Guest blog By Christelle Gental, SP Video Marketing Solutions Manager

So here we are, back in Amsterdam for IBC 2015. The first busy day was concluded with the prestigious CSI awards, a ceremony which was launched by the Cable and Satellite International team back in 2003. The idea behind it is to recognise and reward industry top technologies in cable, satellite, IPTV, telco , OTT and mobile TV. The program has now grown to 19 categories and this year, Cisco was proud to be short listed for 4 of these:

• Best digital video processing technology -Cisco Virtualized Video Processing
• Best cable or fibre contribution/distribution/transmission solution -cbR8 solution
• Best monitoring or network management solution -Cisco Prime Home
• Best IoT product, technology or application:Connected LifeSolution

The event started with drinks and networking reception so everyone in the room -partners, customers, competitors -all under the same roof and very relaxed. A rare moment! Around 200 delegates took to their seats and the host Nadine Dereza opened the show announcing the categories, the names of the short listed companies and inviting a member of the jury to announce the winner of the category. Nadine's no ordinary journalist: she has an interesting view of our industry and our sometimes unusual and over complicated product names. Some of the jokes cannot actually be repeated -but she certainly injects humour in the ceremony!

After less than 5 minutes, we heard our name announced as a Winner for the best Cable distribution solution -cbR-8 Converged Broadband Router won against Arris, Thinklogical and NetInsight.

cbR-8was launched earlier this year at INTX with 2 major customers -Comcast and Altice. It's a great recognition for the Cable Access team who worked very hard to push this solution to a very competitive market.

The award was collected, hands shaken and photo taken then back to the seats for the rest of the ceremony. We were almost at the end of the show and getting ready to leave when the last category for Best IOT product and application was mentioned with Cisco announced at the Winner against 5 competitors -very proud moment! Winning 2 awards is pretty rare.

This is great news for the team who developed theConnected Life platform. This future looking solution will give service providers the choice to either develop and serve their own applications or to deploy the Cisco-provided home monitoring/ automation/ energy management application. Enabling and securing the delivery of IOE services to the consumers were top of mind issues discussed at IBC this year. Dr Ken Morse focused on this very topic when delivering his presentation at the Cutting Edge Technologies conference session.

The relaxed ceremony ended with (more) celebratory drinks.

We collected our two lovely glass trophies, put them in their box and displayed them proudly on our booth reception the following morning.

For more information, read more here: http://www.csimagazine.com/awards/winners.php

Tweet us @CiscoSPVideo if you have any questions about our demos.