Cisco TV Spot Has John Boyega Championing The Cloud As A 'force' In Business

There is no mention of the words “Star Wars” and he’s walking on water rather than the desert planet of Jakku, but John Boyega still manages to walk with the confidence of a stormtrooper in the latest TV commercial from Cisco.

In a 30-second clip titled ‘Unleash the Power of the Cloud,” the actor best known for playing Finn in the long-running science fiction series is placed in a simple landscape where he reflect on what he describes as the “new reality” of cloud computing.

“Adapt to change? Faster? Connect to anyone, anywhere? Faster,” Boyega says, dressed in decidedly military-style boots and a jacket/pants combo that would not look out of place in a world imagined by George Lucas. “Grow your business? Boom.”

Created by Cisco’s agency Neo @ Ogilvy, the TV spot is actually a trimmed version of a slightly longer video featuring Boyega that made its debut on a Cisco landing page late last year. The full-length clip has Boyega getting into the specifics of Cisco’s software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) products. It also notes some cloud-related challenges that the TV spot leaves out, such as application control, security and escalating costs. These are all things that can be addressed through the use of the right SD-WAN solution, he adds.

In a blog post, Cisco CMO Karen Walker mentions the Boyega video as part of the over-arching campaign, “Be The Bridge,” which tries to show enterprise customers how they can get from the seemingly impossible to successful use of IT. This was the same theme she discussed in her recent appearance at Collision in Toronto.

If you’re one of the Star Wars fans that Cisco is no doubt assuming makes up much of its customer base, meanwhile, Boyega shared a behind-the-scenes video about the making of the current clip and TV spot via his Twitter account.