Celebrate the 2025 Customer Hero Award Winners at Cisco Live Amsterdam

Our Customer Experience (CX) team takes great pride in celebrating our customers’ achievements. At Cisco Live Amsterdam each year, we honor a select group of innovative clients with the Cisco CX Customer Hero Awards.

The award recipients have all demonstrated outstanding performance in their categories and were chosen from numerous nominations across various industries within the EMEA region. These awards are highly competitive, and were awarded by Adele Trombetta, SVP and GM, CX EMEA in our CX booth this year. It is a privilege to present this year’s distinguished winners. Please join me in congratulating the award recipients!

Sustainability Leader Award: COP29 Azerbaijan

The Sustainability Leader Award recognizes a customer who has achieved exceptional sustainability outcomes with Cisco Customer Experience. The winner for this year is COP29 Azerbaijan, the organization responsible for hosting the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the largest United Nations event of the year. Under the leadership of Elnar Asadov, Head of ICT at COP29, the team partnered with Cisco Customer Experience to embrace the principle of “One Team, One Family, One Goal.” Together, they built and deployed a secure, automated, and energy-efficient network infrastructure.

In an impressive timeframe of just three months, COP29 and Cisco Customer Experience deployed a robust secure, automated, and energy-efficient network infrastructure using Cisco’s SD-Access solution. This innovative approach ensured a remarkable 99.999% uptime, offering a seamless user experience while also boosting sustainability and operational efficiency.

This collaboration helped COP29 achieve its sustainability goals while delivering a world-class event for over 55,000 attendees from 190 countries.

Digital Transformation Luminary Award: SAP

The Digital Transformation Luminary Award recognizes a customer who has achieved exceptional digital transformation through collaboration with Cisco Customer Experience. The winner is SAP, a global leader in enterprise software who has successfully transformed their office network into the Network of the Future. Leveraging Cisco’s Software-Defined Access (SDA) solution and the expertise of the Cisco Customer Customer Experience team, Peter Panzenboeck, Program Director, worked with Natascha Nick, Chief Architect, to craft a secure, high-performance network that seamlessly integrates Network Access Control (NAC), Wireless LAN (WLAN), and Local Area Network (LAN) services. This integration drives enhanced efficiency, security, scalability, and operational simplicity across SAP’s ~280 offices globally.

Operational Excellence Award: T-Systems

The Operational Excellence Award honors a customer who has dramatically improved IT operations through collaboration with Cisco Customer Experience. T-Systems, a leading global IT services provider, partnered with Cisco Customer Experience to build an end-to-end architecture for a real-time, on-demand platform. This platform provides end-customer enterprises with connectivity to TSI’s multiple clouds in an automated and model-based fashion, improving their end-customers’ experience by reducing the time for service provisioning significantly. Paul Starr, Senior Technical Design Authority, and his team worked with Cisco Customer Experience to set up an implement an automated framework using Cisco’s Nexus 9k, ACI, and Network Functions Virtualization technologies, reducing customer onboarding time and service activation times dramatically. The platform also scales efficiently, enabling T-Systems to provide a more agile service offering while reducing errors during new customer onboarding. This collaboration has dramatically improved T-Systems’ overall customer experience and operational efficiency.

Exceptional Innovation: stc

The Exceptional Innovation Award recognizes stc Group as achieving remarkable innovation through collaboration with Cisco Customer Experience. stc Group, a leading digital enabler, worked with Cisco Customer Experience to transform the legacy telco cloud infrastructure into a future-proof, automation-first architecture. stc Group adopted cutting-edge technologies, including CICD pipelines, AI Ops, and Infrastructure-as-code to streamline operations and reduce deployment times. The solution reduced new application deployment times by 50%, decreased the time for data center expansion configurations by 80%, enhanced operational efficiency, and reduced errors across the system. The partnership with Cisco Customer Experience has helped stc Group continue to lead the industry with innovative, automated solutions.

AI Trailblazer: Core42

The AI Trailblazer Award recognizes a customer that has partnered with Cisco Customer Experience to successfully prepare its infrastructure leveraging AI. Core42, a G42 company specializing in sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure, collaborated with Cisco Customer Experience to build the first AI-driven data center for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI training in the Middle East. This partnership enabled Core42 to leverage Cisco Customer Experience’s expertise in end-to-end planning, design, and implementation of AI-based cloud infrastructure. Led by Adrian Hobbs, Chief Technology Officer at Core42, the teams worked closely to align the infrastructure with AI demands, solidifying Core42’s leadership in the region’s AI and HPC ecosystem while driving large-scale AI programs and cloud solutions

Outstanding Automation Award: Sykehuspartner

The Outstanding Automation Award celebrates a customer who has significantly enhanced IT operations through automation in collaboration with Cisco Customer Experience. This year’s winner is Sykehuspartner HF, a service provider in ICT, projects, logistics, and HR for all public hospitals under the South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority.

Sykehuspartner HF manages critical ICT systems for 81,000 healthcare workers in the region, serving 3.1 million patients. Bjorn Vik, the Project Manager for the MOdernization of NETwork project (MONET) and the NetwOrk Automation team (NOA), along with Jan Idar, lead architect, collaborated directly with Cisco Customer Experience.  Through this collaboration, they have successfully automated and redeployed the first hospital network in the region, completing the upgrade and implementation at a pace that have set new standards in speed and quality.

The plan is to further modernize the entire infrastructure across more than 60 healthcare locations, transitioning into a Managed Service Provider (MSP) by automating the entire network infrastructure through continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). The team has also standardized delivery processes and reduced operational complexity, facilitating easier changes. Additionally, they have significantly reduced troubleshooting and resolution times for issues related to APIs and the automation framework from several days to approximately 10 minutes.

CX Customer Hero of the Year: Paris 2024 Olympics & Paralympics

The Customer Hero of the Year is our pinnacle award, for the customer with the strongest overall outcomes as a result of working with Cisco Customer Experience. The Paris 2024 Olympics & Paralympics, one of the world’s most high-profile events, faced the challenge of securing the most cyber-attacked event in the world. Franz Regul, CISO, collaborated with Cisco Customer Experience to deploy a zero-trust architecture and the full Cisco Cyber Security product portfolio to create a stable and resilient IT environment for the games. With Cisco XDR as a single pane of glass and support from Cisco Talos for threat intelligence and incident response, Franz Regul and his crew successfully secured the event with no cybersecurity incidents.

Explore more Cisco Customer Experience Heroes Today

To learn more about our customer heroes and their stories, visit our Customer Stories Index – a catalog of stories highlighting how Cisco services customers are transforming and innovating to drive impact in their organizations and across the world.

See some of our most recent stories here:

• United Airlines – Taking the passenger experience to new heights with Agent on Demand
• Workday – Enhancing consistency, security, and faster deployments with automation
• NYC Health + Hospitals – Setting new standards in the United States’ largest municipal health care delivery system.

If you want to share your customer story, connect with us at cxcustomerstories@cisco.com. We’d love to hear from you even if you don’t have a story to tell just yet. We can help you build it!

*All photos provided by Akram Hammam. 

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