I spent the morning with Mark Forster from Cisco yesterday.  I have known Mark on and off for the past 3 years.  I have been keen to see Mark because I knew his role as heading up the Unified Communications piece within Cisco UK would give him fairly unique take on what he sees going on.  Fascinating to see how Cisco are approaching the concepts around self taught behaviours.  Like many of the big vendors, Cisco is building applications that fall, broadly under the banner of Web 2.0.  What struck me was how Cisco was learning about the behaviours, related to cultural change and cultural integration (specifically the generational angle) by testing and trialling in house.  When you look at the pockets of development, test and trial going on around Cisco both within Mark's team and within IBSG, a picture emerges of an organisation that is expanding ever more progressively away from the core network offerings.  I guess Mark is realistic about the gap between the likes of IBM and where Cisco currently sit, but it is compelling to see if Cisco can complete the story by building off the network relationships to convey strong messages about collaboration AND hold the relationship to be able to drive the cultural adoption and make money from it. 

It was intriguing to see that Mark had an ROI on one such app which internally was delivering a 2% efficiency gain across the UK operation.  Now that is a few quid in the pocket.

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