XON's inaugural Networking Summit - themed eXploring innOvative solutioNs - was attended by 250 people, including 180 clients and 30 sponsors, at Sun City, from 18 to 19 October, and was considered a major success by XON.
Delegates ranged from Platinum sponsors Juniper Networks, F5 and ADVA Optical Networking, to Gold sponsors Allot Communications, Acme Packet and Symantec, and Silver sponsors Fortinet and AlgoSec.
"It was an enormously beneficial event for us, our partners and our customers," says Charl Coetzee, sales director at XON. "The result is several business opportunities in core network transmission, data centres, security, in government organisations, the corporate enterprise space, and with the telecommunications service providers. The audience was extremely receptive to the advantageous solutions that we can offer through our partnerships with the largest, most innovative and trusted partners in the networking arena that cater to their current and future requirements."
He says the success was so marked that XON's future summits will complement the networking division with representatives, partners and customers from XON's other divisions, including infrastructure, professional services and retail.
Juniper Networks' Adrian Pickering, VP of Middle East and Africa, discussed the three key trends driving networking innovation now and into the future. The cloud is being used to make businesses more effective and efficient as well as to drive new revenues for networking or telecommunications service providers. The majority of transactions are going to the mobile world. And the third dynamic, he says, which is often overlooked, is security. As networks become more pervasive and key to operations, so the security risk increases significantly. Juniper Networks has a global strategy to meet the demands those trends are placing on enterprises, government organisations and service providers.
ADVA Optical Networking's Christoph Glingener, the company's CTO, discussed software-defined networking, which he says: "...is the biggest hype in the industry currently, and something always comes out of hypes." Service providers, he says, are looking for ways to develop new sustainable business models, where bandwidth growth is addressed while total cost of ownership (TCO) is optimised, including energy and space savings. The result, he says, will be that next-generation photonic networks that can mimic the flexibility, automation and fast time-to-service capabilities of digital-based transport networks while ensuring the bandwidth efficiency of pure photonic networks.
Andy Travers, VP of sales, UKISA at F5 Networks, delivered a message about IT agility and how businesses gain strategic points of control wherever information is exchanged, from client services and the network, to application servers, data storage and everything in between. "Most applications 10 years ago were business applications used in the workplace, but today many applications are driven by consumers who influence the way we do business," he says. "That has resulted in the need to control applications and secure the fact that staff or customers are accessing these applications from any device, in any place."
"We partner with the industry's best and most recognised OEMs to ensure flexible, reliable and integrated solutions," says Coetzee. "These companies, as this sample of the topics discussed demonstrates, are at the leading edge of delivering functional and relevant solutions to immediate business concerns."
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