Page 34 - SAMENA Trends - February 2020

REGIONAL & MEMBERS UPDATES SAMENA TRENDS

Cisco Appoints New Vice President for MEA

Cisco has announced the appointment confident of Reem’s ability to empower our
of Reem Asaad as its new Vice President workforce and help regional businesses
for its Middle East and Africa region. As address their challenges.” Prior to joining
digital transformation continues to change Cisco, Asaad held the position of CEO at
and evolve the business landscape at a Raya Contact Center, a business process
rapid pace, Asaad, will be responsible for outsourcing service provider based in
Middle East and Africa business, growing Cairo with operations in Europe, Middle
its position as a leading technology East, and Africa, servicing multi-national
company in the region. With over two and Fortune 500 companies. During this
decades of experience across industries role, she was instrumental in driving
including technology, financial services, the company growth and go-to-market
customer experience, Asaad’s role will strategy, digital transformation, and
focus on strengthening collaborations regional market development. “Having
with governments, customers and been a Cisco Client and a Partner over
partners, underpinned by Cisco’s portfolio the years, it is with great pride that I join
of advanced solutions to accelerate their the Cisco team. There is no doubt that
digitization agendas. Commenting on the the Middle East and Africa region has a
appointment, Wendy Mars, President of huge potential which I look forward to
Cisco’s Europe, Middle East, Africa and unleashing together with the support of my
Russia region said, “I am excited to have wider team. Together, we will focus on how
Reem join Cisco, leading our MEA business. to expand Cisco’s reach, empower local
Reem has a wealth of experience in business businesses and create a greater business
leadership and strong understanding of and social impact in the MEA region” said
the digital transformation landscape. I am Reem Asaad, Vice President, Cisco MEA.

Cisco Gears up Telia Carrier for 400-Gig Backbone

Telia Carrier is in the final stages of launching a 400-Gigabit Ethernet will go live with 400-Gig, but the operator has bought all of the
backbone network that is powered by Cisco’s NCS5000 series necessary components, including upgraded fabrics that connect
routers. While Telia Carrier is one of the world’s largest internet all of the line cards together and the new line cards. He said Telia
backbones, it’s faced with increasing amounts of bandwidth- Carrier is in the process of certifying the software release for the
intensive applications and services, such as streaming video and deployment, and that it “takes a provider some of amount of time
online gaming. In order to better provision the increasing amounts to integrate with their IT systems and get into their automation
of bandwidth across the more than 120 countries it serves, Telia environments.” “The cards that we’re shipping today have 400-
Carrier is making the move to 400-Gig. “So they’re really interested Gig QSFP-DD 56 plug holes, which is the optics technology
in moving to higher speeds and more cost effective technologies that we’ve been talking about for a while now,” he said. “So the
and 400-Gig is going allow them to get much higher bandwidth ports that are on these NCS 5500 devices can deploy 400-Gig
in these devices,” said Cisco’s Kevin Wollenweber, vice president technologies today. More in the short reach and connecting to
of networking, service provider business. “So when you advertise other routers and applications, and then, as the technologies
that bandwidth across the cost of the systems, the cost per bit become available, for longer coherent and longer reach like metro
of these technologies is going to come down pretty quickly. It’s and long-haul coherent connectivity.” Wollenweber said one of
about driving towards the cutting edge technology to allow them
to transmit more bits at a lower cost across their infrastructure.”
Wollenweber said that Telia Carrier had already purchased large
numbers of Cisco’s NCS5500 series routers, which were first
launched five years ago. Telia Carrier was the first service provider
to buy Cisco’s new 400GbE line cards to add to their 5500 routers.
“So they were an early adopter of the first 5500 technologies, and
what this launch is about is their adoption of the 400-Gig variants
of these,” Wollenweber said. “We started talking about these
variants last year, but we just made them order-able and started
shipping the 400-Gig line cards in the 5500 based system.”
Wollenweber said he didn’t know the exact date that Telia Carrier

34 FEBRUARY 2020