Cisco’s on Disruption, Collaboration and Globalisation

I am at Cisco’s European Analyst Event. Nick Earle, VP Services, European Markets, just presented. He says the three high level themes are: disruption, innovation and collaboration.

“We are seeing unprecedented disruption in every industry we do business in. That disruption is accelerating. The way in which companies and governments need to react to disruption is collaboration…”

“Its not just personalisation, its collaboration that makes all the difference. For us Webex was never just videoconferencing; its a platform for delivering services, from Cisco and our partners.”

Earle used an example of Cisco using the tools it plans to espouse, in terms of recent acquisitions:

• Scientific Atlanta- November 2005. took 45 days to close
• Webex – February 2007, took 8 days to close in a competitive bidding environment. lawyers, bankers etc? a lot of it was virtual and collaborative and Cisco used Webex as a platform. using the tools themselves.

That said, it seems to me that Webex was a much smaller and less ugly beast to swallow.

Turning Oil into Networking Gear

Next up globalisation. Earle used a neat piece of data from the Economist, which showed that in 2006 the gross domestic product of emerging economies became bigger than developed economies, in an article called The New Titans.

Here are my tweets on what he said next (salty language edited):

i am beginning to understand why Cisco became a client. We’re perfect for them. RedMonk is great at analysing convergence 15 minutes ago from web

holy cow – Cisco says at least 50% of its top talent will be based in India within three years. that’s commitment to globalisation alright 42 minutes ago from web

Cisco globalisation strategy- it calls beach-heads. train the most Indians as CNEs, and turn middle east oil into networking gear 44 minutes ago from web

The point about oil is that Cisco is investing heavily in the middle east where countries, notably Saudi and Dubai, are also investing for post-oil development.

India – the 50% figure pretty much speaks for itself.

 

disclosure: IBM is a patron, Cisco is a supporter (it slipped in before we made a lower subscription limit as Sponsors for the industry leviathans)

holy cow makes a pretty good gag… nice salty language edit. Ed.