Cisco CEO, John Chambers to visit Australia

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 27 March 2007 10:57

IT Industry - Deals

Cisco CEO John Chambers will make his first visit to Australia in five years at the end of April and will talk up the company's latest marketing tagline: "Welcome to the Human Network".

Few details of his visit were available, but he will deliver a lunch time address in Sydney to the Trans Tasman Business Circle on 27 April headed on the subject of the human network in which he will expand on Cisco's new marketing theme - reported in iTWire earlier this month in connection with its Telepresence video conferencing technology - that "the network is not longer about connecting computers, it's about connecting people."

Chambers delivered an address in January on the same theme at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and according to the organiser's press release  he "identified [the human network] as one of the top four focal points for the company in the next decade."

The release said that Chambers had walked the audience through several demonstrations of the human network throughout his presentation, which included devices that self-install and register, RFID technology allowing consumers to purchase sports tickets on their TV and have them delivered to their cell phone, and live TV chats with friends. It concluded "Cisco is uniquely capable of providing the human network, Chambers said, because it has a broad technology base, convergence expertise, strong partnerships and is device neutral, content agnostic, standards based and customer focused."

According to Wikipedia, Cisco adopted the term late in 2006. Wikipedia defines the human network  as "the social structure composed of individuals, friends, collaborators or other organisations connected through technology using a variety of devices - personal computers, mobile phones, gaming consoles and PDAs. In many instances the term is described synonymously with the architecture of participation. It is the intersection of communications networks and social networks - a telecommunications network where people are the endpoints. Nobody on this network is alone. Ever."