By Leonard Luna, Senior Marketing Manager, Cisco Service Provider Solutions

Timing is everything.  Faced with the ever-increasing challenges and opportunities of the Internet of Everything (IoE), the timing of Cisco's SpringPacket Optical Networking Conference, May 13-15 at the Dolce Hayes Mansion in San Jose, couldn't be better.

Fondly referred to as the PONC ('pon-see'), Cisco coordinates this event with its customers and prospects twice a year: a Spring event in North America, and a Fall event in Monza Italy.  Besides being an immensely influential source of customer input and feedback for Cisco, the conference's is designed to foster collaboration among attendees -often highlighted by compelling customer presentation and/or panels discussions by luminaries from the world's leading ISP, OTT and ILEC organizations.  This year will be no different, and we look forward to you helping usLight upour Spring event.

Bill Gartner, Vice President and General Manager, Cisco High End Routing and Optical Business Unit, provides a PONC overview and invites you to participate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znxZJmKGP1M

Weare excited to report that the mix of professionals continues to diversify, reflecting the industry wide dialog around IP and Optical Convergence.  Originally, optical professionals dominated PONC attendance.  Looking at registrations for this Spring, and clearly trending over the past few years, we are thrilled to seeing stronger and stronger representation from many verticals including Enterprise, OTT players, Datacenter, Government and Educational sectors.  In response we have adjusted our content accordingly.

At the PONC you can certainly customize your experience around transport topics: OTN network design, SONET/SDH migration, advances in ROADM technology, pluggable transceiver innovations and even last-mile optical access.  Or, if you prefer, you can create a more packet-centric experience -the evolution of 100G routing and network virtualization.  Maybe you need to step back and take in a broader architectural view by learning more about the Evolved Programmable Network (EPN) and how through convergence it will harness the opportunities presented by the IoE.  Maybe network programmability and automation are key elements to your architectural strategy going forward?  Then you will want to attend our sessions on multi-layer SDN, multi-layer restoration and multi-layer convergence.  And this Spring, we will also offer content tailored to Enterprise attendees, such as encryption and data center interconnect.

On the third day, as PONC tradition dictates, attendees will be transported to our lab facilities at the San Jose campus to see many of the PONC solutions in action.

At the PONC, you won't get partial solutions, e.g., "Look... we created our part of an SDN solution, now we're just waiting on the rest of the industry to do their part."  With Cisco, you have a partner who takes a holistic, end-to-end approach to the challenges and opportunities of the IoE.  What you will experience is all part of Cisco's larger Open Network Environment (ONE) vision for Service Provider -a company wide initiative to lead the way towards a comprehensive vision that includes all aspects of the solution.  We are excited about what we will learn at the 2014 Spring PONC and we look forward to collaborating with you there.

To participate in Cisco's Spring PONC 2014, click here.