The VAR Guy must concede: He wasn't overly impressed with former Motorola CTO  Padmasree Warrior (pictured) when she presented at a municipal wireless event back in 2007. She gave a classic product pitch instead  of a thought leadership presentation.

The VAR Guy

June 2, 2009

2 Min Read
Cisco CTO Talks Up Voice-Enabled Search

padmasree-warrior

padmasree-warrior

The VAR Guy must concede: He wasn’t overly impressed with former Motorola CTO  Padmasree Warrior (pictured) when she presented at a municipal wireless event back in 2007. She gave a classic product pitch instead  of a thought leadership presentation. Fast forward to the present and Warrior — now CTO of Cisco Systems — is talking vision instead of products.  And it’s a welcome improvement. Today, she offered up a preview of voice-enabled search. Should Google worry?

During the Cisco Partner Summit in Boston, Warrior is navigating a room of more than 2,000 Cisco Partners. Her opening statement: “Great execution is almost always a competitive advantage over a good idea,” said Warrior. “Vision without execution is just a dream.”

Simple but powerful.

Warrior’s keynote continues right now. But so far, so good. Clearly, John Chambers’ public speaking coach has been spending some time with Warrior, and it shows.

Now, Warrior is highlighting how Cisco will address the following opportunities with partners:

Future of Work: Cisco and partners will focus on inter-company collaboration, mobile experience, clusters of experts and millennials. Voice, data and video must be integrated with consistency and interoperability, she notes, in order to drive the future of work collaboration.

Future of Connected Life: She noted trends like Internet mobility, video, content sharing (vs. owning) and lifestyle optimization. And she pointed out that the Flip video acquisition was not about the device. Rather, it’s about the architecture of tying the video content back to shared experiences.

Future of Computing: Warrior pulled up a classic chart showing the mainframe, microcomputer, client server, web and cloud eras. She pointed to virtualization as a disruptive force that set the stage for the cloud age.

Warrior then launched into an overview of Cisco’s architectural play and launched into a demo. It including voice-enabled search, tied to health-care telepresence and near real-time language translation.

Hmmm. Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers hinted a few years ago that Cisco would evantually compete more with Google… …

Has that day arrived?

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