This week in London, our own Dr. Abe Peled accepted the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award from Digital TV Europe, as part of its "Euro 50 Awards" at this week's Cable Congress.

Anyone who knows Abe knows that he's a quick-witted, highly intelligent, super-motivated gentleman, and we're all sincerely glad he's part of the Cisco team, following our acquisition of NDS in 2012.

Abe has 40 years of accomplishments in the digital TV industry. He started his television life in 1974 at IBM's Research Division, working on advanced digital signal processing techniques, and advanced up and up and up until he was named VP/Systems and Software, overseeing all of IBM's research labs, worldwide. His work there even landed his face on a cover story in the New York Times' Business section, in August of '91.

After a brief stint at Elron Electric Industries, in Haifa, Isreal (where he established the first commercial Internet service there), he joined NDS Group Ltd. as CEO, in 1995. Four years later, in 1999, NDS listed and was valued on the NASDAQ exchange at$1 billion; a decade later, when parent company News Corp. returned NDS to private ownership, it was valued at$3.6 billion. During his tenure, NDS grew by 25x, and became known as the leading provider of content protection and software systems for pay-TV providers, worldwide.

Quite an impressive career! Abe now serves in the role of SVP, Strategy for Cisco's video and collaboration group, and we couldn't be more pleased about that. The fact that his four decades of service is being acknowledged by his peers in London is just such wonderful news, and we wanted to express our sincere congratulations to Abe!