Whether they are ‘leaning in’ or ‘breaking through the glass ceiling’, the number of women in the global Service Provider (SP) and Cable industries is growing rapidly. Many female executives are at the helm– or in key leadership roles — of SP firms that are transforming their businesses and architectures. These are exciting times that call for celebration, but we are not done yet.

At next week’s annual Mobile World Congress, women will be front and center at two key events held on Tuesday, March 3 in Barcelona. Cisco is hosting Connected Women Leaders@MWC, bringing together women around the world to celebrate, network and inspire current and future females in the SP industry. I will be co-hosting this event, along with other Cisco leaders, where we will be joined by female executives from many of our key SP customers. It promises to be an interactive forum with lively discussions on how together we can support the growth of influential women in the SP sector. I will also be speaking at an adjunct event at MWC, Women in Business Congress, honoring today’s success and evolution of women in ‘Technology and Innovation’. During my keynote, I will discuss the “The Internet of Everything (IoE): Seizing the Opportunities”. Overall IoE opportunties are estimated to represent a staggering $19 Trillion value-at-stake, and for SPs the global 10-year value-at-stake is $1.7 Trillion. At Mobile World Congress, Cisco will be highlighting innovations across its SP portfolio with several key announcements, presentations and demonstrations that will help SPs capture these IoE-enabled business opportunities. Follow us on our LinkedIn page for targeted updates and announcements.

These are transformative times for SPs, and Cisco is committed to helping inspire the next-generation of female leaders in the SP industry. Please join Cisco Empowered Women’s Network group on Linkedin and visit www.womeninbusinesscongress.com. Let’s continue together to celebrate and support – tell me what you think.

Have questions or comments? Tweet us @CiscoSP360 – We would love to hear from you!

As I board the plane ready for the long flights to Barcelona, I’m excited and energised by the prospective of around 100 APAC customer meetings and Cisco technology demos. Hopefully when I get off the plane in the wee hours I’ll remain half as energised.

With all the discussions with Service Provider CxO teams on their expectations for the event, some common top of the mind issues or challenges for Cisco have emerged;

What are the Global trends in Traffic Demand?

Cisco VNI forecasts 10x Mobile Data traffic growth over the next 5-years, nothing new there, but Read More »

Tags: 5G, cisco VPCs, HetNet, mobile world congress, MVNO, MWC 2015, NFV, orchestration, ott, SDN, VoWifi

An invitation to see how Tomorrow starts here at MWC 2015

We all like to talk about creating new customized services for the end user at “web-speed”. But today there is no way to automate service creation, or to dynamically affect changes (augmentation) to existing services without touching the network topology. This is because we use physical service chains across the data plane.  To achieve automated flexibility in service creation we must logically decouple the service plane from the transport plane – a software abstraction from specific network nodes.

As an industry, we lack the ability to: Read More »

Tags: Cisco Evolved Services Platform, cisco intercloud, esp, IETF standardization, mobile world congress, MWC 15, network service header, NFV, NSH, SDN, Service Provider

As we close on the first two months of 2015, I am amazed by the exciting developments that can directly benefit service providers. A few examples from my recent travels:

• CES in Las Vegas – The Internet of Everything moved from concept to reality as seen in new connected services, continued proliferation of 4K video and virtualization as a business imperative.
• Cisco Live in Milan – Advances in how service providers can integrate collaboration, cloud, open network environment enablement solution to drive transformation. And SDN shifting from a question of “how” to “when”.

I’m confident that Mobile World Congress this year will have even more exciting developments. The recently announced 2014 Cisco VNI Global Mobile Traffic Forecast states that more than Read More »

Tags: CES 2015, Cisco Live Milan, Cisco VNI, mobile world congress, mwc, SDN, Service Provider

In just a couple of days, many of you will be taking planes, trains, and automobiles to sunny Barcelona. I see that the weather forecast is for 65ºF / 19ºC for the opening day of Mobile World Congress. I really appreciate how the MWC timeframe has gradually crept closer to Spring over these past few years. Maybe you are not paying attention to the weather as much as me. You would if you had the same view that I have out my window, where it is currently 20ºF / -6ºC. Yes, I should clean off my roof. But I do like that my garage roof serves as an historical record of the unmerciful winter we have had here in Boston in northeast U.S., where we have had over 100 inches / 250 cm of snow so far.

So my main point is, if you don’t go to MWC 2015 next week, you are going to miss Read More »

Tags: mobile world congress, mobility, mwc, Service Provider, virtualization, VoWifi, wifi