Cisco prepares for video

Cisco's John Chambers showed where his thinking was this week at Cisco's annual C-scape conference, strongly promoting video as the next big thing and highlighting how collaboration was likely to transform corporate work practices and culture. 

The lack of discussion around basic internet and VoIP in particular was noted by Jon Arnold, who also picked up on Cisco's fascination with video and web 2.0. But while social networking and consumer video is impacting the broader internet, Cisco executives said they had not yet had an impact at the enterprise level.

Video and video services were being touted as the next game changer and if Cisco is to be believed a $50 billion opportunity, but the timing would be a number of years before it seriously began to impact network architectures.

Chambers was doing a sell job for Cisco's conferencing product, Telepresence. This was part of a general theme about improving productivity and execution cycles by freeing up company structures to pursue growth opportunities and using various web 2.0 collaboration tools. Cisco itself has recently created a series of cross functional boards and task forces to pursue new opportunities.

For more:
- Video just scratching the surface Report
- Video the next killer app says Cisco Report
- Cisco plots second phase gains Report

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