During her visit to Bangalore recently, Rebecca Jacoby met with Srinivas R of CyberMedia News and shared some interesting details about IT in Cisco and the new initiatives: Excerpts

I was going through your profile on the website of Cisco, it says you brought in innovative approach to business problem. What was the business problem and what were the innovations that you brought in to overcome that business challenge?

I’m not a technologist by that ground and I think you would have probably read that on the site, but I’ve been with Cisco for almost 14 years; I’m one week away from my 14th anniversary.

The first organization that was in, I actually had responsibility within the supply chain management. When I was there, we created an architectural platform for the supply chain that allowed us to have a virtual supply chain with absolutely visibility with that of our customers.

From a standpoint, our interaction with the customers was strictly on - how we take an order, how we translate an order… Over the course of time we essentially outsourced all of our production; we were able to monitor that production and still we are very effectively on schedule, quality, product, inventory, all those things.

And that’s the first big thing using an Internet technology at a time when a person is necessarily coming to do e-commerce. Cisco is also doing e-commerce. I was directly involved with that. Later on I came into the organization, or management, and e-commerce helped to drive the kind of process thinking on a cross functional basis across the organizations, and really make our commerce process or cash possesses efficient and effective. So by that time I had that cross functional reputation.

The major areas that we have been addressing last couple of years are continuously drive a new architecture in the commerce space, with the purpose of enabling new business models in the company and the way in which the customers interact with us through new business models.

And secondly, we will be driving heavy dose of virtualization in our technologies and probably the most fun of all is were are using collaboration technologies meaning web 2.0 technologies, video technologies, video communication and so on to create an enterprise scale platform, which addresses all our business processes and all our communication processes for the business.

So those are the kind of thing we are addressing. By the way I would probably would not call them as problems but call them as opportunities.

You were talking about this Web 2.0; you took over this current position in 2006 end, in 2005 end the term Web 2.0 had been introduced. During that time what did you think of Web 2.0? And how it has evolved as of now and how do you see this, say in next couple of years?

Web 2.0 in 2005 was primarily a consumer affair. I think the use of Web 2.0 technology was becoming prevalent with college kids and in consumer space. Because it is easier to interact and access information better than the ways in traditional technologies in the developing and developed economies.

It’s kind of an idea that IT organizations would typically love them to embrace the use those technologies primarily because, part of the role of the IT is to manage certain type of risk for the corporation. Security risks are the obvious ones, compliance risk and lots of different things. And I think it’s hard for traditional IT organizations to manage that risk using Web 2.0 technologies. So I think we are slow on there, is a little bit slow on the uptake.

A couple of years ago, we really started talking about Web 2.0 technology in the context of collaboration across all our business processes. And secondly Cisco sort of added the concept of video technology, being a big part of the Web 2.0 technology, whether that is technically correct. So we embarked only on, as soon as I set the agenda for the IT organizations, of course in conjunction with John Chambers’ expects to do the strategy for the companies we embarked on Web 2.0 technologies at an enterprise scale at our , CIO conference. Only one out of a hundred CIOs were willing for the need to have a strategic approach and so we talked about it quite a while. One year after that, everyone was at least trying to figure out how they are going to strategically use these technologies. Well, people talk a lot about collaboration and I think, most companies are experimenting with collaboration Web 2.0 technologies a little bit. It is still broadly more understood in a consumer space, as an individual. Right now companies are searching what is the measurable way that I can prove my business value by using these collaboration technologies.

So you have some companies like Cisco, really believe in to invest enough in data front and measure the result as we go. We are working on how we do that effectively, and also had we actually taken those technologies and package them up for companies that are trying to learn? How do we take up technologies and pack them, so that people can have a way to start without having to learn the way to use them in the enterprise and deliver them in a scalable fashion and so on.

I think it will take couple of years to take off in enterprises in general, and I think it's imperative that it does; it is the game changer that can allow us to have the kind of accelerative productivity we need – the kind of economic boost that we all need from technology to create new business model because these technologies enable new business models and new ways of doing work in ecosystems among new partners new supply chain and new customers and so on in a way that is probably the most impactful way that things can happen in Internet or e-commerce.