Cisco sees an upturn in world economy

BANGALORE, INDIA: While there is still uncertainty around sustained recovery and eventual job creation, the business outlook for 2010 will remain optimistic across sectors including theIT industry, says Naresh Wadhwa, president and country manager, India and SAARC, Cisco Systems.

“According to Cisco’s CEO and chairman,John Chambers, the majority of Cisco’s customers believe the world economy would witness an upturn in 2010,” he told CyberMedia in response to a question on Cisco's outlook for 2010.

“IT Investments in the areas of e-governance, virtual healthcare, distance learning, connected branch services, rural banking, managed data services, hosted unified communications, and public safety and security are likely to accelerate,” he added.

In Wadhwa's opinion, companies that will transform themselves to adopt collaborative cultures enabled by next-gen technologies such as unified communications, business video, Web 2.0 and virtualization are likely to gain sustainable competitive advantage. Virtual data centres, collaboration technologies and TelePresence will be the future of enterprise computing.

In networking market the technology trends are mainly cloud computing, data center technologies, security and mobile applications are among the top 10 strategic technologies, he said citing a Gartner report.

On telecom front, the advent of 3G in India is likely to a much needed impetus to the mobile value-added services (VAS).

“This US$ 1.35 billion industry is expected to grow manifold, with some industry estimates pegging the figure at Rs 200 billion by 2015. Increasing bandwidth would also help improve the quality of video services which in turn will spur a growth for collaborative technologies such as TelePresence.

According to Wadhwa, the Indian market presents a huge opportunity for managed services, as service providers increasingly realize the importance of outsourcing tasks such as provisioning, implementation, configuration, support and ongoing operations to a third party who specializes in the same.

While talking about Cisco’s focus in 2010, he said the company's prime technology focus areas for the future continue to be Video, Collaboration, Data Centre and Virtualisation.

“Cisco will continue its extending its existing leadership in products into systems, solutions, architectures and platforms,” Wadhwa said, adding, “The company believes that there will be a ‘video’ explosion in homes and businesses as it is increasingly becoming the most important means by which we communicate and share information.”

Collaboration will drive the next wave of increase in productivity, according to him. “In the future, collaboration will move from intra-company to inter-company, creating a safe and secure channel for companies that work together to communicate effectively with each other. Using Web 2.0, social networks, video will increasingly be used in the enterprise world.”

The Cisco executive said that Cisco's five-phase plan for Borderless Networks will provide a roadmap to enable the next-generation workspace experience and has been enabled by systems innovations across routing, switching, wireless, acceleration, and security.

Cisco’s virtualization vision is to aggregate siloed pools of storage, compute, network, operating systems, and applications, into unified, shared resource pools linked with an intelligent unified fabric. This is embodied by the Cisco Unified Computing System, a next-generation data center platform. Cisco will approach cloud computing in terms of Software as a service, Platform as a service and Foundational cloud infrastructure, added Wadhwa.

He said Cisco will continue to explore and invest in business models in the domain of public safety and security, healthcare and education.