Visionary Flair Marks C-Scape Conference

Chambers’ main message was that to achieve a radical vision of the future, companies and governments must be thinking years ahead of time. “At Cisco, we have spent over a decade getting ready for this, for the era of collaboration, moving the network from handling interactions to becoming the human network, providing Telepresence, quad-play, mobility. We called these productivity models way before anybody else did back in 1997 and 1998.”

Charlie Giancarlo, Cisco senior VP and Chief Development Officer, reaffirmed this vision when he spoke at the conference, especially in the area of video. He drove home this point by pointing out how Cisco is re-inventing what was traditionally thought of as “end of life” markets. “You look at cable TV, videconferencing, and video surveillance—all segmented, point to point, rather dull market segments. But we look at them and see convergence through video and, along with any-to-any network connectivity, these markets are being transformed.”

One simple example of Giancarlo’s vision: a homeowner could place a camera on the front of his house and, while traveling, get a video on his cell phone when somebody approaches his front door—or record it to his DVR for future viewing. The point is that through intelligent services on the network, users will connect to any content at any time anywhere.