Infinite possibilities with Cisco

Global partners of Cisco Systems descended onto the crisp white shores of Oahu earlier this month to hear the latest plans and promises from the networking giant. The Cisco Partner Summit was last held in Hawaii back in 2004 when the small town proved it could cope with the sheer size of the conference with 3000 plus people in attendence. Representing 17 different companies, there were 30 Australian partners at the event along with nearly 75 international journalists that were all waiting to hear about Cisco’s next take on collaboration. Naturally, partners were expecting a few surprises, but one of the biggest seemed to be the vendor’s push for collaboration within its reseller community.

Cisco brought in the heavy hitters for the main keynote address with John Chambers, chairman and CEO, Keith Goodwin, senior vice-president of worldwide channels and Don Proctor, senior vice-president, Software Group, addressing the audience and providing live product demonstrations.

Starting with a simple thankyou to partners, Chambers announced that the company needs to generate US$20 billion in new channel business over the next few years.

The Next Phase

It is well known that John Chambers has been actively pushing Web 2.0 and collaboration through Cisco messaging but it seems that the next phase is already beginning. In an address to partners Chambers said that this is about a whole new generation, Web 3.0.

“It is about where we can go together that has not been done before. It is about catching more market transitions than have ever occurred in the industry that are occurring at a faster and faster pace. The transitions can be on products, where it’s not going to be about routers and switches and data centers and security and wireless and the home strategy versus service providers. It’s going to be about any device to any content over any combination of networks in whatever ways we want with communities pulling together toward a common goal”.

Don Proctor, senior vice-president Software Group, Cisco, explained there are big opportunities for reseller partners. “What we are really doing is positioning a new kind of software stack that Cisco has uniquely developed to help our reseller partners take advantage of this overall shift to Web 2.0 models”, said Proctor.