WARRIOR: The Internet is moving from a superhighway to becoming a platform that touches every aspect of our lives, with roles in health care, energy, and city services. Our vision at Cisco is to enable the “next Internet.” It can’t be just about data transport, but enabling media experiences. Besides, the Internet also is no longer just about messaging, but also collaboration. Facebook, Twitter and blogs that are popularized in the consumer world are coming to the business world. So, we have to create space for applications that integrate voice, video, and data into a single platform. We have launched a product now being called Quad doing just that.

So, collaboration of various kinds is the second pillar, after enabling media experiences, with a third pillar devoted to sustainability, which means power consumption, cooling costs and processing power. [That] leads us to think in terms of smart cities, smart buildings, green IT and energy efficiency. Virtualized infrastructure and cloud computing is the fourth pillar.
So we have media experiences, collaboration, sustainability and virtualized infrastructure as the four pillars of our Internet vision.

WARRIOR: Clearly, video is a killer application, and a sweet spot for us — making video easy to capture, with multipoint connections and all kinds of applications.

WARRIOR: Quad is a product launched in November in alpha for enterprise collaboration. The name Quad comes from college quads, those places you found in college where people interacted.
So, it esentially became a question of how to create that experience virtually. Basically, Quad is an enterprise-class platform to integrate conferencing and unified communications and voice, video, and social networking concepts into the enterprise space. So in that way, social networking translates into expert networking for business users. We already have WebEx collaboration on the iPhone and iPad and have also announced BlackBerry support.

WARRIOR: The lines are blurring between the consumer and enterprise worlds. People want to bring the devices they have into the work environment. Flip continues to lead in the pocket video camera space, and we want to keep making compelling devices to use. People use Flip for enabling video blogging, and I use it to blog short messages with my work community.

WARRIOR: Video is as close to a synchronous and immersive communication as you get to real life. But I also realize that e-mail might be more appropriate at other times. I collaborate in all kinds of ways, from 140 characters to video blogging.

WARRIOR: We are interested in the various forms of video and what will add value to video. That’s our central strategy, so anything we do to strengthen that is important. Perhaps we’ll add Wi-Fi capability to make Flip much more powerful than what it currently is.

WARRIOR: The newer technologies we look at all drive our core business. Video drives core things, including how we make software and routing to process video. It drives bandwidth. The network also plays a key role for how you combine security and policies for cloud computing.

Everything I’ve described in the “next Internet” all ties back into the core of the network. The network is more or less the glue that brings everything together.

WARRIOR: We’ll align our star with what the service providers align with. What Google is doing with fiber-optic broadband is not something we’d consider contradictory to Cisco. Anything that drives bandwidth is good for us. Our approach is neutral.

WARRIOR: I met 15 customers in Washington recently, and every single one was looking for collaboration and security. Small and large companies in the last five years have had distributed resources with sales and engineering teams all over, so it’s a question of how to bring that expertise together.

That’s the reason collaboration is extremely important. But they are also looking at data center consolidation, virtualization, and many have reduced budgets. Green IT is also top of mind.

WARRIOR: We need to think of the networks as a way to create applications and to think of the user experience, including keeping things simple. Apple is good at user simplicity and [is] absolutely the benchmark for that.