Collaboration is in, says Cisco

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 30 September 2009 03:50

IT Industry - Strategy

There's "a massive upside" to the adoption of collaboration technologies, and Cisco is trying to be an example of best practice.

For example, its corporate directory includes information about employee's skills and expertise to foster collaboration and encourage the sharing of knowledge.

Technology is only some 20% of this - the rest is organisational, he said.

Another consideration is that interoperability is central to collaboration. While Cisco might partner with companies such as HP or IBM in some areas, they compete in others. While Cisco can provide end-to-end systems (and as much as Hughes would like his customers to buy an all-Cisco system), it is essential to accommodate other products.

"If you can't [interoperate], customers won't buy," he acknowledged, explaining that most organisations want to work with fewer vendors, but they expect those vendors to cooperate with each other. Customers do not want to be forced to deal with integration issues.

And even where the first steps to collaboration may be internal, they are vrey likely to go beyond the organsational border, which requires support for a federated approach.

Hughes expects much greater growth during the next three or four years than was experienced during the last decade, and "collaboration is going to be at the forefront."

Stephen Withers travelled to the Cisco Networkers conference as a guest of the company.