Kevin Petschow, Senior Manager, Global Public Relations, Cisco (interview)

Kevin Petschow, is an award-winning, results-oriented senior executive with corporate and strategic consultative services experience that leverages global sales, marketing, public relations, industry analyst relations and social media tools to achieve company and client financial strategic business goals. A seasoned team player, department director, and sales, client services and creative manager with successful business management resulting in increased profitability and market share.  

Kevin is a member of the global public relations team for Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO). That team was recognized by PRWeek Magazine in 2013 with the highest honor, “In-House PR Team of the Year” award.  During Kevin’s tenure with 3Com, he led the successful global launch of a new brand, CommWorks, to service providers worldwide resulting in PRWeek Magazine naming 3Com as a finalist for their 2002 “International Campaign of the Year” award. Droid Report recently interviewed Kevin about his current role and discussed mobile insights.

Kevin Petschow

Droid Report: Hello Kevin, Could you tell us more about your current role and your initiatives for 2014?

Kevin Petschow: I currently serve as the global public relations lead for the service provider mobility business for Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO). I support the products and services that we sell to service providers around the world as we advance the mobile Internet cause. This responsibility allows me to be at the forefront of all things mobile and wireless in what we like to call “helping connect those who were previously unconnected.”

I also am the global PR lead for the Cisco Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update (2013-2018), an annual initiative to track and forecast the impact of visual networking applications on global networks. The mobile VNI has become a standard by which service providers, government agencies and organizations around the world forecast, plan and implement strategies to grow their businesses or meet the needs of their constituents or members at large.

Another big initiative for 2014 is to help service providers handle the increasing number of people, devices, machines and sensors coming online across the Internet of Everything (IoE). We are expanding our virtualization offerings for service providers with the introduction of the Cisco® Evolved Services Platform (ESP), a key element of the company’s Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) strategy, which works in conjunction with the infrastructure layer of the architecture. The Cisco ESP is a comprehensive unified virtualization and orchestration software platform that creates, automates and provisions services in real time, across compute, storage and network functions, to deliver desired business outcomes for applications running across multiple domains.

Droid Report: How was Mobile World Congress 2014? Are there any personal experiences you would like to share?

Kevin Petschow: It was incredible. I’m amazed how much Mobile World Congress has grown in a relatively short period of time. The GSMA, organizer of the Congress, should be proud of what they’ve created and how they continue to grow each year. Attendance was record-setting with more than 85,000 attendees from 75 countries at this year’s Congress, up from 72,000 attendees a year ago.

Yes, I’m proud that we (Cisco) collaborated with Fira de Barcelona and the GSMA to successfully provide one of the world’s largest carrier-grade Wi-Fi networks ever at Mobile World Congress. During the event at Fira de Barcelona’s Gran Via in Barcelona, Spain, we provided free Wi-Fi access that generated a total of 19.1 terabytes of traffic from more than 80,880 Internet-enabled devices. By 10:00 a.m. on the first day (Feb. 24, 2014), the number of users had surpassed the total number of users on last year’s network, ultimately reaching 22,126 peak concurrent users. On that same day, 280 gigabytes were uploaded and transmitted via a single access point in the Mobile World Congress press center. Bottom line, Wi-Fi became more relevant than ever before. Attendees received high-speed Wi-Fi service for transacting business and general communication, and the Fira was able to add Wi-Fi as a tiered-service offering to exhibitors.

Droid Report: Could you also share a bit more about The Tech Breakfast Club and your involvement?

Kevin Petschow: The Tech Breakfast Club was started in 2006 in Chicago when Mary Conley Eggert, president of Tech Image, and I felt there was a need to bring together technology and telecom professionals in a setting that allows them to share knowledge, meet other subject matter experts and broaden our own networks for professional advancement. We meet on a quarterly basis and pack a lot of information and interaction into two-and-half hours over breakfast. We’ve expanded the program to other USA and Canadian cities that feature a “technology” hub of businesses and professionals thirsty to increase their knowledge and network. We have a “Tech Breakfast Club” group page on LinkedIn to serve as our “water cooler” for exchanging thoughts and ideas around the world of technology and telecommunications industries.  

Droid Report: Android VoIP Apps such as those found at Google Play have grown as part of the evolution and trend within Internet messaging. As a specialist, what is your personal take?

Kevin Petschow: Mobile video plays a big role in the growth of all VoIP Apps.  Mobile video traffic will increase 14-fold from 2013 to 2018 and will have the highest growth rate of any mobile application category, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update (2013-2018). We (Cisco) believe that by 2018, mobile video will be 69 percent of global mobile traffic, up from 53 percent in 2013.

Why?

