We are excited about visual networking and collaboration

As CTO, she is responsible for helping drive Ciscos technology

innovations and strategies. She works closely with its senior executive team and

board of directors to align their efforts with the companys corporate goals.

Warrior joined Cisco in 2007, prior to which she was the CTO at Motorola,

and headed Motorola Labs, the R&D wing of the company, with a budget of $3.7 bn.

Over the course of 23 years with the company, she has undertaken various roles.

Under Warriors leadership, the President of the United States awarded the

National Medal of Technology to Motorola in 2004. Warrior is a Masters in

Science in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University and has a BS degree in

Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi.

In an exclusive interview with Dataquest, Padmasree Warrior shares her

thoughts on Ciscos technology directions and more. Excerpts

How smooth was your transition from Motorola to Cisco?



I have been at Cisco for roughly four months now, and I have to say that the

transition has been extremely smooth, probably better than I expected in terms

of culture and understanding of Cisco. I spent my first three months learning

about Cisco, its product portfolio, technology strengths, gaps, and meeting our

customers and teams all over the world.

There are some similarities and differences between companies. Large

companies tend to have similar challenges, and the issue is always to get the

teams to work together. How to drive globalization, and get innovation out of a

big company are other common challenges of large companies. We are strong in

networking, and we want to use network as our platform. But we are also looking

at applications, software-as-a-service, and mobility. So theres a lot that I

can bring from my experience to Ciscos future.

On the technology front, in which direction is Cisco going and what is

your role in that?



At Cisco, we have certain areas that we call as our priority. The first

technology area that is our focus and that we are bullish and excited about is

visual networking. Visual networking in a way is video and social networking.

TelePresence and extending it beyond the consumer home space is an example. This

can be used in any vertical like enterprise, and later we can move to consumers

and solutions for home. Moving forward, there are potential applications for the

healthcare vertical as well.

The second area is what we are really excited aboutcollaboration.

Collaboration specifically is an extension of Web 2.0 with unified

communicationsa sort of merging together of the two. So, it is traditional

unified communications extended to applications like Webex, for creating a

collaborative work place. We are using networking as a platform and applications

as software-as-a-service.

What is the product line for this?



Initially we have the unified communications product line. And recently we

also announced Webex Connect as a platform, and enabled third party applications

to develop APIs. Virtualization is another. We are initially focusing on data

center virtualization. We see virtualization as an exciting technology that

enables a green and sustainable solution because it helps in power efficiency in

data centers. However, we would continue to invest in our core strengths like

switching, routing, security, etc.

How is the collaboration with Satyam on healthcare progressing?



Initially, we want to focus on healthcare emergency management and Cisco has

some innovative products in this area. We want to combine our strengths and

partner with Satyam to go-to-market, and once we do that we can extend bringing

in solutions from our side and from their side. We are also looking at engaging

in cloud computing. While the cloud is held within an enterprise or on hosted

services, we are looking at both these options.

Is there confusion among enterprises regarding which mobile device to

choose?



There is no particular mobile device for enterprises. It is just like the

consumer world, where different people use multiple mobile devices. The market

is so massive in the mobile space that there wont be a single device that

everybody would use or buy. The case is similar in the PC market. I think the

devices itself will vary.

What are Ciscos green initiatives?



We think on a broader prospect than just green. I actually like to think of

it as to be sustainable. Green basically says that your output has to be

environment-friendly, and reduce carbon emission. Sustainability means you are

actually consuming less. We have to solve both the issue, ie, consume less while

output is more. We are putting efforts on both sides through technology.

From an emission point of view, Cisco has set a goal to reduce green house

gas emission by 25% from 2010 to 2012. It is a very aggressive goal and we

announced that through Cisco Live, which is our network conference. We will go

after that so that worldwide, we will reduce our total emission.

In addition, through technologies like virtualization, we are building

products that consume less power and reduce our carbon footprints. We launched a

lot of products that meet these criteria. We are attacking the sustainability

problem all the way from the chip-set into the product level.

What is your SMB strategy?



Our initial focus was on enterprises, and it still continues to be a very

large segment for us because this is where a lot of IT spends happen. So lot of

the solutions actually have very stringent requirements in order to support

bandwidth, reliability, etc. Our product is build for that market. We also have

a fairly substantial business in the commercial (SMB) market.

SMBs can come to the Cisco website, on the small business section, and once

you are on a Cisco product it will immediately take you to a chat session where

you can chat with somebody at Cisco. It is a three-way connection between the

small business to individuals at Cisco and third party partners. Hence, we are

looking at very innovative ways of addressing SMB requirements, all the way from

go-to-market to product portfolio.

Whats next after TelePresence?



You can see more from us in the area of video in general. Moving video from

one device to another across any network is something users can think about. We

are keeping the experience very simple and this is the beauty of TelePresence.

We want to make sure that we stay with that level of usability and user

experience even as we look at other multiple devices. We have to make our core

products video-friendly and video content mobility-friendly. We have a fairly

substantial amount of focus here.

Sudesh Prasad



sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in