A Commonwealth of opportunity

Cisco claims the recent Glasgow Games proved that IT networking is more pervasive than ever. Doug Woodburn finds out why

It's easy to dismiss networking as the IT market's wan child - the one who blends into the background as its brothers and sisters wow the guests with spectacular card tricks and piano recitals.

But although the world of routing and switching will never be flashy, the IT network is arguably becoming increasingly central to every walk of life, a suggestion bolstered by the recent Glasgow Commonwealth Games.

Billed as the "most connected Games ever", Glasgow 2014 saw official network infrastructure partner Cisco roll out 240km of fibre. The networking giant also installed 441 switches, 40 routers and 378 wireless access points across 40 venues to support the athletes, officials, volunteers and spectators.

Talking to CRN, Cisco UK managing director Phil Smith said Cisco partners should take the Games as an endorsement that networking is now "front and centre when it comes to the delivery of significant events".

"Maybe we wouldn't have thought of a sports event as the big obvious thing for networking, but it is now," he declared.

"Networking is pervading our lives. It's that old Cisco thing of changing the way you work, live, learn and play: I think for our partners to have such a demonstration of a network being a vital part of making a big Games successful is great."

"Most connected Games ever"

Cisco technology underpinned everything from the scoring to ensuring organising groups were able to talk to each other over telepresence in the months and years leading up to the event. Other technology partners for the Games included Atos Origin, which supported 50,911 applications on the Volunteer Portal; Dell, which supplied 2,400 PCs and laptops and 50 servers; and Toshiba, which provided 650 printers and MFDs. Scottish Cisco partner NVT Group also acted as technology services integrator.

Smith admitted that the wireless network, which was based on Cisco's Identity Services Engine (ISE), was put under strain by the social media demands of the Games' 4,084 participants.

"As soon as the young people hit the athletes' village, the first thing they do is get their phones out and start videoing it or taking selfies and uploading it to the network," he explained. "They melt the wireless network in the first couple of days and normally we have to ramp it up to get them more performance."

Cisco also supplied the Games with 2,500 IP phones, six intrusion prevention systems and eight firewalls.

Murray Husband, general manager of IT services at Glasgow 2014 Limited, which organised the Games, revealed his team had shied away from using cloud computing as it "wasn't quite there from a trust perspective" when the design decisions were taken four years ago.

"What we do from a technology perspective tends to be quite risk-averse as it has to work right first time," he said as he gave a tour of the Technology Operations Centre at which staff from Cisco and the Games' other technology suppliers are stationed.

Great expectations

At a press lunch, Cisco wheeled out Lord Sebastian Coe to talk about how the expectations of being connected have grown among the organisers and athletes down the years.

"The ticketing operation in Sydney was entirely paper and there was no broadband," said Smith. "There were no smartphones in Athens and Facebook was sort of there but not. In Beijing, there were 30,000 tweets a day and within a year it was up to 33 million. The explosion in technology between Sydney and London is an example of the rapidity of that change."
Coe claimed he was the "first athlete in the modern era to utilise the application of science" when it was regarded as "voodoo science".

Despite its relatively modest scale, the Glasgow Games in some way presented Cisco with more challenges than its involvement in the London 2012 Olympic Games.

"We couldn't get into some of the venues here until pretty much the day before," he said. "There were many existing venues in the Olympic Games but here all the venues - bar one or two of the smaller ones - existed and you had places such as Hampden Park (pictured below)with events going on a couple of days beforehand. They would say ‘right, you can have it now' and basically you had to get all the infrastructure in and get it tested. It has been pretty challenging, more so than the Olympics, so we've learned a lot from that."

Smith added: "Each time, we have to look at whether [big sporting events] are worth it from a business perspective, but each time we do it we think ‘what an experience'. It has energised our own people and every one of our customers who has been here has had the experience of their lifetime."

Cisco: Internet of Everything is a channel play

Cisco's UK chief executive used the backdrop of the Commonwealth Games to urge partners to either adapt their business models or form alliances to take full advantage of the impending Internet of Everything (IoE) boom.
Phil Smith shrugged off suggestions that Cisco's traditional networking partners will lose out to other professions, such as electricians, as more "things" - be that cars, livestock or heart monitors - are connected to the internet.

Smith's comments came after visiting press were shown around the IoE exhibit Cisco is running at the Glasgow Science Centre during the Games, for which Cisco is the formal network infrastructure partner (see opposite).

"It's an interesting question, and I think we're going to see a blend [of traditional and new types of partners]," he told CRN.

"I think if you look at the people who will do building automation systems and traffic lights [for instance], some of our traditional partners will want to do that and some already have those capabilities already through other parts that they integrate. Some won't. That doesn't mean they don't have a job to build the networks but I think the scale of the opportunity of IoE is so huge that some people will want to build practices around automation or some other capabilities."

Cisco predicts the number of devices connected to the internet will double between 2010 and 2015 to 25 billion, before doubling again to 50 billion by 2020. But the fact Cisco recently launched an IoE training programme aimed at electricians - focusing on smart meters - shows the vendor is looking outside its traditional networking channel in its efforts to corner the market.

Even so, there is a place in the IoE market for partners with a background selling Cisco's routers and switches, Smith maintained, pointing out that many had already successfully made the leap from networking into the datacentre.

Many UK Cisco partners already do asset tracking of "things" such as wheelchairs and bloodstands in the healthcare sector, Smith (pictured) pointed out.

"It's not a huge leap from that to say ‘OK, how would you monitor a few thousand or few million other things'. A lot of our partners are on that path and we'll probably see a lot more partnering between partners. Maybe the traditional people who have provided the systems in buildings will partner with the traditional VARs - I think that's going to be the trick in the next few years as well."

Smith added: "[Our partners] need to keep changing and thinking about partnering with others because we are in a very dynamic world and unless we recognise that, we've potentially got a problem."

Cisco's IoE exhibition was designed to showcase practical examples of how the IoE could improve business and leisure activities in the future. Using 18 Arduinos - open source devices capable of registering environmental information such as light, sound and temperature - supplied by Cisco, students at Glasgow University had designed apps capable of pinpointing the quietest part of a library and the loudest pub.

This could be cross-referenced with Cisco's CMX technology, which can determine how many things, such as smartphones, are in a given location, explained Cisco systems engineer James McDonald.

"Putting some processes and information around it - the analytics - is what makes the IoE much more useful than the IoT as ‘things' are just computers or devices," he said. "We want to create applications and data that are actually useful to your business and enjoying the activities around you."