We (Cisco) believe the growth in mobile traffic is partly due to continued strong growth in the number of mobile Internet connections, such as personal devices and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections, which will exceed 10 billion by 2018 and be 1.4 times greater than the world’s population (the United Nations estimates 7.6 billion people by 2018).

The Cisco VNI Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast’s annual run rate of 190 exabytes of mobile data traffic for 2018 is equivalent to:

• 190 times more than all Internet Protocol (IP) traffic, fixed and mobile, generated in 2000; or

• 42 trillion images (e.g., multimedia message service or Instagram)—15 daily images per person on earth for a year; or

• 4 trillion video clips (e.g., YouTube)—more than one daily video clip per person on earth for a year.

The incremental amount of traffic being added to the mobile Internet just between 2017 and 2018 is 5.1 exabytes per month, which is more than three times the estimated size of the entire mobile Internet in 2013 (1.5 exabytes per month).

Droid Report: What are your personal thoughts on technology, the future of mobility and applications?

Kevin Petschow: There many things in our lives that require an Internet connection. I stopped counting when it went over 30. There are various names for this trend:

• “M2M” for “machine to machine” connectivity.

• The “IoT” — Internet of Things.

• The “IoE” — Internet of Everything.

The physical “things” in our lives that crave Internet connections are generating trillions of network events per year. That’s trillions with a T.

As a result, networks that must deal with M2M, and all the many other services from mobility to networking, need to be autonomic and elastic to adapt and harness resources to accommodate these ever-changing dynamics.

All over the place, the machines that serve us will take dozens of little Internet sips, when they need to, whether we are awake or not.

For example, in an M2M world of the future, the alarm clock (which is to say, our mobile phone) will be able to tell the coffeemaker to not start yet. Snooze happened.

Many homes today are already increasingly able to execute a daily to-do list of automated jobs — securing windows, running webcams and much more. They’ll be talking to the network, all day long, in hundreds of little shotgun bursts.

And this trend will only increase because once you start putting mental cycles on what would make your physical world better, it’s hard to stop.

Eventually, the really useful M2M mash up makers will shake out, and somebody new will have a seat in the Internet economy, making the interactions we have on the network today seem as advanced as a dial-up modem seems now.

One thing is certain: M2M and the IoE will change the way networks treat traffic, not just because the transaction rates are going to be huge, but because they’ll require unprecedented levels of integration and orchestration between users, network and data centers.

M2M adds just one new dimension to the Web, and to the care and feeding of the Internet. It adds device intelligence, even for devices never built to do anything but what they do as physical machines. When those devices, services, networks and cloud can begin to work more together, it will deliver far more than any of the devices could do on their own. This is where the possibilities of the Internet of Everything really start to take off.

While humans are still the majority users of the Internet, the status quo is gear-built for brawn. Routers move data at predictably faster and faster speeds, and higher and higher densities. The trajectory is always about faster.

Networks need an athletic "brainiac." This mash up will make the infrastructure of the Internet truly programmable, which could spark an explosion of technological creativity that would not only lead to advances in our physical and digital lives, but would also act as a catalyst for the Internet of Everything economy.

Droid Report: Is there anything else you feel Android users and the Android market should know?

Kevin Petschow: Yes, it makes perfect sense that we (Cisco) are part of the growing Android ecosystem. We currently offer Cisco WebEx Meetings for Android and Cisco Mobile for Android.

Cisco WebEx Meetings for Android connects you to your important meetings wherever you are. Available as a free app at www.webex.com/mobile or the Android Market, Cisco WebEx Meetings for Android allows you to view and join meetings, schedule meetings on the go and invite others, view shared content during your meeting, and much more from your Android phone or tablet.

You can visit www.webex.com/android to learn more about this app.

Cisco Mobile for Android lets you place, receive, and manage calls over a Wi-Fi network using your Android phone or tablet. Cisco Mobile turns your smartphone into an IP phone, letting you use your business phone number for outgoing and incoming calls, while also providing corporate directory lookup and enterprise telephony calling features. You can visit www.cisco.com/go/ciscomobileuc to learn more about this app.

Kevin has also led successful public launches of Internet Protocol (IP)-based technologies such as broadband wireless, cloud computing, virtualization, software-defined networking, TelePresence, unified communications and collaboration, voice over IP (VoIP), video and content networking, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, Long-Term Evolution (LTE), femtocell, 3G and 4G wireless, anti-spam and intrusion prevention systems, routers, switches, optical networking, wireless data, cellular, paging, push-to-talk, network security, desktop phones, personal computers, smartphones, contact center and customer relationship management (CRM), and air-to-ground telephone products and services.

We would like to thank Kevin Petschow for taking the time for this discussion and Cisco.