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John Chambers, Cisco® CEO not only endorses virtual worlds and Second Life® as part of their collaboration focus, but has a company-wide implementation strategy in progress. I attended the Cisco Live! program on June 24, 2008 in Second Life and came away with what I think of as a powerful endorsement for business and government in regard to using virtual worlds. I feel strongly that virtual worlds are a part of the internet evolution and are “the” essential component to collaboration and conferencing programs. Not only are they a "green" way of doing business and are a viable sustainability addition to any enterprise, but they're the only environment that provides immersive conversation with your peers aside from the physical world. Distance, time and cost are overcome with tools such as these. Business, government, and the general population will be, and are, integrating them into everyday aspects of the work and social environments along with networked applications such as WebEx (more on this in my next blog as I also attended a talk at Cisco Live! in Second Life today about this application AND Second Life-interesting stuff!). With Cisco’s commitment to collaboration and the integration of several technologies into their own corporate environment as well as their partners for everyday business activities including the use of Second Life and other virtual worlds, I believe we are seeing a major commitment. A virtual world winter coming? I think not. With that, I’ve transcribed some of the questions and answers from John Chambers’ appearance and speech in Second Life and all I can say is Wow! Go Cisco! and thank you, John Chambers. Talk about Cisco’s likely strategy for investment in virtual worlds (Beyers Sellers) John Chambers: If you look at where the market is going to go, we’ve found by virtually interfacing to our customers, we think you can drive productivity of those segments of your business to do that by 10%+ per year. If you take the emotion out of it and take a step back, and remember Cisco is a company that normally gets market transitions right, we also have been very accurate at being able to do them ourselves. If you think about a virtual world, we will interface, the majority of our interface to our customers within the next 5 years and possibly three, will be virtually. Now how much of that will be 3D vs 2D vs other capability remains to be seen, but we clearly are doing this internal to Cisco. So when you talk about those on our wikis, you’re talking about wiki loads literally in the last six months doubling in terms of pages used. When you think about how we’re using video the equivalent of YouTube in the enterprise you’re talking about the loads on the network in literally 4 months going up four-fold the number of users and applications that we have. You’re beginning to see the start of what I think will be a huge wave for Cisco--first being the most advanced company in the world for using this technology and every functional group within our company, and then taking it to our customer sets and helping them employ it. To say we’re going to lead here will be an understatement We’re going to try to lead by a long way and then take this capability that we’ve learned to our customers just like we did back in the mid to late 90’s, the first phase of the internet. There’s a blog by Bruce Damer http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/06/possibility-of.html questioning about whether VW platforms facing downturn in popularity? Do you have any reaction now that Cisco is showing a strong interest in SL interaction? (Matt-ComputerWorld) JC: I think there are experts that may be able look at a point of time, and very often if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 30 years in high tech, is that sometimes concepts are too early, but when they do take off, they take off with tremendous speed and efficiency and this is where I think it’s important especially for the business leaders and for the entertainment industry to understand what’s possible because when a market moves, it usually moves a speed faster than anyone anticipated. I would compare it to the first phase of the internet. If you look back to the predictions made by Cisco and others in the early and mid 90s almost all of them not only came through but ended up being even lower than we expected in terms of underestimating the market opportunities. So I think when you think about interfacing to your customers, your family interfacing to your peers and communities of interest that we will have in both our business worlds and personal lives, I think you’re at the very, very beginning of the stages of what’s possible. Might there be some bumps along the way? Yes, but I would disagree with the overall commentary. I think you’re going to see a world that explodes and this type of utilization. But to one of your colleague’s earlier comments, you got to have more ubiquitous bandwidth processing power and more people who see the value of bringing this whether it’s the value of bringing healthcare, productivity or entertainment. So what I think you’re seeing is the very frontend of the wave of opportunities. What is Cisco doing in terms of R&D, i.e. 3D data visualization? (Tara5 Oh) JC: Well if you watch what we’re beginning to do, we often get our best ideas through our customers and from our partners. Clearly while we’ve been a member of Second Life since 2006, this last partner conference earlier this year, we had a virtual 3d partner capability which we continue to expand. And if you watch what we’re doing, we’re instead of talking about video capabilities in companies, we’re really bringing that virtual capability into our customer environment as the primary way that we will support them in the future and the primary way we interface within our company. We’re not just using the technology we’re changing the organization model to be much more collaborative and rewarding people based upon that and restructuring. In fact, if you watch what we’re doing in the company, while we’re organized in traditional ways in terms of sales, engineering, legal, and supply chain, our organization structure of the future will be all around communities of interest, will be based upon market opportunities and the enterprise or the consumer, opportunities in terms of video or in software, etc. So we’re restructuring our company and we think it will have a huge future. We clearly intend to not only lead in this area, in terms of using it ourself but will lead in terms of bringing it to our customers. What are the obstacles we’re seeing right now regarding virtual worlds? What are we experiencing? What needs to be solved before it’s going to get adopted more? (Tau Takashi) JC: Adoption in business-like many of the new collaborative approaches, you have to have role models first, who understand the benefits from it and are able to show substantially what the results were--able to show productivity, able to show the power of the community is so much stronger than a command and control type environment, able to show the market share gain that they got in terms of market implementation or in savings they got both in travel costs deferred as well as the impact in producing less emissions as a result of that. So I think you’re going to see that occurs in companies and we make it easier to use, and clearly Cisco is going to attempt lead here, and other customers will take it up and it will expand. What is exciting you at Cisco Live? What is getting you revved up? (Danette CiscoSystems) JC: What is getting me revved up at Cisco Live is seeing a concept come true. We started down a collaborative path at Cisco literally 7 years ago with most people in the company not believing this was the right way to go and all of us having been successful in command and control, but that is not the future at all. The future is going to be built of communities of interest and how you can access any data from any device and share that not with a machine or another person in a one to one transaction but share it among a community of interest where you think together. I think this will forever change business models. I think it will forever change entertainment and it will change every aspect of our lives in a way we are just starting to imagine. I think what is exciting to here is that where last year we were talking about that in theory and this year we are beginning to see people grab this is going to happen. We may disagree on the time frame but it is not longer a question any more of if, it is now a question of when. To hear the actual presentation by John Chambers, CEO, Cisco Systems, Cisco Live QA on Collaboration follow this link: http://blogs.cisco.com/virtualworlds. Second Life and SL are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc.
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