Creating a cyber bridge of communication

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.

Ok..you are talking about the collaboration. But even, SCM have the same functionality where you are collaborating with partners and the franchises and everyone. So it’s kind of an extension of SCMs or Enterprise Technologies that are existing from some years?

Yes, I think actually that’s a great analogy especially for the supply chain; it is to some extend... it’s a definite extension of that; but there are a whole new set of technologies that allow you to connect with knowledge resources faster.

Number one; identifies who they are and connect with them and be able to leverage the resources in much more scalable way. For example if I know, in my new old model, and in my new business model too, who is my supplier or who my contact was, then I call him, and in a way we do this. The way the Web 2.0 technology is where we can exchange information the way we were doing but the difference is I can be in the middle of solving a business problem... there is a wine stock and there is a technical problem, and I don’t know who to call. The guy I don’t know with whom the answer can be found. I can use the directory to find the guy who has the expertise in the area and identify who he is. Maybe I don’t know them but I call and can connect to a video conference with the guy right away so I have a higher trust, sort of exchange right away.

Maybe, you know, as is typical in the world today, the guy may be in another country and I don’t quite understand what he is saying. Maybe he could not get me at the same time, so we could clarify at the language they were using. This is how these technologies come together in a business process application. So the communication process and the business process are brought together. In a way it is faster and better and more accessible to knowledge than you have it in the past. It’s pretty exciting.

You said it’s 14 years that you have been with Cisco. The company also has changed a lot with the offerings and products that it has and the requirements of the company has also changed. So as a CIO, how you need to or rather a CIO need to evolve as the company grows?

Just to give you some sense of this, when I started at Cisco, it was less than a billion dollar company; the company had only done two acquisitions and nobody was using the Internet for e-commerce. When IT was integral part in the process of creating an e-commerce platform, Cisco has leading edge at the business to business aspect of that. In the mid 90s, when IT played a major role, how do you actually laid down the infrastructure to be able to support that and the business functions can actually drive the uses at that process. And I think at that part, the role of the CIO was new in the mid 90s and beyond and just automation, which is going to work really well in the years before, and I think that aspect even growing stronger. So it evolves.

Several years ago, IT evolved into a tool of communications. So it became information and communications technology. So those of converged (by the way not everyone has converged, which is shocking but true) so the communication and information infrastructures have converged, that changed the role of IT to have a broader impact on the types of business processes, and how are you going together in the business partnerships and enabling your businesses.

Today, almost every business on the planet has some element of technology either in their product or service. For example in the business in the media, the way it is delivered today, is completely different from 20 years ago. And so, the role of the CIOs and the role of the IT organizations has to be so far beyond technology; it’s really about applied technology but really understanding not only your business and the way it is today, where really is it going and how can technology possibly help keep changing the games so that you can year after year create an advantage for your company. So the IT organization has to think that way how do I have technology help my company continue to evolve its business processes and business models in a way that keeps it competitive. And so you have to be that kind of a business person today, if you are going to be an effective CIO.

Since you are working with a tech company, to what extend do you encounter the same challenges as your counterparts in other verticals?

I think as the tech company, for the most part, you are going to encounter like enterprises depending on the kind of technology you deliver. I think historically we encountered like challenges to a typical manufacturing organization, maybe. I think that has changed pretty dramatically.

For Cisco in last three to four years, we’ve gone into new businesses and new business models. For example, software as a service model has a whole different requirement from an IT standpoint, in terms of resilience, the scale, high volume transaction, persistence of that transaction.

Visual Networking in the video communications has a whole different set of requirements, so some of the things are changing in the industry are changing in business and are changing our requirements.

The one thing that is unique to be in technology company is to typically have an organization in the company culture that is fairly engineering driven, that means everybody is an IT expert. So that is kind of a fun, challenge that keep... IT has to be really good to be able to live up to the expectations. I think that's the kind of fun for my organization and it gives us the added, the strategic role of influencing our engineers, as Cisco's biggest enterprise customers.

How do you react to the fluctuations economic and otherwise, that affects Cisco and how do ensure that you can scale-up or scale down when it is required?

I think there is a base level foundation of business that you are going to do and you need to plan for. There are lots of different business models and components of things you put together to be able to deliver an IT service, so there is a development resources and there is technical resources and so on.

What we do is, we approach IT consistently with an architectural strategy. An architectural strategy is essential and we continue to modularly improve that and that architectural strategy is designed to allow us to drive efficiency on an ongoing basis into the basic things we do to run the business and then we have a set of things, we are investing in that are changing the way we do business and some of which are incremental and are in an ongoing improvement process.

