NAB 2018: here’s what you saw with the Cisco team

Sleep deprived?  If you are one of 200 or so people on my flight back to NYC from Vegas, you sure as heck are!  With another successful NAB in the books, vendors and customers alike make the great trek home, a little worse for the wear.  A week of non-stop meetings, events, solution showcasing, non-stop standing (and, well, drinks…lots and lots of drinks) can leave anyone fatigued.  So one can clearly understand how easy it is to lose track of what you saw and where you saw it. So sit back, relax, and let me give you a quick recap of what you saw with the Cisco team.

Cisco’s focus in 2018 is enabling our media clients to address flexible scale, operational efficiency, and audience engagement, securely.  As a result, we have made significant strides in our Media Blueprint, a set of IP-based HW and SW solutions that securely accelerate the production, playout, and distribution of immersive experiences, which we showcased in Vegas last week.

Cisco Media Blueprint

Here is what you saw:

Flexible Scale:

IP Fabric for Media

IP Fabric for Media, a SMPTE 2110 ready, multicast, non-blocking COTS IP switch which interoperates with your controller of choice (Evertz, Grass Valley, Imagine, Reidel, Lawo, etc) fueling intra-studio, remote, and distributed live production, at scale.

Object Storage: scalable, cloud-based media storage solutions on Cisco UCS with Cloudian, Scalityand Swiftstack, to enable more active data storage, management and access across multiple clouds.

Operational Efficiency

CloudCenter for managing multi-cloud workflows simplifying the support across private and public clouds by automating deployment, migration and management of media-specific workflows.

AppDynamics for application performance management, ensuring applications meet performance expectations with automatic monitoring and faster mean-time-to-repair.

Audience Engagement

D9800 IRDs with Zixi/ABR2T enablement: reliable IP-based primary distribution with the D9800 multi-input/output platform to migrate from satellite to terrestrial primary distribution;

Virtual DCM smart rate control for consistent ABR video quality with bandwidth and cost optimization, and glass-to-glass low latency ABR distribution;

Collaboration: sleek, real-time interactions among expert teams, talking heads, and audience members via Cisco Spark, enabling new ways to jointly create and share files and screens – and create shared spaces for immersive video collaboration.

Everything we sell must be secure, hence we have produced a security architecture for media, providing visibility, segmentation, and threat protection securing your infrastructure and content, across media production, IT, and multi-cloud environments.  We also have incident response assistance ready to help in the event of a hack.

Media Security Architecture

We are hyper-focused on industrializing our approach in Media through our commitment to ecosystem (Chyron Hego, Evertz, Grass Valley, Imagine, LAWO, Reidel, VizRT) and channel (CDI, Presidio, WWT) partners by offering the programs, training, and certifications that provide the confidence that our joint solutions reliably operate under rigorous media workloads.

As a result, Cisco continues to aggressively participate in AIMs, SMPTE, VSF, AMWA, and this year, made a huge commitment to the success of the IP Connected Showcase.

Lastly, this year we highlighted a use case we are very proud of:  Cisco’s Support of NBC Sports at the 2018 Winter Olympics.  Learn more about how we partnered with NBCUniversal to provide compelling and comprehensive sports coverage.

Oh… and there was Ice Cream.  Lots and lots of blue, rolled, ice cream.

Rolled Ice Cream

Now, it’s all coming back right?