Cisco's future in three words: TelePresence, collaboration, video

Cisco's future in three words: TelePresence, collaboration, video

Collaboration as productivity catalyst

Cisco's second keyword, collaboration, is vital to increasing corporate productivity and innovation, driving it at a faster pace than most economists project, said Erik Brynjolfsson, the director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, who joined the conference via Cisco's TelePresence solution. "The more knowledge workers can collaborate with each other using TelePresence," he said, "the more they can increase productivity and innovate faster."

Collaboration has synergy with business process change, according to Brynjolfsson. "Companies that have made business process and collaborative technology improvements have found that the two go together in a highly complementary way," he said, "and the companies that did both had large productivity gains."

Collaboration also promotes social networking within businesses, Brynjolfsson said, adding that its uses go beyond the familiar FaceBook and MySpace applications used largely in the younger consumer market.