Cisco House experience illustrates transformational opportunities for countries, cities and organizations today and in the future

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Cisco House celebrates the powers of transformation, with a focus on how transformation can enrich communities, individuals and businesses. Innovation, particularly via clever application of technologies and thought leadership in the promotion of social and environmental solutions are featured throughout.

“What we’re trying to do at Cisco House is not to talk about technology but to have people really experience how technology can impact their daily lives”, says Laurent Blanchard, VP Enterprise Business Group, Cisco.

“For example, how can video help you pick out the right suit or dress when you’re out shopping… or how to manage the energy in a building.

So what you don’t see at Cisco House is a lot of routers, switches. In fact you’d probably be barely conscious of any network and communications equipment at Olympic Park or any of the 36 competition venues and 41 training venues – but you do see the impact they have.

As the official network infrastructure supporter for London 2012, Cisco has helped to make it the most connected Games ever. Cisco network infrastructure underpinned the delivery of the voice, video and data traffic for London 2012, carried over BT’s communications services network to the thousands of people officiating, reporting, competing in or simply enjoying The Games.

Cisco also provided essential network infrastructure equipment to support the Games time and administration applications on the LOCOG network, including network security appliances, routing and switching equipment, wireless access points and controllers, IP telephony, handsets and the call manager.

Some of the numbers are staggering: 10,500 Olympic athletes, 4,200 Paralympic athletes and over 10 million tickets for the two events. 1800 wireless access points; 16,500 IP telephones; 65,000 active connections and 80,000 data ports. All essential in connecting 300 medal events for 26 Olympic Sports in 34 venues over 17 days of competition, and 471 medal events for 20 Paralympic sports in 21 venues over 11 days of competition. If all London 2012 sports competitions were held on consecutive days, it would last 451 days.

Meanwhile, Laurent Blanchard says that this “no equipment” style of presentation has been extremely well received by visitors to Cisco House precisely because Cisco and their partners have not spoken about technology, preferring to allow their visitors to experience how it affects their daily lives and their business lives.

Cisco House has also helped to present the partnership that exists between Cisco and Schneider Electric at a new level. Laurent Blanchard said, “the two companies are answering important questions such as how can we make buildings more efficient in terms of energy management, or how can we manage very large data centers in a better way… by looking at the experiences of customers for these types of solutions as well as examining the business case for decision making.”