ANGA COM 2014 Closes on a Positive Note: Key Highlights from the Show Floor

Another successful ANGA COM for Cisco.

The event itself attracted 17,000 visitors and 1,700 participated in the Congress, listening to over 100 speakers – both areas attracting more people than last year – this is indeed a growing show!

Cisco was well represented in panels and speaking sessions throughout the event, with Alon Bernstein´s talk on virtual CMTS’, Yves Padrines’ panel on Connected & Smart Homes  – which was very well attended in spite of taking place on the last afternoon – we counted over 300 people!  And of course my own involvement on a panel to discuss how Cloud is key to keeping service provider’s competitive against new players such as the Over-The-Top (OTT) providers.

Cloud or Not to Cloud, That is the Question! from Cisco Service Provider

Above: Check out my presentation from ANGA – ‘Cloud or not to Cloud, that is the question!’

The main themes of the show centered on the connected home and how gateways provide  multiscreen support. There was a lot of upbeat talk about how 4K TV would become mainstream in the relatively near future. DOCSIS 3.1 and WiFi-based services are clearly high on the priority list for the cable industry.
But the show was not only about technology. In order to reduce OPEX and CAPEX it will be key for service providers to have a certain degree of flexibility in how they deal with content and associated copyright (for example storage of content in the Cloud). There was continued interest in how we are helping our customers to become more agile with our Cloud and RDK-based thin client solutions. Many of our customers are still trying to find out what this means from them from an investment and business point of view, but the general consensus is that it is the right direction going forward.

We had a splendid booth on the show floor, with a veritable smorgasbord of demos  – showcasing our cable access solutions, video cloud services, RDK-based solutions, UHD with a 4K STB, connected home technologies, our encode-transcode capabilities and Videoscape offerings. All in all we had over xx visitors on the stand which we’re extremely pleased with!

In particular, our cable access story resonated very well with our customers. The introduction of the new cBR8 – our integrated CCAP solution, providing unprecedented bandwidth and density in the CMTS world. On the video front we are furthering our capabilities to support UHD (4K) services for our service provider customers and were proud to have demonstrated the 1st 4K 60p capable set-top box alongside our world-class Cisco Snowflake UI served from the Cloud.

The connected home area of our stand generated a lot of interest – providing a vision of how the home of the future can be managed. We showcased a mix of existing deployments and more visionary stories including specific examples of Internet of Everything applications. If it wasn’t already obvious, there was a palpable interest in the topic and I for one look forward to seeing more – no doubt it will be a hot topic in industry shows to come.

So until IBC…