NewZNew (Chandigarh) : Cisco celebrated its twenty year anniversary of ongoing innovation in digitisation, technology offerings, new partnerships and collaborative efforts with companies, communities and cities around India. Over recent years Cisco has established several examples of public-private partnerships, announced local strategic initiatives and expanded collaboration with partners and customers.

Cisco estimates that there will be 545 million Internet users, 654.1 million smartphone users,  and 1.6 billion networked devices in India in 2019. In 2019, mobile data traffic will be equivalent to 51x the volume of the entire Indian Internet in 2005 while video will be 66% of India’s mobile data traffic. As more devices capture more data, interact with more people and change the processes by which we live, learn, work and play, digitisation will have a profound impact on industries.

Forty percent of today’s leading companies globally will be displaced from their market position by digital disruption in the next five years, yet 75 percent of these companies have yet to address this risk by prioritizing their digital strategy, according to research conducted by the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. Digital disruption is a reality today and is transforming every industry, from healthcare to education, banking and financial institutions and more.

To capitalize on the unprecedented opportunities presented by this wave of digitisation, companies and cities are increasingly looking to drive digital business transformation. Cisco’s vision of digital business transformation – the rapid and escalating value derived from the inter connectivity of people, processes, data and things – is to help companies be more innovative, agile and efficient. More than 75% of India’s top 500 companies use Cisco’s technology to increase productivity, deliver more value, and create better experiences for customers and end users.

A number of important announcements were made in recent months to commemorate the twenty year anniversary of Cisco in India. Key milestones and highlights include:

• In December 2015, Cisco announced three new products marking the acceleration of local innovation to enable digital transformation in India. Highlighting that innovation is a core part of its culture, Cisco announced that over its 20 years in India, it had contributed to filing 1000 global patents and 600 such patents had been issued for innovations across all major technologies.
• In November 2015, Cisco and CH2M announced a new global strategic relationship to provide urban planning and design, smart-technology integration and program delivery services. The first integrated delivery from Cisco and CH2M is to Shendra-Bidkin, an industrial smart city being developed along India’s Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor.
• In June 2015, Cisco announced its commitment to accelerating the digital transformation of India through a series of investments involving education and skills initiatives for the new digital economy, through the Cisco Network Academy program, and an expansion of the company’s India facility. Under the ‘India Innovation Theme’, Cisco has helped create a vibrant ecosystem catering to the needs of a rapidly digitising India.  With over 25 direct and indirect investments, in the startup ecosystem, Cisco is collaborating with entrepreneurs across India to discover and accelerate the creation and adoption of disruptive technologies as well as new business models around digitisation.