Collaboration's the keyword for Chambers 24 July, 2007 By Robert Dutt

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The theme of collaboration ran deep in Chambers' opening keynote, as the always-energetic executive detailed the company's bets on collaboration, highlighted by the company's TelePresence product, a project which has long been a favorite of the executive.

"It's not about personalization, but about collaboration," Chambers said of what he predicted would be a coming wave of increased productivity thanks to IT. Chambers said Cisco expects those rises in productivity to be even more heady than the "good old days" of the late nineties.

That collaboration is changing Cisco internally, Chambers said, leading to more agile teams and task forces that pursue particular issues, rather than a stricter business unit structure. When the company elected to open a major center for innovation in India, for example, the company shipped a number of top executives over, to live and work in Bangalore, and to interface with their counterparts in North America via online collaboration tools, including TelePresence.

"What makes it so unique is that you communicate like you're actually there, but it only works if you've got the right architecture and the right technology in place," Chambers said, stressing that making an investment in IP technology should be guided by larger, business-oriented goals. "The decision isn't an IP telephony decision, that's the wrong reason. It's about any device, any content, anywhere."

While in 2005, "it killed" Cisco to integrate its purchase of Scientific Atlanta in 45 days, the online tools provided 18 months later by its purchase of WebEx allowed the networking giant to close that deal in eight days. "And we took a day off," Chambers quipped. And Chambers said that kind of momentum is becoming increasingly possible thanks to readily available bandwidth, noting that by 2010, 20 Internet-connected homes will have more traffic running to and from them than the entire traffic on the Internet in 1995.

And while that coming boom in productivity has the opportunity to be huge, how much a company will see of it will depend on how willing management is to let go of the old model and re-invent itself.

"The limitation with Web 2.0 is not the technology, or the ability to deliver it," he said. "The limitation will be the cultural change that is needed to make it happen."

And that change starts with acknowledging that not everything comes from the top down. Cisco, he said, keeps wikis on topics like new technologies and companies to watch. He said that as a result, thousands of ideas a year are passed along, filtered down to few hundred feasible concepts, and then further refined over time until they turn into a handful of new products, acquisitions or business units.

He noted that like the Internet itself, which was nearly 30 years old when it started being harnessed to anything approaching its potential, Web 2.0 concepts have existed for a long time, but are just now starting to come to the forefront.

And it means that Cisco itself will have to transform itself as well, moving further and further away from being a maker of networking gear, and more towards producing software and services.

"We were very proud of being a plumber for a long time," he said. "It's an honorable profession, and it's very lucrative. But together, we are becoming the platform for all of IT."

Chambers touched on the company's mantra of the network being the platform, a mantra which he says is taking off, as he reported that even customers who strongly opposed the concept are being won over and wanting to see the company move further along its path.