Not just the first in ASEAN, Cisco’s latest Co-innovation Center in Singapore makes it its 14th worldwide. On the same day of its launch on Feb 15, Cisco also established a Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence in Singapore.

Both centers are located at Cisco’s 80,000 sqft office in Mapletree Business City. They are designed to catalyse digital innovation and development in line with Singapore’s focus on pushing for a digital economy framework, said the Economic Development Board (EDB), a statutory board under the Singapore government’s Ministry of Trade and Industry.

The Co-innovation Center will bring together customers, industry partners, start-ups, application developers, accelerators, government organizations, and academia to work on problems unique to the region – with a particular focus on cybersecurity and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Separately, the Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence is expected to expand Cisco’s threat intelligence research, and security incident response capabilities in the Asia Pacific.

At the opening ceremony for the two centers, EDB Managing Director Chng Kai Fong said, “Cisco’s Co-Innovation Center and Cybersecurity Center of Excellence will not only build new digital capabilities in Singapore for the Asia Pacific region, but also provide opportunities for Singaporeans to work with the best minds in Cisco and its partners to create new and innovative solutions that enable and secure digital transformation in different industries.”

On the company’s official blog, Cisco Chief Technology Officer of Engineering and Chief Architect David Ward said, “Singapore joins our global network of Co-Innovation Centers with the mandate to identify, collaborate and co-engineer innovative solutions beyond Cisco’s traditional offerings that move the dial for our customers and partners.”

Cisco has been focusing significantly on blockchain technology of late. Local leading daily The Straits Times noted (Feb 15) that Cisco hopes to bring some of its overseas innovations to Singapore, such as how it is working with the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands to help it become fully autonomous by 2023. Cisco is also testing out in Sydney an app for commuters which feeds them public transport ridership rates in real time.

In July 2017, Cisco joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) – the world’s largest open-source blockchain initiative.