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"Collaboration will be the productivity tool of the next decade... the ability to bring the Cloud to life, in many ways," Cisco chief, John Chambers, said at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 in San Francisco.
"From our perspective, it starts with video... we no longer make devices which are not video capable... Video will be the platform for all forms of communications as we go forward. "
By way of example, Chambers said that seven years ago the company had made high-end routers capable of handling one billion phone calls and had succeeded in selling 6000 of these.
"We now have routers which can do one billion videos. You know where I am headed with this... we have sold 1200 of those," he said.
Chambers said that in line with this vision, the was not another tablet PC in an already overcrowded market, but a "collaboration desktop mobility capability".
"If you look at where this is going to go you will see devices and capabilities which encompass a whole new generation of collaboration," he said. "Video is the killer application." Chambers also said the need for productivity and the proliferation of mobile devices was moving the industry beyond information technology to a networked architecture facilitating "business technology".
"It is the ability of innovation, combined with process change, with cultural change that will probably drive productivity at companies at five or ten per cent per year," he said.
"When you think of the economy of the future it will be q networked economy. It will not be about processing data. It will be about the relevance of data which you can quickly access when you need it. It will be about bringing expertise to bear for your opportunities and challenges."
Tim Lohman travelled to San Francisco as a guest of Oracle.