Cisco CEO: 'Video is the killer app'

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>> Video is the killer app. It isn't just 90 percent of the load on the network or video, it's gonna be how you do business. It will be so deeply embedded in what you do for healthcare or how you interface to your customers or how you interface to each other, you won't know whether it's IT enabling your strategy or IT so deeply embedded in the actual business transaction or government service transaction. And the next generation data centers will be build around this virtualization, this Cloud department and others have talked about in terms of how you get access to this. But remember, the Clouds, we drew those a decade ago. It's the network that really brings them to life. Its ability to now when I travel around the world, the majority of time I talk to customers is no longer physical. I come in to work at 10 at night, basically start off in Italy, have meetings in Italy with the press, with our employee base, with our partners, with the key service provider, go to London, meet then again with some key partners, talk again with our key customers and service provider environment, talk to member of the government, slide down to Spain. Spend some time in Spain over to France then down to Mexico, end up the day in San Jose virtually. Then you can say John, that's just CEOs. That's how every employee of every company will incur. That's what doctors would do. That's what educators would do. Now you think about the productivity for that. And you suddenly realize how this has changed. It hasn't just changed the way we communicate as a company, it changed how we work, how we learn, how we play every aspect of our lives. And it is this ability suddenly to realize with the couple examples how much this has come into life. When you think about how we do a product announcement, John talked about, you know, a decade ago. Well that seems from a long time ago, it really wasn't that long. We announced the high-end router called the CSR. It basically was unbelievably powerful. It could handle a billion phone calls in each product. We announced it with tremendous fan fare. We spent 6 million dollars on it. We were excited. We had 100 customers in the room. We sent out a press release, et cetera. We announced the UCS system the other day, the next generation data center architecture. We did it virtually and now it's more with 13 telepresence systems, 6 CEOs of our partners around the world participating in it, 35 members of press in these 13 different locations, 7 invited financial analysts into the telepresence rooms, another 480 invited listening through it through WebEx capability. That was the announcement. We then walked across the street, went in the customer event. Again with over 450 customers in the room, 6,600 customers listening interactively, we rolled in all out with Web 2.0. It was 10 times more effective than our prior launches at 1/10 a calls. Four billion media hits, 85,000 hits on Cisco news at Cisco capability. 32,000 flicker hits, the ability to think about how do you blog on this and merely the platform blog alone 18,000 hits. Think how far we've come. This is how we live our lives daily. Completely changed how we communicate. Virtual meetings, we just finished out strategic leadership offsite the top 3,100 people in the company. The cost the way we used to do it was nearly over 2,800 dollars. The cost this time was 600 dollars. It got identical ratings to what we did before. It was nearly almost like a Second Life. You walk virtually into the room. You go to key sessions. You talk about the general audience groups. You talk about one-on-one sessions. My interview with Lee Scott is an example within it. We would do our global sales meeting with 17,000 people virtually this year. It will move the cost from 4,300 per attendee to 437 dollars. We do our company meetings instead of costing 79 dollars per person who comes physically at the meeting, you're talking about under 10 dollars per employee, 3 times the attendance better payback. Now, is that communications or is that a complete change in business process. The answer is you can't tell the difference between the 2. Was this IT enabled or is this actually how we ran our business? The answer is yes. Think about it. A year ago when we were together, if I were to told you that our use of WebEx, the company we just bought was gonna go from a thousand people using it regularly to 40,000. You would say, "John, did you have a drink before you came on stage today?" If you would have told me 2 years ago that I'd be blogging as my primary way of communications, I would have said, "Did you have a drink today?"

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>> The guys says, "You can tell." I can talk 300 words a minute and I'm good in video, but I can't text that fast. And yet if you watch what's happened, if you would have said that Youtube except we're bringing in how Cisco Vision, you're suddenly thinking about 56,000 people using it regularly, that's an increase of 3,500 percent from a year ago. What would you have said? What you're saying is this is a way that's gonna break big time. This is about the future of productivity and collaboration.

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