Cisco is proud to be a triple diamond sponsor of MPLS+SDN+NFV World Congress 2016, which runs from March 8-11 at the Marriott Paris Rive Gauche Hotel and Conference Center in Paris, France. (For the uninitiated, that's quite a jumble of acronyms - spelled out, it stands for "Multi-Protocol Label Switching + Software Defined Networks + Network Function Virtualization.")

This year's theme is all about transformation through innovation - a topic near and dear to us - with an intent to enable the software-defined operators of the future.  Cisco is hosting or participating in several opportunities to connect with thought leaders on the software-defined path, starting with a pre-conference customer workshop on Monday, March 7, at 1:30 CET.

Topics to be covered during the workshop include Open Network Strategies for Software-Defined Operators; Cloud-scale Networking Innovations; Segment Routing use cases (and demo!), "FOG" computing, and Low-Power Wide Area Networks, among others. If you're our customer, and you want to attend, please contact your account representative - we'd love to have you!

Throughout the conference, come see us at Booth 315, where we'll be showing demonstrations supporting cloud scale for software-defined operators including:

• FD.io
• Segment Routing
• NFV Infrastructure
• WAN Automation Engines
• Low Power Wide Area Networks for the IoT (Internet of Things)
• Cisco Network Services Orchestration (Tail-F)

Naturally, we'll also feature our Whisper Suite Demos, covering analytics, predictive service management and model-driven operations - and if I say anything more than that, it no longer counts as whispering....

In addition, we'll have plenty of speakers spreading the word about MPLS, SDN and NFV. Here's a snapshot; checkout the agenda for  the most recent information:

We hope to see you in Paris!