Web 2.0 will speed up business

As a man who has the ear of Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, John Chambers, chairman of Cisco Systems, has become respected for his crystal-ball gazing.

Yesterday, the head of the world’s biggest maker of data networking equipment was at it again: he predicted consumer-led technologies, amid Web 2.0, will spark a boom in productivity.

Social networks, teleconferencing, wikis and other technologies that allow interaction on a large scale could also change traditional business models, Mr Chambers reportedly said.

But before he elaborated, and explained what the second growth phase of the internet might look like over the next decade, he verified Cisco’s track record as a soothsayer of all things ICT.

“If you go back to what we said in the mid-1990s, we made predictions on productivity that people thought were mathematically impossible and yet it was over-achieved beyond what any economist thought,” Mr Chambers told the Financial Times yesterday.

In an interview with the paper, he continued: “We said [internet protocol] would be the future and it wouldn’t be separate voice, and video and data networks, and that has happened.

“We said there would be a brutal industry consolidation among the data communication companies and that clearly happened.

“We said that all electronic devices past a given price point would connect to the internet. That’s clearly happened.”

For the future, Cisco’s growth will come not just from network infrastructure, but from applications that help customers leverage connections between themselves and their customers.