Reem Asaad, Vice President, Cisco Middle East and Africa talks with Channel Post MEA about their participation at the forthcoming tech show, GITEX Global and explains that AI will be the key highlight this year, as Cisco plans to showcase its latest AI innovations spanning networking, security, collaboration, and applications at the weeklong event
What are your plans for this year’s GITEX Global and what will be the highlight for Cisco at the show?
Under the theme of “Experience the Power of AI to Shape the Future”, Cisco is participating in GITEX GLOBAL 2023 to showcase its latest technologies, demonstrating the power of innovation in helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation and navigate emerging technological shifts at scale.
Aligned with GITEX theme ‘the Year to Imagine AI in everything’, this year at GITEX, Cisco is set to showcase its latest AI innovations spanning networking, security, collaboration, and applications; outlining our strategy to ‘securely connect everything to make anything possible’ and do it in a sustainable way.
With AI at the center of technology, which direction is Cisco heading?
The acceleration of AI will fundamentally change our world and create new growth drivers for Cisco, our customers, and our partners. Understanding AI’s potential and putting AI to work to unlock new use cases are equally important and essential to fully realizing its possibilities. When it comes to AI, a trusted business partner is needed as much as an algorithm. As a trusted partner, Cisco is committed to helping customers and partners navigate this transition in a responsible way and deliver on the promise of this technology.
We had the foresight to reimagine silicon from the ground up to power AI infrastructures, years of expertise in deploying AI solutions at scale, and an AI-driven portfolio to responsibly power, connect, secure, and observe AI — in all its various forms. Cisco is strategically positioned to play a significant role in the AI landscape.
On the AI Infrastructure – the ability for our customers to build their own AI/ML networks based on Networking from Cisco. And two, Cisco AI enhanced products, providing various solutions embedded with cutting-edge AI technologies.
What products will you be exhibiting throughout the weeklong technology show? Will there be any live demos?
At GITEX this year, we are sharing how Cisco has been employing AI across the widespread of our portfolio for a broad range of use cases, for more than a decade. These include predicting network outages and better visibility and anomaly detection in networking, threat predictions in security, advanced insights in collaboration (to power features like real-time translation and improved meeting summaries), statistical modelling and baselining in observability, and AI powered technical assistance support in Customer Experience.
Our leadership in Predictive AI sets the stage for even greater outcomes and opportunities with Generative AI. For example, within Collaboration, we use AI in our audio intelligence capability such as speech to text conversion, translation and transcription services, and background noise removal. While in security, AI strengthens our security suite via policy assistants and SOC assistants, and we are also working on securing AI through security solutions catered for AI models.
Visitors will have the opportunity to engage with subject matter experts at Cisco’s stand and experience demos that illustrate how Cisco’s AI technologies are empowering industries such as education, healthcare, financial services, retail, and manufacturing.
What are the major trends influencing the IT market in the Middle East?
This year, the economic climate has continued to be shaped by reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Many companies have since looked to the future for innovative technologies that can help, and AI has rapidly emerged as a model that can change our world and create new growth drivers for us all. We outlined the key technology trends for 2023 and beyond in the areas of security, increasing network efficiency, sustainability, and AI.
- Future of Work has remained hybrid and will continue to enable more equitable, inclusive experiences. We will also see natural language processing (NLP) and AI/ML used in new and innovative ways in collaboration solutions, powering hybrid work.
- Security Resilience is continuing to evolve to include anomaly detection, zero trust frameworks and behavior patterns using AI and machine learning.
- Simplifying and Automating Infrastructure is witnessingnetworks become more experience-centric with increasing capabilities to predict potential issues and provide problem-solving options. This represents an important step toward a future where connectivity will be powered by self-healing networks that can learn, predict, and plan.
- Accelerating the Cloud Experience is seeing a noticeable shift in how companies leverage multi-cloud architectures.
- Internet for the Future is being built to maximize operational agility and future-proof infrastructure, like 6G.
- Sustainability and Journey to Net Zero, Net Zero is driving common standards to meet sustainability goals with advancements in Power Over Ethernet (PoE) design and hardware to transform data centers for a more sustainable future.
- Reimagining Applications: Today, services are delivered and consumed through applications. It is how companies build relationships with their customers. Full-stack observability solutions allow multiple teams to have a common end-to-end performance view of systems across applications, multiple clouds, infrastructure, and network segments.
To support our customers in their journey to navigate these trends and leverage the power of emerging technologies, we have lately announced our intent to acquire Splunk Inc., the cybersecurity and observability leader. The acquisition builds on Splunk’s heritage of helping organizations enhance their digital resilience and will accelerate Cisco’s strategy to securely connect everything to make anything possible. The combination of these two established leaders in AI, security and observability will help make organizations more secure and resilient.
What does your company hope to achieve at the end of the show?
This year, GITEX represents a very special occasion for us. Over the past few years, the profound shifts we have experienced have catapulted digital transformation and agility to the next level.
As we navigate this complex world alongside our customers and partners, we are excited to share how we are harnessing emerging technologies like generative AI to support them in tackling their biggest technology challenges. But also, more importantly, we are looking forward to strengthening our connections with our customers and partners and driving meaningful conversations on what they need to flourish in a world where digital transformation is evolving every day.
Where can visitors find Cisco at the show?
Cisco’s stand will be located at H22-C20.
