align itself with business intent.
What does this mean? Well, in the words of Peter Dinklage, it means a world where the network uses intuition to drive itself and learn from experience. A network that can configure millions of connections, not in months or days but in minutes, and a network that can stop threats even when they are hidden in encrypted traffic. A world, that Cisco says, has already moved from concept to reality.
Taking to the stage for the opening keynote was Senior VP and GM of applications at Cisco, and collaboration visionary, Rowan Trollope to talk about Cisco’s vision and look to the future. During the session he gave his prediction for technology in 2050.
Here’s a quick snapshot :
The first drone taxi is set to launch in Dubai in 2022
The replacement of smartphones by augmented reality devices by 2025
Text messaging performed by brainwaves by 2025
One terabyte network connections being commonplace by 2034
The cure for Alzheimer’s being discovered by 2036
AI overtaking human intelligence by 2045
You can hear more from Rowan’s keynote here.
Look out for more news from Cisco in the coming months. This year promises to continue to surprise and deliver more than we could ever imagine from the world of technology.