If you want a quick summation of where Cisco is going to focus in the next three to five years the three magic words are TelePresence collaboration and video. That's the troika that will bring all of Cisco's strategic planning R&D and acquisitions together.
Of the three Cisco has proclaimed video the killer app and the company plans to introduce in 2008 its EOS (Entertainment Operating System) a hosted software platform that will integrate social networking content distribution and content targeting into a unified operating environment.
| Cisco clearly wants to get away from being considered just a hardware vendor. Tim Dillon Associate vice presidentIDC Australia | |||||
| Cisco clearly wants to get away from being considered just a hardware vendor. Tim Dillon Associate vice presidentIDC Australia | ||||||
Outlining its high-level plans Cisco kicked off its C-Scape 2007 analyst conference in San Jose on Tuesday bringing in industry experts and remote conference attendees via its TelePresence videoconferencing solution.
According to Cisco CEO John Chambers the industry is in the second phase of major Internet development which will use collaboration via Web 2.0 technology as a positive disruptive force that promotes social networking for business and consumers.
Chambers said the network will be used to enable new business models and Cisco is trying to position itself to be in the middle of it all including negotiating content agreements with media companies.
'We'll watch how it goes as Cisco tries to position itself as a communications company a software company and a video company ' said Tim Dillon associate vice president of IDC Australia. 'Cisco clearly wants to get away from being considered just a hardware vendor.'
Starting with the TelePresence focus first Chambers said he plans to double the number of customers he visits over the next three years yet cut his travel in half. 'TelePresence is the ability to share information in a many-to-many form and it can be more effective than the face-to-face meeting ' Chambers said.
Telepresence is about unified communications he said. 'It's an architectural approach using a shared workspace and having the ability to integrate video from different places working across one unified data voice and video network.'
Collaboration as productivity catalyst
Cisco's second keyword collaboration is vital to increasing corporate productivity and innovation driving it at a faster pace than most economists project said Erik Brynjolfsson the director of the MIT Center for Digital Business who joined the conference via Cisco's TelePresence solution. 'The more knowledge workers can collaborate with each other using TelePresence ' he said 'the more they can increase productivity and innovate faster.'
Collaboration has synergy with business process change according to Brynjolfsson. 'Companies that have made business process and collaborative technology improvements have found that the two go together in a highly complementary way ' he said 'and the companies that did both had large productivity gains.'
Collaboration also promotes social networking within businesses Brynjolfsson said adding that its uses go beyond the familiar FaceBook and MySpace applications used largely in the younger consumer market.