Cisco Live! Melbourne Abounds with Co-Innovation Opportunities

With record-setting attendance of nearly 8,400, Cisco Live! Melbourne opened up new vistas of digital opportunity for our co-innovation teams across Asia Pacific, Japan and China (APJC). Throughout the week at the Co-Innovation Pavilion, we hosted a steady stream of inquisitive customers, partners, government officials and colleagues, exploring how businesses and communities are generating transformational value through digitization.

By week’s end, more than 500 C-level executives and 2,000 customers and partners from various multinational companies and startups visited us to learn how Cisco co-innovates. At the Co-Innovation Pavilion, we featured five demo experiences on Smart Cities and five more on Industry 4.0, focused on manufacturing.

Highlighting the week were live stream feeds from Tokyo and the Tokyo Co-Innovation Center, showcasing celebrations at the Cisco Digital Japan Days 2019, where visitors experienced the way that people will live, work and play in the future with Cisco technology.

Our co-innovation philosophy was stated eloquently at the conference keynote by Irving Tan, Cisco Senior Vice President and Chief of Operations, “We’re recognizing that in this new world of digitization no single organization has all the answers. We need to live in a world of co-innovation,” which Tan emphasized is exemplified by Cisco’s network of 14 global Co-Innovation Centers, including four in the APJC region—Sydney, Perth, Tokyo, and Singapore, which opened just last month.

We were privileged to host a visit from Miyuki Suzuki, Cisco’s APJC President, who discussed current and new projects with our team and partners, and who also helped host the grand opening of the Singapore Co-Innovation Center in February. During her keynote, Suzuki discussed how “discontinuity” can be an opportunity to “move forward, to create something new, reimagine our communities, and create grassroots innovations and change our organizations.” She referenced the Smart City initiative in the historic city of Kyoto, which Cisco Japan teams and our Tokyo Co-Innovation Center staff are collaborating on to improve the day-to-day experiences of both residents and tourists.

We had productive exchanges with so many external and internal partners, from the PTT, Thailand’s only Fortune Global 500 company, to Cisco’s Ken Boal, Vice President for ANZ, and Nando Gil De Bernabe, Managing Director, Strategy & Operations, APJC, who took time out of their busy schedules to advance current and future projects.

Showcasing Co-Innovation with Industry Leaders and Start-ups

Driven by Dave Ward, Cisco’s Chief Technology Officer of Engineering and Chief Architect, our Co-Innovation Centers in APJC teamed up with their ecosystem of innovation partners at the Co-Innovation Pavilion. Together, we presented side-by-side a series of proofs-of-concept (POCs) and customer solutions combining Internet of Things (IOT) technologies, architectures and software.

We and our valued partners unveiled a cornucopia of use cases featuring the latest digital advances for industry and society. As a founding member of Innovation Central Perth’s WISE (Wireless Industrial Sensor Environment) program, Wesfarmers Chemicals, Energy and Fertilizers (WesCEF) attended Cisco Live! and provided invaluable support by sharing their experience of working with Cisco, Woodside, CSIRO Data61 and Curtin University. This Industrial portfolio of Wesfarmers, Australia’s largest company by revenue and the nation’s largest employer, is leveraging the Center to understand cutting-edge sensor and connectivity technologies. Innovation Manager, Dr Kate Brooks, was on site to highlight the benefits of WISE membership and to showcase the WesCEF WISE technology and data projects. Separately, the RealWear team showed how it integrated Cisco’s WebEx Teams into its smart wearable device, which is incorporates a ruggedized computer that connects communications between remote workers in the field and colleagues in central offices.

On the Smart City front, we focused on digital technologies that improve the lives of those who live, work and visit cities. For example, Aqura demonstrated how they can leverage Cisco’s Kinetic solutions to extract data from an industrial environment and analyze it to reduce downtime and increase operational efficiencies. Ikara demonstrated Echelon, its business process assurance platform that enables organizations to transform siloed IT operations into an integrated digital services model. Audinate, which collaborated with Cisco’s Innovation Central Perth, showed how its Dante audio-visual networking technology analyzes infrastructure failure modes for the Public Transport Authority of Western Australia. And Quantum IT, in partnership with Cisco’s Innovation Central Sydney, validated a design using video and LiDAR technology running on Cisco UCSW hardware to improve management of congestion, security threats and business performance.

On the Smart Port front, colleagues from the Netherlands kindly joined us to highlight Cisco’s collaboration with the Port of Rotterdam to build an IoT platform, making one of the world’s busiest and most advanced ports even safer and more efficient. What is especially exciting here, is that this platform can be applied across multiple industries.

We and our partners also showcased a number of horizontal platform and technology developments that enable better digital solutions across a broad range of vertical markets, from healthcare to manufacturing. Working with global standards bodies, we’re developing a scalable solution marrying IT and OT requirements to autonomously provision IoT sensors with correct security and network policies. The Cisco Deep Fusion Reasoning Engine, leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML), accurately identifies objects, determines patterns, predicts interactions and makes recommendations. And Mobility as a Service (MaaS) will bundle traditional transport modes such as trains and buses with technology platforms and new service offerings like on-demand, rideshare and smart parking services.

Announcement of a new Cisco Center in Australia

With an event drawing such strong attendance from industry leaders, Cisco Live! proved to be the ideal venue for a major announcement. Scott Harrell, Cisco’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Networking Business, and  Professor Deborah Terry, Curtin University’s Vice Chancellor, co-announced a new Center for Intent based Networking, which will be co-located with Innovation Central Perth on the Curtin University (Perth) campus.

Large conferences and exhibitions can often be overwhelming with the sheer number of announcements, sessions, demos and networking activities. Thanks to our extraordinary APJC innovation team and closely-knit ecosystem partners, Cisco Live! Melbourne inspired and energized us by opening up new digital opportunities to explore and co-develop in the weeks and months to come.

The full week showed first-hand that the common thread connecting our Co-Innovation Centers across the world is the belief that incremental and breakthrough ideas come from working with a diverse ecosystem, including our employees, customers, partners, universities, researchers, start-ups, and more.

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