Jim Buchan

Jim is a Vertical Solutions Architect working in Cisco’s EMEAR theatre. With a firm grounding the education sector with experience built up over a priod of 28 years as a teacher (K-12), University Senior Lecturer and Director of a University Virtual Campus project. Based on this experience he was subsequently commissioned to perform international consultancy activities advising the Ministry of Education in both Botswana and Namibia on the deployment of ICT solutions for Education.

Three secondments followed first to UKERNA (now Janet(UK)) concerning the development and procurement of the JANET network through the establishment of five Higher Education Metropolitian Networks in Scotland, then to the Scottish Government as lead technical advisor for the Broadband Pathfinder project and the Glow Interconnect.

Jim then joined Learning and Teaching Scotland to work on the Glow project team as its Chief Information Technology Officer to lead the technical design and procurement exercise of Glow. Glow was a project to oversee the establishment of the Glow Interconnect (extension of Janet network connecting Scottish Local Authorities), the design and procurement of the Glow Content Delivery Network for all of Scotlands schools and finally the Glow Intranet. The Glow Intranet is a country wide learning platform which serves a total of 1.5 million users including pupils, parents and staff in all of Scotlands 3000+ schools.

Jim moved from Learning and Teaching Scotland to take up his current post with Cisco where he has been supporting sales teams in a number of countries to have more effective engagements with the Education market customers. This has included working particularly with strategic countries and accounts and supporting in particular John Connel and Selim Eddie. Because of his former experience, Jim has also be invoved in providing advice to the team which is developing the Cisco Learning Environment (CLE) and has also been leader and Exemplar in the context of the Emerging Markets Virtual Theatre (EMVT) project. Current work includes supporting GovNET projects in Albania, Turkey and Hungary, supporting education project in Morrocco, Tunisia, Kuwait, South Africa, Peru and Tartarstan and investigation current tools which might be deployed alongside Cisco solutions in Education including MetaSYS and Meego and other learning platform solutions from Promethium. He served on the CLE

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