How meetings will be held in the future
Cisco demonstrated the future recently. It’s usually hard to get really excited about a to-be-expected-but-slightly-better type gadget, or even some way off technology, but imagine attending a business meeting a few thousand kilometres away, in person.
At the launch of Cisco’s Globalization Center (East), we saw CEO and Chairman John Chambers standing on stage in the rugby-field size temporary hangar speaking to a fellow exec. Marthin De Beer, Senior Vice President, Emerging Markets Technology Group was in San Jose, California. Except he “wasn’t”. He was “standing” on stage in front of us. Live.
This was Cisco’s TelePresence technology at work. Granted, we won’t all be meeting and communicating like this next month, but Chambers is convinced that business will adopt the technology and that in three to five years we’ll see a TelePresence solution for consumers. It’s all about productivity after all – why fly halfway across the world to meet with someone? And no, this isn’t the stock-standard “plug and play” video conferencing technology we’ve had the misfortune of using. This is technology that works and is being used. Cisco have used TelePresence for 28 000 meetings so far.
Chambers tends to bet big. And bet bold.
The new Cisco push – collaboration – will change the way you and I work, and lead to a decade of growth in productivity. Already users globally are collaborating on the internet every day (think Facebook, YouTube), but Chambers believes the disruptive business model of collaboration and teamwork will replace the traditional command/control situation inside companies. He speaks almost evangelically of a new sales model, a new services model and how this changed nature of work at Cisco alone will, for example, cut down their typical acquisition time from 45 days to just eight.
The Globalization Center in Bangalore is the embodiment of this push. Cisco is betting that this effective second headquarters will be the platform for growth across all developing countries.
“We didn’t come to India for growth in this country”, Chambers says. “This is the engine for future emerging markets”. He didn’t want the company’s presence in India to be just another “R&D [research and design] or support” centre.
Cisco is taking the move seriously. It seconded its third-in-charge (Wim Elfrink, Globalization Officer) and relocated 20 execs to Bangalore. The centre is a concrete (and glass) manifestation of the $1,16bn Cisco has committed to invest in India. The campus itself cost $50m and will probably be about of the size of The Campus in Bryanston, once completed (Phase 2 and 3 are being built). The Cisco Globalization Center (East) will house 10 000 staff by 2010, drawing from India’s “virtually limitless” talent pool.
To tie in with Cisco’s whole idea of virtualisation, and globalisation, meeting rooms are named after major cities in emerging markets (perhaps to change the way employees think about being “present” in a location). And yes – there is a room named “Johannesburg”. Phase one of the campus, supports 12 simultaneous TelePresence sessions, which teams will use to engage with customers globally.
Why emerging markets, then? Chambers volunteers a simple answer: emerging markets (as a whole) overtook the developed economies for the first time this year. He says one need only take the projected growth rates for emerging markets into account to figure out where these economies will be propelled (in relation to developed ones).
“Three to five year out, we see 30 to 50% growth,” Chambers says of Cisco’s emerging market operations.
He describes the greenfields opportunities in emerging markets as very exciting. Where else do you get the chance to build from scratch, without legacy systems? This is the question asked rhetorically by almost every exec you meet. Dubai’s “enclosed” cities (think Dubai Media City, Dubai International Financial Centre) are mentioned, and Cisco will be helping to build economic cities in Saudi Arabia.
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