A networking experience with Cisco

June 24, 2007 by Calixthus Okoruwa

There is something special about the secretary’s desk in front of Marthin de Beer’s office. Marthin de Beer, by the way is senior vice president for Cisco’s Emerging Market Technology Group and he’s based in Cisco’s headquarters in San Jose, California. On his secretary’s desk, you will not find anybody, only a huge television screen. There’s an image, however, on the screen, a real life image of his secretary and in real time too. Just as you can see the image, so can the secretary working from her home in a distant US city see you on her own television screen.

“There’s a glass door through which I can monitor people coming into my office, and watching the way people react when they see this television screen on my secretary’s desk for the first time can be very interesting. By the time the person on the screen actually moves, looks at them and says, ‘how may I help you?’ some visitors out of shock almost want to take to their heels”, says Mr. de Beer.

Welcome to the world of the virtual secretary, which Cisco is now making possible via video-telephony in the product which it calls Telepresence. Television sets used for Telepresence have twice the resolution of high definition television (HDTV) such that the image seen on television is so crystal clear, you would think the other person resides inside the television set.

Telepresence can be applied to just about any industry in the world, says de Beer. Indeed, retail giant, Wal-Mart’s chief executive officer on visiting John Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive sometime ago, promised he would adopt the telepresence option, in a bid to cut down on travel and other costs usually associated with meetings for which Wal-Mart staff drawn from around the world need to participate.

De Beer was delivering a keynote address at the recent Cisco networkers’ event. Held in Sun City, South Africa annually for many years now, the event brings together engineers, networking experts and other professionals, drawn from Cisco and its client and partner organizations across the world. The networkers event is typically an education cum social networking event and delegates from around the world are engaged in technical tutorials or techtorials as they call them, live technology demonstrations, meetings, and one-on-one sessions. The overall objective is to share and dissipate knowledge among a growing tribe of internet networking engineers and practitioners across the globe.

De Beer’s job at Cisco is essentially to continuously appraise emerging technologies and zero in on the most promising of these technologies, turning them into start-up businesses of sorts. And so keen is Cisco on technological innovation that it sets aside as much $4billion annually for research and development.

The world, says De Beer is at the cusp of redefining the computer. Over the next decade, the computer will have evolved significantly from what we currently know it to be. And video will be at the centre of this evolution.

The rapid global success of You Tube (which was acquired last year by Google in a globally celebrated deal) is a pointer to the fact that the paradigm of the computer is fast changing. Consumerisation, he says is the most significant trend to have affected the information and communications technology, ICT, industry over the last 10 years. Technologies are gradually gravitating towards offering consumers the benefit of interactivity, which in turn drives the wheel of mass collaboration (as in Wikipedia for example) and social networking (as in YouTube). An example of such technology evolution can be found in Web 2.0, a new technology platform that in very simple terms enables mass collaboration.

Having noticed that consumerisation is increasingly at the core of emerging technologies in the ICT space, Cisco, we are told, is gradually inching into the consumer market space. In so doing, Cisco is priming itself to continue to transmit voice, data, video etc over Internet Protocol, IP, with increasing efficiency and sophistication. It is also constantly priming itself to get more and more value from virtualized resources and services as well as more value from applications and services.

But more specifically, adds Steve Midgeley, Cisco’s General Manager for South Africa, Cisco is evolving towards putting the human network at the centre of all communications. In so doing, broadband will be the growth engine. Broadband can address majority of issues pertaining to various economies, including providing opportunities to emerging economies to leapfrog and benefit from technological innovations.

Basic research now shows that there is indeed a direct correlation between broadband penetration and economic development. Some of the most developed countries in the world also have the highest broadband penetration.

Broadband lends itself to a multiplicity of possibilities and actually becomes the tool, the growth engine with which countries can stimulate economic efficiencies and enhance productivity and also by which organizations like Cisco can help transform communities via technology.

Cisco country transformation, we are told, by Carlos Marques, the company’s regional manager for emerging Africa, is a specialized Cisco project which Cisco is driving across emerging economies. Its objective is to help such countries fast-track their development via technology, and to do so in a way that impacts the self-dependency of such countries. A key example of such an intervention is Cisco’s current country transformation project in Ethiopia. The company will also work with Camtel and Dimension Data, two of its partners to help build and expand IT skills growth in Cameroon as part of that country’s transformation initiative.

In all these initiatives, Cisco, we are reminded again is driven by the desire to turn the network into a platform for innovation. Marthin De Beer tells the story of Rebekka, a young school girl from Iceland whose hobby happens to be photography. And ever so often, she would paste photos on Flickr, the popular photo website. Executives from Toyota the Japanese auto maker recently came across her photos, were impressed and have since offered her a job in their design department.

Technology, he re-emphasizes, has gradually evolved from analogue to digital and is now strongly evolving to networked, an implication that we are in an age in which IT is increasingly interactive with the consumer playing a critical role.

There are tens of different sessions across the expansive Sun City hotel, all being attended simultaneously by the over 1000 professionals who have come to share and learn about new developments in this fast paced world of technology.

Cisco recently entered into a partnership with the Federal Ministry of Education in a scheme that will see Cisco make some 80% of the payments needed to train 20,000 Nigerian university graduates in ICT skills. Cisco currently has over 10,000 academies across the world and these academies impart skills via a uniform global certification scheme covering different aspects of ICT and spanning specific periods. Cisco’s certification is globally recognized and typically people are more attractive to employers and potential employers when they posses the Cisco certification which are awarded by its Academies.
This is part of its Network Academy Scheme, a global scheme in which as part of its social responsibility, the company trains tens of thousands of people across the world in ICT skills via its academies.

Perhaps what Cisco would need to do, in conjunction with governments and other ICT stakeholders in the developing world, I suggest, is for it to “glamorize” ICT in much the same way that footballers and showbiz people have learnt to glamorize their professions. This way, ICT in developing countries should gradually arouse a lot more interest and enthusiasm among young people, maybe in much the same way Idols West Africa, for instance does. This approach could catalyze immense growth for the various economies in the future.

“You raise a strong point, a point we have never really thought much about in the past”, the three Cisco gentlemen concur. “Yes indeed, we must begin to look at creative ways by which we can further popularize or glamorize technology”.

As one departs the centre at the close of the event, one cannot but wonder what the innovations would be on the line-up in another 12 months at the 2008 edition of the Cisco Networkers’ event.

* Okoruwa works for XLR8, a communications consultancy