Web 2.0 Collaboration

Transcript

Introduction

Peter Shaplin: Welcome to this podcast series, an ongoing conversation about trends, technology, and business. For Cisco, I'm [Peter Shaplin]. Doug Dennerline is Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Collaboration Software Group at Cisco, responsible for overseeing all aspects of the Company's next generation collaboration software solutions. It's good to meet you.

Interview

Doug Dennerline: Nice to meet you, Peter.

Peter Shaplin: Begin with maybe a definition. When you think of collaboration, how do you define it?

Doug Dennerline: We really try to define it in three ways. There are technologies which enable collaboration to occur, but the technologies by themselves don't really create an environment for it actually to occur. At Cisco, it's begun with John creating a culture inside of Cisco where you have leaders that know how to work cross-functionally. And then, we use tools, like WebEx and WebEx Connect, to enable that to happen at [the pace of] the web, if you will.

Peter Shaplin: Doug, where does WebEx fit as a tool that a company is going to use?

Doug Dennerline: The UC client 7.0 has tight integration with WebEx, as well as the notion of it participating in TelePresence, so you have this suite of applications available from us, from a phone on your computer to an asset in the cloud to a very immersive collaborative environment in TelePresence. And so, I think, again, we're uniquely positioned with these assets that we bring to market.

Peter Shaplin: What's collaboration worth to a company, other than the lip service that we hear so often--.

Doug Dennerline: --Yes--.

Peter Shaplin: --Oh, we're collaborative. What's it worth?

Doug Dennerline: It's an invaluable change that companies need to make. You no longer are confined by the boundaries of a city, a state, or a country. If you don't figure out how to innovate at a very rapid pace, you'll fall behind. John loves to find places in the market that he calls transformational changes. This is one. It's a very disruptive thing and we have to figure out how we get in front of it.

Peter Shaplin: Is this the blending of the whole concept of collaboration, presence, connectivity, networking, and the ability to work with both colleagues in my company, but also externally in my customer base?

Doug Dennerline: That's the magic of what Cisco is bringing to the market. This notion of taking assets that you're used to using on premise and marrying it with the applications that might live in a cloud, like WebEx Connect. So email sits presently there, but now you need to jump into a meeting with someone. Now you're using an asset from the cloud. That's a unique capability that no one can bring to the market except Cisco.

We're in the middle of writing an application right now on the iPhone that would I think be a perfect explanation for this. So you have a meeting scheduled for 8:00 in the morning and you're going to be late for your meeting. Well, now you could use your iPhone. You could dial into your WebEx meeting and you could actually listen to the audio portion of the meeting and actually you could probably see the PowerPoint presentation on your iPhone. And through a technology called dusting you can actually move the state of that meeting from your iPhone onto your laptop and use your IP telephony telephone, which is much more immersive in its ability to have that meeting. No one else can do that. And the reason we can is because the state of what was going on was in the network. It's not about the software. It's about the state going on inside the network. So that's the Cisco differentiation that no one else can touch.

Peter Shaplin: Explain for us your view and help us understand technology enhanced collaboration.

Doug Dennerline: There's been a lot of collaboration tools available for a long time. But I think to date most of the time we tell you, Mr. User, you have to learn our tools in order to collaborate. I think what we're finding is we're creating tools now that are so easy to use. And they're intuitive to the way that you already work. You don't have to learn them.

Peter Shaplin: Often times marketing documents and PR spiel speak of melding the web speed innovation with intelligent network foundation. Tell me what it means, what is it worth to the company?

Doug Dennerline: When you think about Web 2.0 and you think about things like Facebook or YouTube, well, these companies are less than five years old, but they're on their fifth or sixth generation of their application. It's very quick. It's not this heavy piece of code. And you turn on your computer one day and you look at Facebook and there's a bunch of things that you could do today that you couldn't do yesterday. Well, that's true of WebEx. We update our software every 90 days. So the magic is we can take the pace of innovation of the web and apply it to enterprises today in a way that we never could before.

Peter Shaplin: Well, what do all these requirements then mean for the IT infrastructure and for the CIO sort of listening to this saying, oh, my gosh--they're putting their hands up in dismay saying, I can't embrace this?

