Chambers and Collaboration

Watching John Chambers give a keynote presentation is always delightful and last week's C-Scape conference was no exception. For about a year the topic of many of his talks has been "Collaboration" with two main themes which he intertwines. One theme is a conversation about the promise that modern Collaboration tools (Web 2.0) have for significantly improving worker productivity - as the CEO of a large company (66K employees) Chambers is the Poster Boy for the importance of modern collaboration tools for significantly improving productivity at a global company. He is probably the best spokesman for Collaboration 2.0 tools. His second theme is Cisco as a provider of these collaboration tools and this is the one that I have trouble grocking. Certainly the bits for these tools traverse Cisco networks and when you're talking about video that will be a lot of network traffic. Chambers' examples of Cisco's collaboration portfolio are VoIP telephony and Telepresence plus a lot of stuff that they've picked up through acquisitions totaling more than $3.3B (see table below), the biggest piece being WebEx. Sure, it can be argued that Cisco has a suite of products including conferencing, e-mail and instant messaging but Microsoft has Exchange, SharePoint and OCS and over a decade of work on collaboration tools. More than that, it's hard for me to picture Cisco as a provider of tools that users interact with like the office functionality that he demonstrated (which, we presume, are examples of what's coming from WebEx Connect). Even though I'm skeptical, I have to remember that it is John Chambers who says that Cisco is going to be a big player in the collaboration business which is enough to keep me interested and watching closely.