With less than a month before the much anticipated AfricaCom 2015 begins, exhibitors and sponsors are preparing to deliver a host of exciting activities, talks and presentations to the 10,000 expected delegates. Scheduled to take place between the 17^th and 19^th November at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, this year’s event theme will be innovation, transformation and leadership for digital Africa.

This year Cisco will be sponsoring the inaugural SDN (Software Defined Networking) & Virtualisation PoCs theatre at AfricaCom 2015 in a bid to show their commitment to fostering an entire ecosystem of young programmers, talents and partners in Africa. Cisco will also use the new platform to demonstrate the benefits of SDN in enabling African operators to accelerate application deployment and delivery as well as dramatically reducing IT costs in a practical, hands-on way.

A full programme of demonstrations will be scheduled to take place at the SDN and Virtualisation Theatre throughout the show’s 3 days. The theatre will also act as a networking area for visitors. Paolo Campoli, Head of Middle East & Africa Global SP Sales and SP CTO for the MEA Sales Region at Cisco says, “Cisco is sponsoring the SDN Theatre at because in Africa, we’re already seeing strong demand for SDN from industries with complex networks that need to quickly process large amounts of data and this includes Service Providers in particular.”

In addition to a full schedule of PoC demos throughout AfricaCom within the theatre, visitors can also look forward to innovative and insightful keynote addresses around innovating for Africa’s digital future, new digital models and sustaining profitability in Africa.

“In the wake of the digitisation era, Cisco’s NFV (Network Functions Virtualisation) architecture will help African Service Providers to transform their networks to prepare for the new wave of the internet and IoT. We have combined NFV with two complementary technology initiatives namely Open Source to help free an organisation’s technical talent to innovate and SDN which is enabling them to accelerate application deployment and delivery whilst dramatically reducing IT costs,” says Campoli.

“SDN also enhances the benefits of data center virtualisation, increasing resource flexibility and utilisation and reduces infrastructure costs and overhead and enables network programmability and code development to bring applications and networks closer. The result is a modern infrastructure that can deliver new applications and services in minutes, rather than days or weeks required in the past delivering with a platform capable of handling the most demanding networking needs of today and tomorrow,” concludes Campoli.

NFV and SDN offer new ways for telecom operators to design, build, operate and manage information networks. Experts at the 2015 AfricaCom Conference will unpack these very hot topics which are sure to generate some intense discussion.