All eyes are on Lisbon, Portugal starting today, and not just because Chinese President Xi Jinping is visiting.  This week's LightReading 2020 Vision Executive Summit brings together some of the industry's greatest minds to tackle telecom's toughest problems. This is certainly relevant as we look ahead over the next few months toward Cisco Live and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and focus on how to help Service Providers around the world save money, make money and reduce risk.

Since the inaugural 2020 Vision Executive Summit in Iceland four years ago, the communications industry has experienced the early stages of what is going to be a tough but ultimately rewarding transformation. There's plenty of excitement around the potential of 5G, AI, virtualization and other transformative trends, but it's certainly not all rainbows and roses - and we all know it.

A heavy dose of reality has set in as the day-to-day business and operational disruption hits home, caused by increasing competition, regulatory and political uncertainty, and unparalleled cybersecurity threats.

These key issues will be front and center at this year's 2020 Vision Executive Summit in Lisbon, December 4-6, where the expert team of Heavy Reading analysts and Light Reading editors are bringing together industry leaders to discuss these pressing topics and answer questions.

Cisco will be speaking at two keynote presentations at the event: one from SVP/GM Service Provider Network Systems Sumeet Arora discussing the network of the future; and one from EMEAR Service Provider CTO Brian Meaney hitting security issues head on.  In addition, you can find Cisco on panels tackling questions about The Edge -where is it and who will own it? And about 5G -where are we now, and what are the roadblocks?

SVP/GM Sumeet Arora speaks on panel at 2020 Vision Executive Summit in LisbonPanelists from Cisco, Telstra, Vodafone, and CalixCisco EMEAR SP CTO Brian Meaney uses the Game of Thrones theme to explain security threats.Sumeet Arora's keynote presentation on the Network of the Future

Light Reading's 2020 Vision Executive Summit is sure to be stimulating and thought-provoking.

Until then, Ola' from Lisbon!

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Post-Show Update!

We enjoyed a fantastic week in Lisbon, focused on how enterprises, web scale and service providers are transforming with automation, at the edge, to the cloud, in their workforce, how they approach security, and much more. Take a look at the highlight reel featuring insights from our SVP/GM, Sumeet Arora.