Cisco opens first CE centre in SA

Cisco South Africa has on Tuesday (12 June), opened its first Customer Experience Centre (CEC) in Bryanston, Johannesburg to provide an interactive display and customer showcase for its next-generation collaboration technology solutions.

New technologies include Cisco Jabber instant messaging (IM) and Presence, Cisco WebEx Video and WebEx Social, Cisco Digital Media Suite (DMS), and Cisco TelePresence.

New for customers in SA and available to demo at the CEC, according to Cisco, is the next phase of its Virtualisation Experience Infrastructure (VXI), an IT system that was designed to simplify desktop virtualisation and bring voice and video to the virtual workspace.

Cisco VXI will help enterprises in SA take advantage of the financial, data security and workforce flexibility benefits offered by desktop virtualisation, with the ability to integrate rich media and video collaboration capabilities to create next generation workspaces. Cisco VXI also increases the number of virtual desktops that can be hosted on each server, the company says.

The technology company notes that desktop virtualisation is on the rise in the enterprise. The worldwide hosted virtual desktop (HVD) market is expected to reach 70 million units, or 15% of enterprise desktops and laptops by 2014.

Michel de Beauregard, regional sales manager, Cisco SA said: “ As the workforce in South Africa becomes increasingly mobile there will be an acceleration in the need to access media-rich applications from any device, anywhere, anytime and enterprises are turning to desktop virtualisation to give them the benefits of the security, flexibility and cost-savings by delivering desktops and applications as a centralised service.”