John Chambers, the chief executive officer of networking giant Cisco Systems, was in fine evangelical mode Tuesday, laying out his company’s vision of a future where intelligent networks power IT and collaboration is the key driver for businesses.“My role is to challenge your thought process,” Chambers told attendees at his keynote address at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. The executive spurned the stage and continually paced through the audience, occasionally posing direct questions to individuals, notably: “Am I making you uncomfortable yet?” Cisco CEO Chambers Chambers’ take is that many IT vendors and customers have gotten overly comfortable with current systems and are nervous about change. But he maintains that major change is needed for companies, including his own, to remain globally competitive.Such change may well feel strange as, according to Chambers, more and more intelligence, previously part of applications, middleware and operating systems, will reside instead in the network. At the same time, storage and applications will be completely virtualized. Users won’t know where the application they’re deploying resides. The network will be able to connect any device’s screen to any application an individual is authorized to access. The added intelligence in the network will mean that users will be able to communicate with each other in the format they each prefer with the network making the necessary translations.At the same time, organizations will need to change their business processes and move from having a command-and-control focus on individual silos of expertise such as financials and human resources to enabling collaboration and communication across the entire company. Cisco has been working at bringing such change to its internal operations, he said, and at first, it was a painful process. “We lost huge productivity in our first two years,” he said, but now having put collaboration at the heart of its decision-making process, the company is able to be much more nimble.Chambers then conducted a lengthy and lively demonstration of how a baseball fan’s appreciation of going to a game might change in the future, thanks to intelligent networks.Individuals would gain entry to the ballpark via an e-ticket on their smart phone. Digital signs inside the ballpark, if authorized by the smart phone, could display advertising tailored to people’s likes. Once in the game, individuals could use their wireless-enabled ultra-mobile PC to keep score on the device’s electronic scorecard or hit its instant-replay icon to view a contentious play.Restaurants at the ballpark could use Cisco’s newly announced TelePresence videoconferencing system to show the game on huge screens and allow diners to contact remote friends to watch along with them.Cisco launched TelePresence Monday as a way to make virtual business meetings more like real life. The system uses huge screens to project life-sized high-definition video images of conference participants whose voices seem to come from their on-screen location.Using TelePresence will save Cisco US$120 million in travel costs next year, Chambers estimated, and reduce the company’s carbon emissions by 10 percent. -China Martens, IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)Related Links: Cisco Gets Into Enterprise Video Publishing Cisco Enables Widescreen Meetings Cisco Banks on ‘Quad Play’ for Sustained GrowthCheck out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage. Related content BrandPost Retail innovation playbook: Fast, economical transformation on Microsoft Cloud For retailers, tight integration of data and systems is the antidote to a challenging economy. By Tata Consultancy Services Mar 24, 2023 3 mins Retail Industry Digital Transformation BrandPost How retailers are empowering business transformation with TCS and Microsoft Cloud AI-powered omnichannel integration and a strong, secure digital core lets retailers innovate across four primary areas while staying compliant, maintaining security and preventing fraud. By Tata Consultancy Services Mar 24, 2023 4 mins Retail Industry Cloud Computing BrandPost How to Build ROI from Cloud Migration This whitepaper and webcast can help you calculate the ROI and create a business case for modernizing your legacy applications to the Microsoft Cloud. By Tata Consultancy Services Mar 24, 2023 1 min Retail Industry Cloud Computing BrandPost How to power a sustainable enterprise on Microsoft Cloud In this eBook, we’ll follow the journey of Amal Skye, a fictitious woman who is committed to living in a way that preserves the planet for the future —and how businesses like Tata Consultancy Services and Microsoft are making that possi By Tata Consultancy Services Mar 24, 2023 1 min Retail Industry Green IT Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe