Cathy Burns, country marketing lead, SA, discusses the development of the agenda for the keenly anticipated Cisco Expo 2013.
What is your role at Cisco South Africa?
I'm the country marketing lead responsible for delivering integrated marketing campaigns that increase brand awareness and drive our sales pipeline across Cisco architectures and solutions. It's wonderful to be part of a team dedicated to transforming SA through our technology solutions and skills development programmes.
I am passionate about managing campaigns that deliver return on investment by generating sales leads for our account teams. I believe all marketing activities need to be strategic and measurable.
Cisco Expo 2013 is our biggest event of the year.
What can people look forward to at Cisco Expo 2013 South Africa?
The Expo is part of a global series of Cisco proprietary, in-country events, designed for our customers and partners to showcase the very latest in technology trends and Cisco solutions.
Under the theme 'Built for the Human Network', Cisco Expo 2013 South Africa will bring together information technology decision-makers over two days at Sun City between 3 and 5 March 2013. It will be a platform for sharing ideas and knowledge with likeminded professionals. Attendees will be exposed to interactive workshops, experiencing full-scale networking and real-time collaboration, while learning about emerging technology trends in cloud computing, data centres and pervasive video.
The Expo is also a great long-term investment for all IT professionals, making them even bigger assets to their companies and assisting in reaching their career goals.
What will Cisco Expo 2013 South Africa showcase? How many people are expected to participate?
The focus is to bring products and solutions to life through interactive exhibitions and live demonstrations. These demonstrations will range from simple connectivity to intelligent platforms that dramatically improve productivity and collaboration.
The Expo will also provide a platform for our sponsors and exhibitors to engage with attendees from across the continent.
Registration for the event is already open and I encourage you to take full advantage of the early bird special currently available on our Web site until 10 October.
Who is the official sponsor of Cisco Expo 2013 South Africa?
We have secured a number of sponsors across various categories. Our official sponsor is Bytes Technology Group, a Cisco partner that offers a multitude of products, technical skills, specialised services, support and solutions to a broad spectrum of clients across business sectors throughout Africa.
What technology solutions are likely to be of interest to organisations sending attendees to Cisco Expo 2013?
There are too many to mention, but the increased access to the Internet in Africa will enable a profound level of collaboration that will change the way we think, the speed by which we invent, how we connect and share information, and the extent to which we can sustain our environment. During Expo 2013, Cisco will showcase how African organisations can simply, reliably and affordably connect locally, regionally and across the world.
Our broad portfolio of routers, switches and wireless access points work together to link devices to each other and to the Internet. Cisco helps customers collaborate by bringing together their phones, e-mail, text, conferencing and video, making them more productive. As well as providing a better way to communicate, Cisco's communications solutions enable access from anywhere, using any device, on any network.
How are the topics decided? How has the expo evolved in response to the market?
There are a number of factors that will influence the choice of topics at Cisco Expos and these focus on Cisco's key business priorities, response to customers, partner and attendee feedback, and the hot issues in the market.
Our topics will focus on the key technologies that Cisco is investing in and architecting to solve our customers' most important business challenges: robust and secure core routing, switching, mobility and services, immersive collaboration, unified and guaranteed data centre/virtualisation/cloud, rich and pervasive video, and architected world-class networks.
Feedback from Cisco Expo South Africa 2010 was extremely positive, with attendees agreeing that the content and topics covered were relevant to their day-to-day business needs and helped give them a better understanding of current technology trends as well as areas for future ICT investment. Our goal is to keep evolving our expos based on customer and attendee feedback so that the content remains relevant and valuable and reflects the current state of the ICT market in SA.
How will Cisco use the technology it'll be showcasing? Will there be Web casts, social media and live coverage?
The Cisco network will be the platform that all the technology at our expo will run on. This will help to deliver Internet connectivity to ensure all delegates and participants are connected and have Internet access throughout the two days. This platform will also provide wireless connectivity in the adjacent hotels that the delegates will be staying at during the expo.
Our collaborative technologies will also be showcased throughout the event. For example, our keynote speakers will be able to ask other members of the Cisco Executive team who have not managed to travel to SA to join them virtually “on stage” by means of our impressive three-dimensional Cisco Holographic TelePresence. A live, immersive, face-to-face experience, the Cisco TelePresence solution empowers people to meet virtually, share content, create high-quality video recordings and events, consult with experts, and deliver powerful personalised services, all using the power of the network for an immersive in-person experience.
Social media has also become an integral part of our expos - we have already started our Facebook campaign to update attendees and partners on key expo developments as they happen. During the event, our utilisation of social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook accelerates.
How does SA compare to other regions, in terms of the events, and the sorts of people who attend?
The notable thing about the Cisco South Africa attendees is the fact that distance is never an issue; they will travel from all over SA to be part of the event in Sun City. In fact, Sun City has proved such a popular location that, the year we chose to do a smaller event in Johannesburg, we received requests asking us to take the event back to Sun City.
In terms of numbers of attendees, our expo in SA represents one of the bigger Cisco events globally with a good mix of engineers, technology specialists, company employees, CTOs, CIOs and leaders from both the public and private sectors attending. We are projecting that Expo South Africa 2013 will be our biggest and best-attended event, throughout the whole of Africa, to date.
Cisco Expo 2013 is a registration-only event. Click here to register.
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