Stuart Corner
Saturday, 12 April 2008 03:52
Opinion and Analysis
Page 3 of 4
The implications of all this could be far reaching indeed when placed in the context of Cisco's ambitions. Put simply Cisco wants to turn the IT world around from one in which the network exists to provide connectivity between devices, and processors to one in which the role of devices is simply to deliver the services provided by the network to end users.
Here's how Michael Kisch, director, consumer marketing at Cisco explained it on
Cisco's Consumer blog .
"We have had great success marketing the value of the network to service providers, large businesses and more advanced small businesses. We are now focused on extending that effort to consumers...Ultimately the network is critical to the consumer experience. Getting consumers to understand this is the task for Cisco."
According to Kisch There are basically three areas where the network will have a huge impact on the consumer experience: connection, discover and experience.
Connection and experience are fairly straightforward: the network provides the link to content, to services and to other people; experience is about the quality of the services delivered over the connection. However Kisch envisages services such as this: " a child would be able to watch their favourite Saturday morning cartoon. Halfway through the program the family needs to leave to go visit Grandma. The parent would be able to pause the show, load the family into the car and re-start the video from where it left off and play it on the rear headrest video screen."
Good stuff, but it's discovery that is the really interesting one. Kisch explains: "The concept of discovery is based upon the fact that in a world of infinite content choices it's impossible for any one person to know exactly what they are looking for all of the time. The consequence of this is that we miss movies, TV shows, short form videos and music that could be of interest to us. For us to be aware of these things we need to be able to tap into the wisdom and interests of people who are similar. This requires the network to bridge across different devices, websites and social networks and the intelligence to establish contextual relationships between individuals and content."
Sounds like Cisco plans to out google Google! Or if not provide somebody with the tools to do this (so far Cisco has not ventured into the network services business).
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