Spring PONC makes Triumphant Return to Dallas

By Leonard Luna, Senior Marketing Manager, Cisco Service Provider Solutions

Cisco’s Packet Optical Networking Conference (PONC) triumphantly returned to Dallas this past May after two consecutive years in San Jose. Over 270 members of the network operator community attended the ninth iteration of this annual event. The conference followed the traditional 3-day agenda:

Day-1: General Session presentations featuring Cisco leadership/experts, industry analyst and VIP customer presentations, with the Keynote delivered by Kelly Ahuja, Cisco SVP Service Provider Segment.

Day-2: Workshops – Attendees selected from 12 sessions covering a variety of solutions including packet, optical, SDN, EMS/NMS, orchestration, cloud, PON, transceiver technology, and segment routing.

Day-3: Exposition & Bonus Technical Sessions. A variety of over 10 live demonstrations were on display including 4 bonus technical sessions covering TDM migration, Optical Network Design, High Speed Optics, and Virtual Routers.

A diverse representation of providers attended the PONC including local, national and global providers, cable, educational, financial and government operators, system integrators and industry analysts. Many attendees have made the Spring PONC a recurring event in their annual schedule to keep pace with industry trends and solution innovations. Trevor Bidle, VP of Technology Strategy, US Signal noted that US Signal has attended all 9 Spring PONC events.

This year’s Spring PONC was greatly enhanced by presentations from the following industry experts:

Glenn Wellbrock, Director, Optical Transport Planning, Verizon

“The True value of Flexible Networks, Next-Gen ROADM Architecture”

Paul Schopis, CTO, OARnet

“OARnet and Ohio: Building Communities”

Trevor Bidle, VIP of Technical Strategy, US Signal

“Evolving the Network to Deliver Business Outcomes”

Andrew Schmitt, Principal Analyst Infonetics

“Converged Optical Market Trends”

We took the opportunity to interview our customers, partners and analysts on-site at the PONC so you can gain their perspective first hand. The following video testimonials answer the questions:

Why come to the PONC?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwYjior0YR0&index=2&list=PL9FE8C8A586B69150

What do you experience at PONC?

What do you take from PONC?

Our sincere gratitude goes out to our Spring ’15 PONC attendees made this year’s event so successful and compelling. If you didn’t get a chance to attend, please plan on attending the Spring PONC in 2016 or join us in Baveno Italy this Fall for our European-based event. I encourage you to bookmark our year-round PONC website to keep up on the latest PONC news.

Keep the conversation going – Connect with us @CiscoSP360.