The New Network

To hear John Chambers tell it, there’s a new network in town. As the chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems geared up for the Cisco Partner Summit 2008 in Honolulu, he crafted a message that he hopes will inspire partners to follow him down a new path, on a course that he says could catapult the vendor and its channel to the forefront of the IT industry.

That path? Collaboration fuelled by intelligent networking via online Web 2.0 tools and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Collaboration which combines technologies such as VoIP, unified messaging, instant messaging, IP video, presence, mobility, SaaS and Web tools like blogs and wikis that enable customers to more easily communicate with each other is the linchpin of Cisco’s strategy.

It’s a vision that shows just how far Cisco is asking its partners to go beyond their roots as providers of routers and switches: Cisco is moving toward software, and its solution providers need to get up to speed on applications or find someone to partner with who is.

“If you think of Cisco three to five years from now, we have the opportunity, along with our partners, to be the most influential company in the world, not just on communications, but also IT,” Chambers said in a recent interview with CRN at the company’s San Jose, Californian, headquarters. “The role of the network will evolve dramatically, moving from merely transport or plumbing to more of an intelligent infrastructure that makes it completely transparent as to where your applications are, where your storage is, where the processors are, what type of device you’re on. At home or at your work, in your car or at a hotel – your services automatically find you and move to you”.

Collaboration marks the next phase of the Internet and will drive improvements in productivity for the next decade, particularly as business users latch onto social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies previously thought solely to be the domain of kids, Chambers said.

Solution providers say they are starting to see the groundswell. “There is a game-changing event going on in networking right now ... We’re asking our networks to do increasingly complex things moving forward”, said Gary Berzack, CTO and COO of eTribeca LLC, a solution provider in New York, pointing to technologies such as perimeter intrusion detection and prevention, internal wireless controllers, storage and video, all of which are now embedded into networking infrastructure.

Keith Goodwin, senior vice-president of worldwide channels at Cisco, said solution providers will have to adapt to take advantage of the collaboration opportunity, even in the way they work with Cisco.

“It’s not just a market opportunity. It is significant and, ramping up, is going to drive growth for us together over the next three to five years, but part of it will be to utilise these technologies ourselves,” Goodwin said, referencing programs such as Cisco’s Industry Solutions Partner Network, which so far has brought more than 200 channel partners in contact with solutions from Cisco ISV partners.

Chambers has been laying the groundwork for this push for some time. Anyone who has heard him deliver a keynote address over the last three years has likely heard him preach on the elevated role of the network as a platform for grander things: application delivery, service delivery and all things related to communications and IT. He thinks it’s catching hold.

“It’s actually accelerated now, because a lot of the basic concepts in collaboration are now taking off”, Chambers said. “The network will probably enable the next major wave of IT spending as well as communication spending. So the role of the network has changed: It’s changed from being infrastructure, primarily a box mentality, to an architecture approach that provides business solutions, and as such, we at Cisco have to change and so do our channel partners”.

In fact, Cisco channel partners need to do more than change. Chambers argues they need to evolve.

“I think that we and our channel partners will have to evolve based upon, [for] each one of us, our dreams and aspirations, and be realistic [about] our capability and our ability to move within markets”. Chambers said, adding that while some partners will stick to a product or solution area, others will chase a broader architectural play with solutions expertise.

If Cisco’s mantra for its partners to pick a specialisation or find a means of differentiation seems familiar, it’s because the vendor has been evangelising it for several years (“If my message to my partners is changing every 12 months, I don’t have a strategy or a vision,” Chambers noted). The key take-away now is the ramification of such specialisation and differentiation.

“What it means is that partners need complementary partners because you cannot be an expert in everything”, Berzack said, noting that eTribeca works with about seven other Cisco partners on a weekly basis and roughly another 30 on a monthly basis.