Cisco Spotlights Video At Its Partner Summit

Executives spent much of this month’s Cisco Partner Summit evangelizing video and the huge role it will play in the vendor’s technology and channel strategies going forward.

Cisco President and CEO John Chambers said the networking giant in the coming year will focus on improving collaboration by weaving video into enterprise voice, e-mail and instant-messaging applications, as part of the company’s push toward unified communications.

“The majority of interaction between people is going to be video, and partners are going to be the ones driving profitability in this area,” Chambers said during a keynote at the conference in San Diego.

Chambers outlined a future in which the ability for workers to communicate and make decisions in groups will speed business processes and spur the development of new apps, such as video collaboration. “The ability to implement loose forms of collaboration, regardless of where people are located, gives you the ability to move as a group and make decisions faster than you could before,” he said.

At the foundation of Cisco’s strategy is its recently revamped Unified Communications IP telephony lineup. Unveiled earlier this month, it includes native support for SIP, adding presence capabilities, improved mobility features and the ability to support third-party SIP-based phones. Chambers demonstrated communications capabilities that will enable customers to use drag-and-drop features to add video to phone calls, create ad hoc conference calls and collaborate on documents.

Charlie Giancarlo, senior vice president and chief development officer at Cisco, left little doubt about the vendor’s intentions. “Over the next few years, Cisco will be a video company,” he said during a keynote address at the partner summit.

Both Chambers and Giancarlo shared a glimpse of Cisco’s future video plans for “telepresence,” technology set to debut within the next year that promises to provide a more realistic videoconferencing paradigm where life-size, high-definition images populate the boardroom table and voices come from different directions, as if the conference participants actually are sitting in a room together. “Every customer we’ve showed it to wants it today,” Chambers said.

Tim Hebert, COO of Atrion Networking, Warwick, R.I., said Cisco’s plans to pump up video capabilities play directly into the VAR’s strategy to build up a practice around communications applications that provide customers with process efficiency and productivity gains. “We’re past customers talking about IP telephony as dial-tone. It’s about changing the way you do business,” he said.

Jim Teter, COO of Calence, a VAR in Tempe, Ariz., said video is going to be a critical technology piece in converged communications solutions for customers of all sizes. “The technology is now affordable enough for a lot of small businesses to take advantage of it,” he said.

Unified communications now represents 10 percent of Cisco’s business, Chambers said, adding that he expects it to comprise 30 percent to 45 percent of incremental business within the next five years. Cisco also will sharpen its focus on how to use convergence in the network to streamline business processes. “The network has the ability to change business structures and bring in new customers,” he said.

Technology partners also will play a key role in keeping Cisco’s innovation engine running, Chambers said. “Partnering is much harder than acquiring as a way to move forward, but innovation always is a combination of doing it yourself or with a team. And the courage to partner is also important.”