Michel de Beauregard

The South African arm of multinational networking corporation Cisco Systems has opened Africa’s first Cisco customer experience centre (CEC).

The centre will allow local customers to experience the company’s latest technology first-hand.

Situated in the northern Johannesburg suburb of Bryanston, the CEC provides an interactive display and customer showcase for its “next-generation” collaboration technology solutions, including Jabber instant messaging and presence, WebEx Video and WebEx Video Social, Digital Media Suite and Cisco TelePresence.

Cisco SA’s regional sales manager, Michel de Beauregard, says the opening of the centre marks a key milestone for the company’s business in SA, as it represents Cisco’s investment in the local market “as [Cisco] supports customers to transition from the PC era to the cloud era”.

Globally, Cisco operates 21 such centres in its major head office locations, including China, Italy, Germany, Australia, the US, Canada and the UK.

New to SA, says Cisco, is the next phase of its Virtualisation Experience Infrastructure (VXI), a desktop virtualisation tool that brings voice and video into the virtual workspace. Cisco says VXI was designed to simplify desktop virtualisation and help South African enterprises fully utilise the financial, data security and workforce flexibility that it affords.

“Cisco VXI also reduces the total cost of ownership of desktop virtualisation solutions by significantly increasing the number of virtual desktops that can be hosted on each server.”

The CEC is open to the public during office hours and showcases all architectural plays – virtualisation, borderless networks and collaboration-based systems.