Officials from Cisco Systems and CSU, Chico, along with CSU, Chico students, will offer brief remarks and a demonstration of advanced networking. President Manuel A. Esteban and new College of Business Dean Heikki Rinne are among the CSU, Chico officials that will attend. The donation was spearheaded by Mark Tonnesen, a senior director within Cisco's Information Technology organization and executive sponsor of Cisco's partnership and relationship efforts at CSU, Chico. This broader skill set will give students a substantial competitive edge in the high-tech job market. MIS Professor Michael Wang, who teaches the advanced networking class, said the new lab will give CSU, Chico students invaluable experience working with Wide Area Networks, or WANs, which are the networking systems that carry Internet messages.
WANs are the building blocks of e-commerce.
The two demonstrations planned for tomorrow's ceremony will show how network facilities can facilitate a multimedia teaching lesson at a remote site, and how a data network, rather than a traditional voice network, can be used to make telephone calls. In additional to the lab, the Cisco partnership will include an internship program for both faculty and students, guest lectures from Cisco networking experts and participation from Cisco in future curriculum development in the advanced networking area. Cisco Systems is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Cisco's networking solutions connect people, computing devices and computer networks, allowing people to access or transfer information without regard to differences in time, place or type of computer system. Cisco is among the top companies in the world as measured by market capitalization.