And then we have things that are specifically investments designed to enable our growth strategies. For e.g. when we came here to Bangalore and bought this Globalization Centre, the investments we made from an IT standpoint to make the campus work are continued to improve, continue to the growth strategy in the business. We look for every opportunity architecturally to drive savings to run the business, you use our fluctuation sort of adaptor, the incremental change. Cisco business philosophy is during a tough time we migrate and realign our resources to the growth strategy so that we are positioned to come out of that and scale the upturn.

I would say that the IT strategy at Cisco is the direct reflection in the over all company strategy; that's really the role of IT at Cisco.

Is it possible to share us one or two ideas where you change the cost structure because of slowdown and still you manage to drive towards the vision you have? How did you manage the things?

For example, the most obvious example is we have cut travel in business in a big way and we are doing that by enabling people to do this effectively through tele-presence, and, to give you an idea, that last year we cut travel by 20 per cent and increased customer visit by 35 per cent using tele-presence. In IT, because we use our own products, our customers want to talk about how we use our products and their best practices and so on. So that's a really simple example and I have lots of other examples where we were using WebEx conferencing and we managed to combine that using unified communications platform in a way that makes it very cost effective for us to do that. It improves global communication in a big way.

To what extend is the cost of IT infrastructure is a major concern for the CIO's? I am not talking about Cisco as such, overall. When I speak to a manufacturing CIO or in a retail he says cost is the main thing... so how important is it and how do you overcome that?

Well, first I would say value is the main thing and not cost. What you need to do is to take the overall architectural approach, in that architectural approach it needs to match your business needs and so if you have a well-planned architectural approach and a value orientation of that architecture you can think of infrastructure like a factory in a manufacture environment and there are times when it is wise for you to build the factory because you know that you can produce products in a way that it would bring overall value to you as a corporation and the whole business plan put together makes sense to do that.

There are times when maybe you don't want to build the whole factory but maybe you want to borrow some space or pay someone to build something in that factory... so if you think about that’s the way the information models are changing.

The key is that you need to move to an architectural strategy that allows you to get a better total cost of ownership and of the architecture that matches your particular business processes and terms of business models that we are using to gain that IT service.

Apart from day-to-day work at Cisco, what projects are you working as of now?

Our major strategies in IT are driving an enterprise scale communication and collaboration platform. The use of Web 2.0 collaboration, video technologies on a broad scale and then brings that, helps our business develop that as way of doing, in order to bring business that is one of our biggest strategies.

The second biggest strategy is how do we really drive our business process in associated application to a real service-oriented architecture and not just the technical service but also the business service and how you bring those together for leverage to make our business more productive.

The third one is the broad virtualization strategy that starts with the data centre and virtualizes the typical services that we have in data centre, network storage compute in a unified approach, but also takes the concept broadly across the entire IT architecture with an endgame of really creating, you know a situation were an individual can use any device you want. Using the network as a platform they were able to manage the content, knowledge and the expertise you want to use in a way that is individual to you and so collaboration, commerce, virtualization, and globalization as fourth initiative.

... Is this for year 2009-2010?

I think that’s a three to five year plan and those are the initiatives that we named as our strategic imperatives two years ago. I think in the coming years based on current economic situation we think those are the right strategies and we are going to accelerate them and we would probably take the concept that we have done on commerce and apply to every business process that we have and we will really scale the collaboration platform this year.

Some 10 to 15 years back, as you told, the enterprise technologies used to go for ERP, CRM or whatever and now they are talking about the Web, Internet or collaboration space. So what would be the future of enterprises on IT in the next five years?

First of all, I would say that the collaboration technology is just beginning to be leveraged in the enterprises, so there is really two or three years of drive on collaboration technologies especially the use of video in the enterprise.

The same is to the virtualization. I think in the next year you are going to see a broad changing in the definition of virtualization and has been sort of people think about it virtualizing servers, storage and there is going to be a broad definition of virtualization that starts in the data centre and virtualizes all the IT services that come under a datacenter but optimally virtualizes all the business process, allows you to access them, by the way virtualizing individuals using collaboration technologies being able to access the individuals wherever they are in the world, whatever function they are in, whatever business processes they are in.

I think there is a kind of 3 to 5 year leverage possibility in using those kinds of virtualization technologies to create new business models. I think you get to see a lot of that and possibly the third area is really broad affective use in leading edge companies.

Probably the other thing is, this is beyond the enterprise, I think you are going to see over the next couple of years a better adoption of technologies among countries and states, public entities using something like 'Intelligence Urbanisation' as an example of that and that will be driven how do we use these technologies to drive sustainability, how do we use these technologies for better management of government services in order to really change the networking in cities.