Standing on the shoulders of giants: Promoting innovation through active collaboration

I was reading Matthew’s Blog and John Donne’s famous meditation XVII and what stuck me is the universality of the statement, devoid of any religion. What is also striking is the parallel that we can draw from something so seemingly philosophical to our current efforts around collaboration and open technologies, where the community comes together as a microcosm to collectively promote innovation

No company can afford to be an island. Not even one with $26B in cash. The work that Cisco is doing with its partners and customers - whether it be the Industry Solution Partner Program, the Open at Cisco initiative, or the Cisco ’Think Inside the Box’ Developer contest - all embody the spirit of collaboration and align with this philosophy. 

In the past year, I’ve seen this power of collaboration translate into innovation that solves real-world problems. As we opened up the Integrated Services Router, with the Application Extension Platform it was an invitation to people with ideas and expertise different from our own to bring in their applications and integrate it on the router platform. The developer contest (Phase-1 is extended to Feb 27th, 2009) takes it further. Linux magazine recognized this trend and included Cisco in their “Top 20 companies to watch in 2009” award at the #5 spot. It’s always gratifying for a network infrastructure company to get recognized by a major software publication.

As we continue to evolve the concept of the Network as a platform, we realize that true power comes from the outside as it much from inside Cisco. It’s a win-win for our solution partners, channel partners and our customers. Similar efforts are on with our Unified Communications solutions including Webex, Linksys products and our mobility solutions to name a few. Others in the industry are doing the same. Apple’s iPhone has garnered a lot of attention for its coolness factor as also the sheer number of user applications that are developed on it.

We’re thankful to a number of industry thought leaders, bloggers and media personnel who have encouraged Cisco’s various open activities. Coverage has been provided by the Linux Foundation (“Cisco Dev Contest Bridges Network, Development Gap”), Slashdot (“Cisco Turns Routers Into Linux App Servers”), CIO (“Cisco: Huge International Interest in the Developer Contest”),  Linux Insider (“Making of an Open Source Developer Hero”), and the VAR Guy (“International Linux Developers: Falling for Cisco?”), ReadWriteweb: Cisco in the cloud: Application Extension Platform, among others.

Sir Issac Newton said “If I’ve seen further, it is because I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants”. Today, individual giants may be over-rated. With Web 2.0, collaborative tools, APIs, and some passion, the community is the giant. I don’t think Sir Newton would disagree.

Posted by Shashi Kiran at 07:54AM PST