Cisco ANZ's new MD sets the course

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 18 September 2007 12:57

IT Industry - Deals

Les Williamson, who recently took over from Ross Fowler as head of Cisco Australia & New Zealand has set the company's agenda - on social responsibility and collaboration, in his first press briefing.

In a press conference at Cisco's Networkers event in Brisbane Williamson said: "Cisco ANZ is in fantastic operational shape and...we intend to be an ICT innovator with regard to some of the larger social agendas in Australian and New Zealand around environment, skills and around collaboration. We intend to be the leader in ICT innovation around collaboration internally and with our customers and partners."

The company's focus will also expand to increasingly embrace the SMB and consumer markets, according to Williamson (global CEO John Chambers has recently flagged tighter integration between the Linksys consumer and SME business and the traditional Cisco business) "We intend to be innovative...by leveraging what we are really good at which is business and architecture leadership. We are now driving that into the SMB and consumer space." He added: "We also intend to focus on three key technology areas: unified communications, data centres, - we now have a full end to-end data centre suite that we are taking to market - and video...in all its facets."

Williamson has dubbed the new approach "ANZ 3.0" and says it will be piloted "with key customers and partners in each [market] segment." There will also be an increased focus on the public sector market. This, Williamson said, "will be a key vertical for us. It has already been what we call an 'incubation vertical' and I am now looking for a new leader for that sector."

Collaboration tools will loom large in Cisco's new approach. "We want to make collaboration real for external customers so we have to make it real internally within Cisco Australia and NZ," he said. "We are rolling out a lot of new collaboration capability internally some of it very futuristic. We are part of what we call an early adopter programme in Cisco globally and we will be using alpha and beat releases to get used to products to before we take them to market."

The company has revamped its internal communications tools, standardising on two new PDAs that have been certified to its requirements and internal systems and, following the recent closure of its acquisition of collaboration services provider, WebEx, has provided every employee with a WebEx account.

Stuart Corner travelled to Networks as a guest of Cisco.