This year’s APAC event combined both press and service provider summits which ran coterminously at the JW Marriott Hotel, Phuket, Thailand.
Software-defined networking (SDN) was a major topic, occupying most of the first morning of the two-day event. Among the key speakers were Rick Bauer, Managing Director, Technology, Open Networking Foundation who updated the conference on why service providers should be considering SDN.
The conference went on to talk about datacentres, network applications stores, and BYOD, followed by a pre-lunch presentation from Kash Shaikh, Senior Director, Product & Technical Marketing, HP. Shaikh talked about his company’s deep commitment to SDN and its extensive range of products supporting the new way of doing datacentre networking.
After an afternoon’s round-table discussions between analysts, press, service providers and vendors, the conference reconvened the next morning. Doug Schultz, VP of Asia Pacific/Japan, FireEye, opened proceedings with a keynote on new cyber-attacks. His company was well-placed, he said to detect new unknown attacks, which were hard to counter using traditional signature-based methods.
NetEvents then went on to debate the nature of those new attacks and ways of countering them, followed by a guest presentation from Robert Kuse, MEF Board Member & Director on the latest progress of the MEF, and the growing importance of Carrier Ethernet as a cloud services delivery mechanism.
The need for a solid foundation for tomorrow’s 4G networks was the next topic, with Carrier Ethernet being among the backhaul options for operators.
Following a discussion on how wholesale operators could increase ARPU, the final conference plenary wound up with a quick fire session between two managed service providers. This took the form of a presentation each from Nitin M. Jadhav, Associate VP, Trimax IT Infrastructure & Services, and David Rosengrave, Practice Manager, IT Solutions – Global Services, Verizon, followed by questions from NetEvents Editorial Director Manek Dubash, and from the floor.
NetEvents CEO Mark Fox then closed the conference with a preview of the next special event, to be held in May 2013, in Palo Alto, California, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Ethernet.
