Chambers: It’s About Us

Time magazine had it wrong when it named “you” as person of the year in 2006; instead, argued Cisco CEO John Chambers, it should be “us.” In his keynote address at NXTcomm, Chambers said that collaboration and the concept of Web 2.0 is changing the way we live and work.

Web 2.0, he explained, is just a collection of technologies like TelePresence, unified communications, social networking, blogging, etc., that support collaboration whether it’s at work or play. This is “phase two” of the Internet and is driven by consumers and a many-to-many environment. In contrast, phase one was business-driven and characterized by one-to-one transactions. The end game is that users can use any device (cell phone, TV, PC, etc.) in any mode (voice, video, data) with a network that understands preferences and presence.


Cisco CEO John Chambers said Time magazine should have named “us” person of the year.

During his keynote address, Chambers demonstrated an example of how this might work. If a consumer was listening to a song in his car, it would automatically change to a music video of the same song as he entered his home. The content, thus, adapts to the player. In another example, a baseball fan could watch the game on his TV and get IMs on the screen from a friend, or surf to find stats or buy tickets. He could even check a buddy’s schedule to see if he were free to come along. The tickets then could be stored on a handheld that could be scanned at that gate.

There are examples in business, too. Cisco, itself, has been a living lab of sorts for the Web 2.0 concept. Chambers said his company began the transformation to a collaborative work model in 2001.

In the early years, he joked that executives were resistant to move to a “democracy.” That is they felt discomfort migrating from a traditional “command and control” management model where decisions are pushed down from the top to a collaborative model where each functional group appoints a few representatives who collaborates with other teams in a many-to-many fashion.

The benefits of this move were not immediate. “The first two years were miserable,” he said. “Now we move with tremendous speed.” He credits completion of due diligence on Cisco’s recent acquisitions of Scientific Atlanta and Webex in 45 days and eight days, respectively, to this collaborative mode.

In 2006, Cisco completed two projects using this method. In 2007, its goal is 18. “I don’t need to tell you what a competitive advantage that is if we pull this off,” he told media and analysts in a press conference that followed the keynote.

One of the ways that Cisco is realizing this idea is with its wiki, iZONE, which generates thousands of ideas from staff, which are weeded down to a few executable ideas. “We now launch two to three times what we did previously” using this method, Chambers said.

To make all this work, he said intelligence must move into the network and telcos can no longer sell a “dumb pipe.” Architecturally, it all needs to be tied together.

Balancing that with enterprise’s willingness to pay is a task that Chambers says should grow easier. He said Moore’s Law is at work, doubling price performance every 18 months.

Speaking as a user, he added, his costs to service providers have doubled. “I am fine with that,” he said, noting with TelePresence and other collaborative tools he makes up for the deficit through fewer travel expenses.

Cisco Systems Inc. www.cisco.com

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