The University of West Bohemia (UOWB) and Cisco Collaborate to Create a 21st-Century Campus and Knowledge Center

PILSEN, Czech Republic, March 25, 2009 - Cisco announced its intent to collaborate with the University of West Bohemia (UOWB) on a number of initiatives to enable the university to stay at the forefront of networking technology developments and offer its students a high-tech campus environment.

Facts / Highlights:

The cooperation will focus on the following areas:

Creation of a knowledge centre with the involvement of UOWB and Cisco experts. The goal is to develop initiatives and blueprints for broadband connectivity to bridge the gap between urban and rural areas, and to create highly advanced metropolitan networks.

Cooperation with the university's faculty of Applied Sciences and the Centre for Information Technology. The focus will be on exchanging information on technology solutions related to wireline and mobile next- generation networks.

A program aimed at improving the competencies of UOWB's information and communication technology specialists, including tutor-led and online training, technological updates, access to Cisco® technology labs in the Czech Republic, as well as participation in Cisco's industry-leading certification programs for networking specialists.

Integration of the Cisco Networking Academy® CCNA® and CCNP® certification courses into the bachelor's and master's programs at UoWB. The university has been a regional Networking Academy site since 2000 and is currently supporting six local academies in the Pilsen region.

Cooperation to build the university's 21st-century campus infrastructure based on a next-generation Internet Protocol (IP) network to serve UOWB's 19,000 students and 2,000 instructors with highly advanced data, voice and video services, using high-speed local wired and wireless networks and the 10-gigabit Internet connectivity provided by CESNET2 National Research Network.

Quotes

Josef Prusa, chancellor, University of West Bohemia

"Our university belongs to the top five best-equipped universities in the Czech Republic when it comes to information infrastructure. ICT develops so dynamically that this position is hard to maintain without a close collaboration with the leading companies, to which Cisco surely belongs. Therefore we welcome establishing close cooperation with Cisco Czech Republic."

Alexander Winkler, general manager, Cisco Czech Republic

"During the first phase of the Internet, universities and their entrepreneurial students were at the forefront of inventing and then accelerating the acceptance of the Internet as the platform for communication across campuses and countries. Today, in the second phase of the Internet, high-speed networks are connecting research communities and are accelerating the exchange of information in ways never seen before. They enable faculty and students to create a flexible teaching environment that helps develop such vital 21st-century skills as creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, and especially collaboration. At Cisco, we are pleased to work together with the University of West Bohemia and look forward to create a knowledge center for modeling all that's possible today at a 21st-century campus."