This year, Cisco Live! returned for the first in-person gathering in three years. I was so excited to meet face-to-face with our customers and partners to catch up on all the great things we have been doing and have important discussions about the opportunities that lie ahead.

At Cisco we're seeing tremendous market opportunity for private 5G as-a-service (5GaaS). The promise of 5G as a new consumer revenue platform for service providers has been slow to materialize, however, private 5GaaS delivered to enterprises is capturing mind share, as more and more enterprises undergo digital transformation.

For enterprises, private 5G can augment and enhance existing networks, providing trusted coverage and mobility across unique business-critical environments. 5G can be a tremendous digitization and modernization driver for many enterprises, however, it can also be complex to understand, manage, and deploy for most IT organizations.

This is the reason partnering with communication service providers matters. Private 5GaaS is a natural addition to their existing managed services because it is easily scalable and repeatable with one investment and multiple deployments. They already have the knowledge and expertise to deliver and support private 5G, and as such, they can enable enterprises to improve workforce productivity, reduce exposure to risk and threats, and deliver modern and digital experiences.

In a speaking session for our SP customers at Cisco Live!, Bob Everson, Sr. Director of 5G Architecture at Cisco, Ken Davidson, Director of Product Management at Cisco and Giovanni Sansalone, Vice President of Product Management at Bell Canada, discussed new opportunities Cisco and Bell, Canada's largest communications company, are exploring around private 5G as part of our long-standing partnership.

Giovanni pointed out that one incredible benefit of our relationship is that service providers, like Bell, already have both the spectrum and the hands-on experience to deploy and manage private 5G services, which is a great combination. As network infrastructure becomes the backbone of Canadian businesses who want to innovate and advance in the digital age, Bell's 5G network, the most awarded and fastest in Canada, is best positioned to help them on their digital transformation journey.

Cisco's Private 5G solution delivered as-a-Service, provides a pay-as-you-use consumption model, making it financially simple to understand. It allows enterprises to save money on their up-front infrastructure costs while ramping up services as needed. In addition, the enterprise IT team can maintain IT policy and identity across both Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E, and 5G for simplified operations and spare IT staffing from having to learn, design, and operate a complex, carrier-class private licensed radio network.

As Cisco's largest partner in Canada and the first to explore the Cisco Private 5G solution, there is a tremendous opportunity to expand on our partnership and add value to our enterprise customers. From optimal performance, end-to-end security, and robust professional and managed services, businesses across a variety of industries in Canada would have the ability to unlock new growth opportunities and drive efficiencies.

We are looking forward to the possibilities ahead and are eager to expand our long and successful partnership with Bell to bring security, IoT, and 5G technology to Canadian enterprises and industries. Together, we can deliver private 5G across Canada to help enterprises on their digital transformation journey, accelerating their OT and IT digitization and allowing them to scale their operations and address business critical demands today and into the future.