Next Internet experience driven by collaboration, Web 2.0 9 December, 2008 By Chris Talbot

As he has stated in the past, Chambers said Cisco is living by what it preaches about technology and usage models. The company has rolled TelePresence rooms out around the globe for its own use while also taking the technology to its customers. At the same time, Cisco has been restructuring itself around next-generation collaboration and Web 2.0 technologies, which means a change in the way business as done as well as a new mindset in how an individual works.

The next Internet experience will be built around video and virtualization as the industry moves to the usage of collaboration tools, Chambers said during his C-Scape 2008 keynote speech.

"We believe the network will enable all forms of communication and IT," he said.

Chambers made note of the challenging economic times, and while he said he couldn't be sure how long they would last, he did note that Cisco has been (and still is) preparing itself for how best to deal with and how to recognize and take advantage of the eventual economic upturn.

Operational excellence is key, he said. Everything Cisco is doing is building off of its belief that collaboration and Web 2.0 will become a more dominant and important part of business communications and doing business.

"We will literally use this as a chance to get close to our customers," said Chambers, who added that when there is an economic downturn, Cisco focuses more on developing relationships with its customers rather than distances itself from them.

However, there are differences in how Cisco is approaching the economic downturn this time. Whereas it would have reduced headcount in the past, now the company is focusing on realigning resources and being able to move headcount around to appropriate areas of the business.

"One of the hardest things we're going to try to do is resource management," Chambers said.

Cisco is also being realigned to focus on 26 different areas of opportunity.

"We're going to realign our resources to these 26 new opportunities and do what we did on a larger scale than in 2007," Chambers said.

Looking ahead, the Cisco CEO said that business and entertainment models are going to change. There is already evidence of this occurring with changes in the way people use technology and communicate with each other.

However, the dividing line between technology and business has blurred so much that Chambers said business and technology architecture at Cisco have become a seamless whole. That's going to happen outside of the networking giant's walls, as well.

A key change is the movement from personalization to communities of interest. While people are used to having a business community and a family community, that's going to change in the future. Chambers noted that by December of next year, he expects to be participating in about 40 communities within Cisco. Additionally, information from those communities will primarily be distributed by video. It's a visual world, he said.

While Web 2.0 and collaboration technologies are key to the business of the future, Chambers did note that if they're not deployed in a way that integrates all the technologies together, it will hinder rather than help employee productivity.

"I believe there is a new generation of productivity," Chambers said.