Cisco Shows Commitment to the Media Industry, Wins “Best in Show” Award

This week’s NAB Show (National Association of Broadcasters) will go down as a smashing success for Cisco thanks to innovation, leadership, training and partnerships.  For me it marked my 15th NAB show, and I couldn’t be more-proud of the work our team at Cisco showcased this week in each of those four areas.  With approximately 100,000 attendees at NAB, this is the premier event for Media, Entertainment, Sports and Broadcast and each year we aim to share the latest and greatest. Oh, did we do that this year!  Let me tell you how:

Innovation:

Cisco’s presence at NAB included a journey-like experience inside the booth to showcase the full portfolio of Cisco solutions within our Cisco Media Blueprint and how those map to the workflow within the Media Supply Chain with a guided journey in our booth.  One of those journey stops included a detailed overview of our COTS-based switching solution, IP Fabric for Media, which was also awarded TV Technology’s “Best in Show” Award!  Our IP Fabric for Media solution has been leading the market for years with deployments such as Arena TV, Canal+, and many more, so it was great to see the team honored with this award that highlights the innovation that was on display.

Cisco takes home the TV Technology “Best in Show” award for IP Fabric for Media

Leadership:

Cisco’s very own SVP and CTAO, David Ward, highlighted two industry-leading events this week at NAB.  The first was his future-looking keynote session with industry analyst Josh Steinhour from Devoncroft at their annual Media Executive Summit with well over 500 attendees.  At this event, David provided insight into how Cisco is leading the innovation that is driving IP & Cloud-based workflows within Media & Entertainment.  He also shared with a room full of industry executives, how innovation around 5G and IoT will play a role in Media & Entertainment. The result of the event was customers and partners coming up to me saying, “Dave rocked it!”

Cisco’s David Ward joins the stage at the Devoncroft Executive Summit

Training:

Throughout the week, I was honored to talk to many members of the press, and analysts.  During each of those sessions, the role of skilled-labor, re-skilling, and training was a hot topic.  I am proud of the work that Cisco has done around training for Media & Broadcast Engineers and confidently know that we are leading around training.  Cisco launched our IP Fabric for Media & Broadcast / IP Engineering training a year ago, and it’s awesome to see that the industry realizes now more than ever how important that training really is!  We even had our Learning at Cisco team was on-site during NAB and the feedback from customers and partners was tremendous as we lead this industry towards new skill sets required in the world of IP & Cloud within Media & Entertainment.

The IP Fabric for Media Demonstration at NAB 2019

Partnership:

Man, am I proud of all our partners and how they collaborated with us at NAB and honestly well before this event.  We had over 20 partners in the Cisco booth showcasing technology from SDN Broadcast Controllers, Cameras, Endpoint Solutions, Processing Solutions, Editing, Playout, Scale-out Storage and Systems Integrators.  Cisco also had events within the IP Showcase, AMWA, Devoncroft Media Executive Summit and the Diversified IP Showcase event.  We even had partners display recent wins which is just the icing on the cake!

Through innovation, leadership, training and partnerships, Cisco once again showed its commitment to the Media & Entertainment market this week at NAB and for that I am truly encouraged and feel honored to work along-side such a talented group of people helping to accelerate ideas to audiences within this industry.  For more information on how Cisco is transforming Media & Entertainment go to www.cisco.com/go/media.