LAS VEGAS — For Cisco CEO and President John Chambers, social networking isn’t
just for kids. It’s for business and it’s the collaborative model that will
propel productivity.
At last year’s Interop, Chambers shared his vision of the network as the
platform. At this year’s Interop kickoff, he expanded the vision to
version 2.0, or Web 2.0 to be more precise.
“The second phase of the Internet is how collaboration and Web 2.0 tools will
forever change business,” Chambers said as he marched around the packed
room.
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John Chambers Source: Cisco |
Chambers isn’t just jumping on the mass media social networking bandwagon,
either. He argued argued that Time Magazine got it wrong when
they declared “You” to be the person of the year.
“They got it wrong and are looking to the past,” Chambers said. “It’s not
about you. It’s about ‘us,’ and collaboration is the way it’s going to be
expressed.”
The “us” that Chamber referred to was also a coy reference to Cisco.
Chamber reminded the audience that 15 years ago, Cisco said that the network
would change every aspect of our lives, and where intelligence is everyone
on the network. He noted that at COMDEX in 1997 he called for complete
convergence. Now he’s called for complete Web 2.0, and he’s moving Cisco as
fast as he can toward that goal.
“I believe that you should be able to use any device anywhere over any
network, and the network is the platform,” Chambers said.
The first wave of the Internet and the network was all about transaction and
not interactions. The new Internet 2.0 is all about collaboration of many to
many that is enabled by the network.
It’s not just talk for Cisco, either.
“A lot of ideas you see with social networks we are doing now,” Chambers
said. “We’re changing our business structure.”
As a case in point Chambers described how Cisco’s new collaborative model
helps him acquire companies.
In March, Cisco acquired WebEx
in a deal that took only eight days to close. According to Chambers, a Web
2.0 approach made it easier to close the deal faster. The same was the case with the company’s 2005 purchase of Scientific Atlanta, which took 45 days to close.
Cisco is also using Web 2.0 approaches to get its products to market faster.
The I-Zone Cisco wiki has thousands of ideas posted which then get whittled
down to 250 feasible ideas, down 12 that get a business plan and ultimately
three ideas that translate to new product and business units.
This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.