Collaborate or leave, says Cisco to its leadership

Many people have wondered what the heck Cisco is doing owning WebEx. The fit between the two companies is less than obvious. John Chambers shed some light on that and the bigger picture of Cisco's interest in collaboration during a keynote address at Forrester Research's IT Forum in Las Vegas. He said Cisco's entire future hangs on its success with collaboration, which is why the company is focused on TelePresence and why it grabbed WebEx.

So, seems like all those router and network engineers should just pack up and leave. (Oh, wait, they are leaving ...). In fact, he hinted that the exodus of top officials at Cisco occurred because they couldn't give up their command-and-control ethic and start working in a new groovy collaborative Web 2.0 way.

Cisco spent years making itself over into a collaborative environment, Chambers said, in which all the Web 2.0 tools -- blogging, wikis, various forms of presence -- are tied together architecturally. A story in Network World reports:

The first two years of collaboration in Cisco were "miserable," Chambers said ... collaboration efforts within Cisco almost failed. An effective Web 2.0 strategy has to be spearheaded by a CEO, but leadership also has to give up some power to make it work, he noted. ... It got better. Chambers said. "It took me making some changes. About 20% of my leadership did not make it through this."

Chambers admits that the collaborative world, where anywhere/any device networking is the norm, carries with it new security headaches. Of course, Cisco also sells security products and so Chambers's advice is to move past the idea of security point products and to embrace a holistic security architecture approach.

Is Web 2.0 the future? And if so, will Cisco's very cool, but very expensive TelePresence solution lead the way?

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