Cisco Expo 2010

The 11th annual conference Cisco Expo 2010 was held on the 14th and 15th of April, 2010 at the Clarion Congress Hotel in Prague 9.

More than 980 participants attended this year’s event, having 958 take part in the first day’s techtorials and 799 on the second day.

The conference opened with a keynote and a short film where the General Manager of Cisco Systems Czech Republic, Mr. Alexander Winkler had transformed himself into a blue faced Avatar character while pointing out the connection between the concept of the tree of life from the film and the Cisco Unified Computing System. The keynote was presented in the form of a talk show having the GM invite representatives of EMC and VMware to introduce the VCE alliance (Virtual Computing Environment. A representative of the conference’s general partner, T-Mobile, Mr. Miroslav Rakowski had also proceeded in the discussion and was given the opportunity to make a speech.

The main themes of the conference were virtualization, data centres and cloud services.  Seven thematic blocks were divided into 28 technical presentations so everyone could choose their own programme. These presentations were focused on trends in modern communication technologies and network architecture.

All participants had the posibility to send a question to Cisco experts via text messaging. We had collected over 30 questions from all fields and a special session was dedicated to these questions.

A party had been prepared to end the first day of the conference and it was again divided into several sections including the main hall with bands along with a bubble and laser show. A playzone had been set up in 2 rooms with the posibility to play PC games, Nintendo Wii, fly RC helicopter models and much more. We hadn’t forgotten about relaxation either.  Thai masseurs were available and on hand throughout the evening as well as specialities from the hotel’s chef.

The second day started with a technological keynote and 5 technical and interactive techtorials followed throughout the whole day which included demos and case studies. A special session was dedicated to the commercial segment in the form of a Commercial Summit.

Last but not least, an exhibition of modern technologies took place in the foyer. Over 27 partners had exhibited during this conference.