Cisco and Proximus renew strategic partnership

Companies to Co-Develop Business Models Around Three Growth Areas

LAS VEGAS, NV — CES 2015 — Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and leading Belgian telecommunications and IT services provider Proximus announced today at CES 2015 that they have consolidated their partnership to drive joint innovation and business development. The renewed partnership will enable Proximus to provide its customers with faster, tailored and innovative services across its entire portfolio. Cisco will benefit from Proximus’ technology research and local go-to-market expertise, in order to co-create new service provider offerings.

Within the framework of this renewed agreement, Proximus and Cisco have defined three areas for growth: next-generation video delivery for consumers, smart city services for government organizations and service orchestration for business-to-business customers.

Next Generation Video Delivery: Proximus already has a very successful mass market video offer through traditional digital TV set top boxes. By centralizing digital TV functionality on Proximus’ open cloud architecture instead of the consumer’s digital video recorder (DVR), the telecommunications provider plans to move faster, accelerating delivery of new personalized video capabilities. For instance, an open cloud based architecture makes it easy to integrate digital TV with third party applications like cloud sourced program ratings and recommendations. And subscribers who run out of DVR space for their favorite programs could in the future simply rent more storage in the cloud. With Cisco Videoscape, both partners will develop a next generation, cloud based TV offer for Proximus.

Smart and Connected Cities: Cities are facing new constraints such as traffic congestion or demographic pressure. Cities of tomorrow need to be safer, more efficient, sustainable, comfortable and interactive. Together with Cisco, Proximus has developed a smart and connected cities framework that goes further than city-wide and free wireless internet. The partnership will accelerate the development of smart and connected cities (S+CC) business models that both monetize coverage and improve life for consumers and income for businesses.

Service Orchestration and SDN: Future proof network and IT infrastructure must be able to meet exponential growth in traffic and have a native ability to enable new services. With Cisco’s network service orchestration technology, Proximus customers would be able to configure their network services online. Network orchestration also allows to fully automate the subsequent provisioning and management of both virtual and physical networks, further improving customer experience and agility.

Dominique Leroy, CEO, Proximus: “This long term agreement not only reinforces our existing cooperation, it also shows Proximus’ commitment to innovation and improving customer service. We want to build a future that will benefit our customers, our employees, our shareholders and our partners. That transformation strategy will help us return to growth.”

John Chambers, chairman and CEO, Cisco Systems: “As the leading service provider in Belgium and Luxembourg, Proximus has an extensive innovation track record. Proximus sees the benefits of transforming networks to a software-based, agile platform. We are expanding our collaboration to embrace the benefits of the Internet of Everything (IoE) with cloud-based video solutions, virtualized managed services solutions and much more. Together with Proximus, we will co-develop a transformation roadmap towards more agile and cost efficient infrastructure that can sustainably cope with growth in volumes, rightsizing of operational resource and changes in skills and competencies.”