Cisco Partner Summit: Video, Collaboration, Virtualization Drive Huge Partner Gains

"We are completely committed to your success," Warrior said. "No one has a crystal ball to know what's going to happen in five years, but with humble confidence, we acknowledge that if we work together, we can write the playbook."

In her portion of Wednesday's morning keynotes, Warrior offered five predictions for how technology will shift in the coming years. First, she said, the Internet will become a platform that will transform industries, moving beyond its previous role as information superhighway. Second, IT will play a central role in "the networked economy 2.0," driving economic growth and creating new business models.

"In the past, wealth was created by processing data. Now, wealth is created by providing relevance," Warrior explained, discussing how thanks to the Internet, information is always available and in colossal volumes, and therefore, technologies that identify and provide the most relevant, contextual and useful data have moved to the fore.

Her third prediction was that the winners in the new technology landscape will be those who build "the next Internet," that is, those who bring the Internet beyond just data transport and its role as a messaging platform and create a media experience and collaboration platform with distributed, virtualized architecture.

Fourth, Warrior said, the killer apps will continue to be video, collaboration and virtualization thanks to a demand for immersive experiences. Finally, she added, all of these technology changes will need to support new consumption models for IT. The arrival of cloud computing, in other words, means that solutions must account for combinations of on-premise and off-premise infrastructure, platforms and services.

"We have to have federation between the two environments," Warrior said. "here's no way to do that without the network playing a role there."

Later in the keynote, Tony Bates, senior vice president and general manager for Cisco's Enterprise, Commercial and Small Business Group, and Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Cisco's Emerging Technology Group, urged Cisco partners to look at networking and infrastructure holistically, with collaboration technologies and video relevant to all aspects of each.

"In just two to three years video will be 90 percent of all network traffic," De Beer said. "It doesn't matter if you are a partner specializing in video -- that's something that matters for every partner in this room. You need to learn about it and be aware of it."

Added De Beer, "We are just scratching the surface of how we can reinvent video collaboration and communication."