BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 2
By Yusif Aghayev – Trend:
CISCO has been cooperating with Azerbaijan for a long time and sees great potential of its technological development, Regional Director of the world famous CISCO company Vladimir Orlov said in an interview with Trend conducted in a video conference format.
“Therefore, a decision was made to further strengthen our cooperation with Azerbaijan and its government,” the regional director said.
Orlov noted that CISCO has representative offices in very few countries, one of which is Azerbaijan.
“CISCO is promoting the global Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) program and helps the countries involved in the program to carry out digitalization,” the regional director added.
“A memorandum of understanding and inclusion of Azerbaijan in the CDA program was signed between the Azerbaijani government and CISCO in 2017,” the regional director said. “During that period, only 17 countries were included in this program. So far, there are only Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan among the CIS countries.”
“The main ideology of this program is to facilitate the implementation of the vision of the country's leadership to accelerate digitalization,” Orlov said.
“As part of the implementation of the development concept 'Azerbaijan 2020: A Look into the Future', approved upon the decree of President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev dated December 29, 2012, digitalization is one of the main priorities of the country's development,” regional director said.
"During that period, we determined several priority spheres of cooperation, the first of which was the identification of broadband penetration - that is, the level of access to the broadband internet,” Orlov said. “Azerbaijan showed the best positions in the post-Soviet area in accordance with the results of the report of the UN Commission on the 'State of Broadband Communication 2016'.”
“Then an agreement was reached following the results of the consultations,” regional director said. “The leading providers modernized their services in Azerbaijan in such a way to ensure development for several years ahead in the direction of unhindered access to broadband internet and the development of information technologies.”
“In accordance with the practice, the level of development of information technologies greatly affects the country's competitiveness in the global markets,” Orlov said. “As is known, there is such an indicator as the Networked Readiness Index, also called as the technology readiness, which is published annually by the World Economic Forum in Davos.”
“It determines the ability of the countries to take advantage of the opportunities through the information and communication technologies,” Orlov said. “The rating of the country is estimated in accordance with this indicator. Our task during that period was to raise the rating of Azerbaijan within this index."
“Another sphere of cooperation between CISCO and the Azerbaijani government was the Smart City project,” regional director said. “This project was aimed at introducing various information technologies in the development of certain sectors, namely, transport, energy, education and others.”
“A pilot project was implemented at [Baku] International Bus Terminal,” Orlov said. “Its purpose was to introduce and test the maximum number of information technologies necessary not only for the bus station, but also for those that could be replicated to the city as a whole.”
"We also began to actively cooperate with the Azerbaijani government in the field of education,” the regional director said. “Cooperation in this sphere is developing in several directions. One of them is CISCO network academies. It envisages the provision of CISCO educational and methodological materials for educating children in Azerbaijan.”
“Another sphere is Connected Schools project, which allows to centrally manage the educational process in the widest way by ensuring cybersecurity at the proper level,” Orlov said. “Other sphere includes the participation in innovation centers related to the creation of educational platforms for the development of entrepreneurship skills.”
“This is only the first phase of our strategic cooperation with the Azerbaijani government,” the regional director said. “Today, consultations are underway on [our] participation in big innovative projects related to the digitalization of agriculture, the energy sector, healthcare and many other spheres.”
“We work very closely with the Department for Economic Issues and Innovative Development Policy of the Azerbaijani Presidential Administration, the Ministry of Transport, Communications and High Technologies, the Baku Transport Agency, the Ministry of Energy and many other structures,” regional director said.
“We may confidently say that today, the necessary organizational structure for introducing innovative technologies has already been created in Azerbaijan, and we are at the highest level of relations with the Azerbaijani government in this sphere,"the regional director said.
CISCO PR manager Dmitry Leskov and CISCO Sales Specialist Oleg Saenko also attended the video conference, which was held on the WebEx platform developed by CISCO.