Monday, December 15, 2008

Cisco C-Scape 2008

As I mentioned last Sunday, the Cisco C-Scape was held (virtually) last week. Due to a few too many things going on at work I couldn't attend in real-time, but I did go back and view a couple of the archived videos. Here are just a few of my thoughts/notes on C-Scape and a press-filled week for Cisco:

  • My favorite C-Scape session was what CEO John Chambers said was his favorite as well -- Closing Q&A. I think John handled the questions quite well, and I can only imagine the pressure of being CEO of such an enormous company and getting bombarded day in and out with share holders, press and analysts. He mentioned that a week or so back he met with approximately 80% of Cisco share holders and said that their expectations for Cisco in the coming year was to be 'dramatically more aggressive (but don't mess it up)', even though the financial markets and overall outlook is set to be somewhat gloomy. He mentioned that their most aggressive investments will be in China and India, while still looking into Mexico and Brazil. John was asked what 'type' of company Cisco will be in 2012. He gave an answer that any good CEO would, but basically said that they have the "architectural play" and that their strength is in "the network is the platform".
  • Bloomberg had an article last Tuesday about how Cisco may be a winner in the Obama plans for Infrastructure plays. Economist James Galbraith, a Democratic adviser, recommends spending more than $900 billion. "Just as the highway program moved the U.S. into a new era in the 1950's, technology companies such as Cisco expect the federal government will now lead the way to an information-based economy." Check out the Bloomberg article here
  • Video IS the killer application. I can attest that watching videos on the computer has increased dramatically for me in the past year. The number of video's linked inside this post alone are a testament to the statement. Cisco is also increasing the use of videos as a basic communications form via informal (in their cubical) short videos, and the TechWiseTV podcast.
  • One of my favorite bloggers and now Cisco employee with a really long title, James Urquhart has an article on Cnet about a Maturity Model for Cloud Computing . His title is "Marketing Manager/Technology Evangelist for Data Center Virtualization at Cisco Systems, Inc." :) I'm starting to agree with Larry Ellison and Christofer Hoff -- just what exactly is "the cloud" again? I think we should just go back to calling it "the Internet". James does have a very good article however and true to my ITIL roots he references a maturity model that actually does do a good job of explaining how a company might mature towards this mythical "cloud" of computing power.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I agree with you that Video is the killer app. When I spoke at Cisco's GSM this past summer, I learned that video consititutes approx. 60% of their own internal LAN traffic. If companies can be given the chance to get video introduced into their corporate culture, then I am sure that they can see similar results. The question that comes up is "what is the method of introduction?" More than likely, I belive that it will be with video's entry into the home market, which Cisco can also take advantage of with their acqusitions in the consumer market.