The New Network

As the chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems Inc. gears up for the Cisco Partner Summit 2008 in Honolulu next week, he's crafting a message that he hopes will inspire partners to follow him down a new path, on a course he says could catapult the vendor and its channel to the forefront of the IT industry.

That path? Intelligent networking that fuels collaboration via online Web 2.0 tools and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Collaboration—a combination of technologies such as VoIP, unified messaging, instant messaging, IP video, presence, mobility, SaaS and Web tools like blogs and wikis that enable customers to more easily communicate with each other—is the linchpin of Cisco's strategy.

It's a vision that shows just how far Cisco is asking its partners to go beyond their roots as providers of routers and switches: Cisco is moving toward software, and its solution providers need to get up to speed on applications or find someone to partner with who is.

"If you think of Cisco three to five years from now, we have the opportunity, along with our partners, to be the most influential company in the world, not just on communications, but also IT," Chambers said in a recent interview with CRN at the company's San Jose, Calif., headquarters. "The role of the network will evolve dramatically, moving from merely transport or plumbing to more of an intelligent infrastructure that makes it completely transparent as to where your applications are, where your storage is, where the processors are, what type of device you're on, [whether you are] at home or at your work or in your car or at a hotel—your services automatically find you and move to you."

Collaboration marks the next phase of the Internet and will drive improvements in productivity for the next decade, particularly as business users latch onto social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies previously thought solely to be the domain of kids, Chambers said.

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