Cisco beams up Shatner to address Las Vegas cloud trek

Networking giant Cisco officially kicks off its Cisco Live! event in Las Vegas today with an opening keynote from chief executive John Chambers.

The show will see product and strategy announcements from Cisco and other networking and IT vendors. Many presentations focusing on cloud computing, with topics including "Monetising the cloud", "Scaling the cloud", "Cloud security concerns", and "Cloud computing and virtualisation".

The cloud has featured heavily in Cisco's plans ever since it launched its Unified Computing System (UCS) in June 2009 in an effort to grab a major share of cloud computing and enterprise on-premise (private cloud) deployments.

Application performance management and IPv6 deployment and routing also feature heavily on the Cisco Live! agenda.

The event follows a good 2010 for Cisco, with its revenue up nearly 11 per cent on 2009 to just over $40bn, and profits up nearly 27 per cent to almost $8bn.

The company has forecast even better results for 2011 year end. The results will be announced in August.

Perhaps in anticipation of stellar financials for this year, Cisco has booked actor William Shatner (pictured), best known for his role as Captain James T Kirk in sci-fi series Star Trek, to give this year's closing address.