Cisco CTO Demos New Tools To Drive Small Business Sales Push

She also showcased new collaboration tools Cisco is using in its drive to bring in 300,000 new small business accounts.

"In the future, we will think of innovation as a culture, not a function," Warrior said, speaking during a keynote address at the Cisco Live conference in Orlando, Fla. "It will no longer be one person's job to innovate. Innovation will continue to be more and more a persistent global conversation."

Warrior, who joined Cisco from Motorola earlier this year, highlighted several recent product launches that have come as a result of extensive collaboration within Cisco and with technology partners, including its QuantaumFlow Processor, the introduction of Cisco VPN technology into Apple's iPhone Software 2.0 release and its Nexus 5000 Series Switch.

She also offered two technology demonstrations that show how Cisco is using collaboration tools to boost channel sales.

Warrior and Cisco Chief Demonstration Officer Jim Grubb spotlighted new functionality launching this week to Cisco's Website that connects small business customers to its channel partners. The demonstration showed how the vendor can communicate with visitors to Cisco's SMB solutions Web site via live chat and direct them to a local reseller. That reseller can then use WebEx technology to share information with users on the products and services available from that channel partner.

"We want to add 300,000 small business accounts," Grubb said. Connecting interested customers to channel partners "is the only way we will be able scale," he said.

Warrior and Grubb also showed how channel partners can tap into WebEx technology via Cisco's Partner Central portal to create collaboration space online to work with their customers. The integration of WebEx technology into Partner Central is enabled by the APIs that WebEx provides, Grubb said.

The duo also demonstrated Cisco's Green Data Center Model Calculator, part of its new Efficiency Assurance Program, which is an online tool for analyzing data center power use. The calculator shows how changes to data center infrastructure impact capital expenditures, operational expenditures and business benefits.

Cisco announced in December that Warrior was coming on board as CTO, and she joined the company a few months later in March. Her keynote address marks her first big public splash since then. Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers said Warrior is fitting in well into the Cisco way of life.

"We've decided to keep her," Chambers joked when asked Tuesday by reporters how Warrior was working out in her new role. "Chemistry-wise, she's fitting in very well. What I asked her to do when she came on is first learn Cisco ... build relationships with the engineers, learn our culture."

Warrior now is leading several Cisco initiatives, including cloud computing, Chambers said.