Doug Dennerline: Yes, the CIO is definitely in a tough spot right now. I think the empowered end user is going out and using iPhones and wikis and blogs and it's making the IT organization go, wow, what do we--how do we stop this? We don't even know people are doing it. They're going out and signing up to a blog or they're buying their own iPhone and bringing documents out of the company on the iPhone. Well, the magic of what I think Cisco brings to the marketplace is this notion that security is a really important thing.

We are a company based on understanding the requirements of a large enterprise. We build very secure, very reliant, very available networks today, and we're just going to build that same capability in the clouds. And again, that's because we understand networking and we understand large enterprise, we'll be able to let you participate in cloud-based and premise-based solutions and protect you whether you're in one or the other. You'll never actually know. But your IT organization will say, okay, if you're in this kind of meeting, here's the kind of documents you're allowed to go into that meeting with, or here's what you're allowed to do in that meeting. And we're the only company that will be able to do that.

Peter Shaplin: What are the hurdles that you're tasking your team to solve and what is the vision that you and John and the folk who are at this level--what do you see going forward?

Doug Dennerline: We have an interesting challenge in front of us in that the collaborative capabilities that we're bringing to the market enable functional leaders to collaborate in ways they never thought possible, to do things quicker, create revenue for their company, innovate for new ideas, new products, new revenue streams. It's not about IT, yet IT is the one who is challenged with the notion of keeping the company secure and compliant and enabled, so a very unique capability.

What I think John and I and others envision is being able to collaborate in ways that are just obvious to you and you don't have to worry about am I compliant, what are my tools, am I able to do this, am I not able to that. You have everything you need delivered to you, available to you on your desktop, on your phone, in a way that lets you work the way that you want to. It will be the next wave of productivity and John's been talking about productivity forever.

Peter Shaplin: The tools--clearly in text and voice and video, and I still think many people probably think of them as three separate silos, but collaboratively these are the mash-up or--?

Doug Dennerline: --Exactly what it is - it's a mash-up, but it's an enterprise mash-up. It's not a consumer mash-up. It's what you need to do to get your work done. What we're building with our WebEx Connect is--yes, it's voice, video, and data, but then, it's team spaces, it's presence, it's IM, it's email, it's wikis, it's blogs, it's search. It's all those things that you need to do displayed in a wiki kind of environment, so you can create a desktop that's customized for the way that you want to work that meets your needs as a knowledge worker.

So it's the marriage of enterprise, premise-based solutions with enterprise cloud-based solutions and consumer-based things like My Yahoo!, if that's important to you. They can all be displayed in your workspace.

Peter Shaplin: There are couple of words that keep coming up again and again in conversation about this. Speed, security, and flexibility are the three that I've seen an awful lot.

Doug Dennerline: So I actually think you've really hit what we think is really important. Speed to me is the number one capability that collaboration enables. And it's this notion of taking situations before where it took days or weeks and you now can do it in hours or days, and security. Security clearly is the differentiator that we feel we bring to the market. There's a lot of bad people in the world trying to get data out of these networks and we do a very good job of trying to secure them in a way that no one else can. And flexibility is--whoever you are as a knowledge worker--enable you to work quicker, easier, faster.

Peter Shaplin: How are you going to measure and how are you going to be measured in terms of is this succeeding?

Doug Dennerline: In a few different ways. We are helping companies change the way that they work. And we'll be able to measure that through them telling us, I travel less, I have a more productive workforce, able to create revenue streams I never thought I was able to create before. One of the things we're finding is companies have new titles. They have VP of Innovation, they have Senior Vice President of Collaboration. Companies get this. The good CEOs in the world are saying, hey, this is a game changer and we're going to play.

Peter Shaplin: Doug Dennerline, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Collaboration Software Group at Cisco, thank you for speaking with us.

Doug Dennerline: Thank you very much.

Peter Shaplin: And thank you for listening. An archive of this and other podcasts, both audio and video, can be found online at newsroom.cisco.com. I'm Peter Shaplin for Cisco.