Cisco sees the future, and it's collaborative

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 18 September 2007 13:02

Opinion and Analysis

His answer: "The US Council of Competitiveness believes the three pillars of innovation are talent, investment and infrastructure...And I believe that Internet technologies can contribute to and accelerate each of those in a big way...Three ways to foster talent are education training and information...As our CEO John Chambers likes to say, education and the Internet are the two great equalisers." To these three he added one more: "The fourth way we nurture talent today is through collaboration."

And, not surprisingly, Charney contends that the Internet is the critical infrastructure of the 21st century: which means it is critical to two of the three pillars of innovation.

All this was fleshed out with numerous fascinating illustrations, anecdotes and quotations and, sitting rather oddly with the 'big picture' stuff a practical demonstration of the collaboration features of Cisco technologies and their integration with its latest acquistion, online collaboration tools provider WebEx.

Rounding the whole thing off was a rather bizarre video to illustrate the power of collaboration, A teenage child in some unspecified future struggles to coax a strange contraption of cardboard, assorted hardware and decidedly 20th century electrical components to perform some unspecified function. Frustrated she summons up the holographic presence of friends from around the world: multiple genies conjured from an electronic Aladdin's lamp who jabber in many tongues and gesture at the components of the contraption. Enlightened through the power of global collaboration our future teenager rejigs the contraption, twiddles dials, pushes buttons and disappears in her time machine!

As I said, bizarre. But I'm sure you get the message: with the ability of the Internet to engender instant collaboration between people anywhere in the world, anything is possible.

On a more down to earth level, Williamson reinforced the message, telling journalists that collaboration would be a key focus area for the local operation in an approach to market that he has dubbed 'ANZ 3.0'

And it is not just Cisco for whom collaboration is taking centre stage. As I noted earlier, reporting the acquisition of Zimbra by Yahoo!,   Microsoft, Google, Capgemini and others are all becoming more involved in this market.

Stuart Corner travelled to Networks as a guest of Cisco.