Chrysler hires Tata of India for data work

Duties had been done by contractors

  Consultancy Services to do computer work for the automaker in sales, marketing and shared services as part of a multiyear contract, the Indian company announced Wednesday.

 

The value of the contract is $120 million, media reports in India said. The length of the contract was not revealed.

David Elshoff, a Chrysler spokesman, said the arrangement consolidates work that had been done by other contractors, which he declined to name. "This was work done by contractors before," he said.

The change has left information-technology workers at Chrysler unnerved and afraid their jobs will be eliminated, said several who have communicated with the Free Press.

Tata will manage daily maintenance of a variety of IT systems that are used to run Chrysler's business operations, he said. The India-based company will be working on such projects as Chrysler's online vehicle ordering system for dealers and maintaining the company's dealer-brand sites.

Chrysler's IT department turned to firms such as Tata beginning in 2002 as part of the automaker's Rite Source effort "with the goal of improving our overall efficiency," Jan Bertsch, Chrysler vice president and chief information officer, told Chrysler workers last month in a memorandum obtained by the Free Press.

That agreement recently ended and Chrysler apparently decided to increase work with Tata.

"These agreements will help us to evolve into a new operating model designed to provide even greater efficiencies, improved processes and more flexibility through increased supplier resource pooling capability," Bertsch said. "The first phase of this evolution and our new partnerships will start this month and will continue throughout 2008. As the year progresses, we'll continue to evaluate additional opportunities ... and will keep you apprised of the outcomes of our efforts."

The auto industry is a major focus for Tata Consultancy, accounting for 15% of the company's $4.3-billion in global revenues for fiscal 2007, the company said. Tata Consultancy is part of the Tata Group, one of India's largest conglomerates, which includes Tata Motors.

"This growing trusted partnership is a testament to TCS's competencies and capabilities which continue to help the customer in its business transformation by providing innovative IT services scalable to their needs," N. Chandrasekaran, Tata's executive director and chief operating officer, said in a statement. "The expertise and in-depth knowledge of the automotive industry and Chrysler's business, coupled with our ability to deliver certainty of results will provide sustained value to Chrysler."

Contact TIM HIGGINS at 313-222-8784 or thiggins@freepress.com.

Survey: More government workers can telecommute

Computerworld Networking & Internet

 

Grant Gross

 

February 19, 2008 (IDG News Service) U.S. government employees have a telecommuting gap -- nearly all of them could work from home at least part time, but only about 20% do, according to a survey released Tuesday.

More than four in 10 survey respondents didn't know whether they were eligible to telecommute, according to the survey released by Telework Exchange. But based on the results of an online quiz to determine eligibility, the group found that 96% of the U.S. government employees could telework at least part time, and 79% could telework full time.

A three-day-a-week government telecommuter could save an average of $5,878 annually in commuting costs and avoid putting 9,060 pounds of pollutants into the environment, according to Telework Exchange.

If the 79% of U.S. government employees eligible to telework full time actually did, they would save $13.9 billion in commuting costs and spare the environment 21.5 billion pounds of pollutants, the study said.

"The point here is that telework saves money, it saves the environment," said Joel Brunson, president of Tandberg Federal, a videoconferencing software and services vendor that helped fund the survey. "Telework is the panacea for a lot of the ills out there."

Congress passed a law in 2000 requiring federal agencies to offer telecommuting as an option to many employees, but it has been slow to catch on in practice. Advocates of telework said it can provide several benefits to government agencies, including a way to remotely continue operations during a natural disaster or terrorist attack. Telecommuting could also ease the enormous traffic problems in the Washington area, according to advocates.

To telecommute successfully, government employees need access to a good broadband connection and support such as a help desk, Brunson said. But it's easier than ever to telework, with broadband, mobile e-mail, easy-to-use videoconferencing and other services readily available, he added.

"Telework has grown leaps and bounds from five years ago," he said. "With the prevalence of broadband service out there, there are a lot of tools we have that we didn't have five years ago. With today's technology, [videoconferencing] is pretty rock-solid and almost utilitylike."

Employees have some responsibility to show that they can telework, Brunson added. They must prove that they can work without on-site supervision and still meet deadlines, he said.

This is the third government-focused telework survey done by Telework Exchange and Tandberg Federal since early 2007. The most recent survey had 664 responses -- 70% from civilian government agencies, and 30% from U.S. Department of Defense employees.

Metlife closing Indy center but not jobs

February 14, 2008

 

By Tom Spalding

tom.spalding@indystar.com

February 14, 2008

 

Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. is closing its auto and home Indianapolis call center in a suite at 9001 Wesleyan Road.

The MetLife employees aren't being fired or quitting. They'll be telecommuting.

There are no layoffs; 89 workers will be re-offered their existing jobs or newly created positions, but the conditions of their employment will change to "virtual" call centers.

Instead of an office just south of the Michigan Road/Interstate 465 interchange, they'll work out of their residences using their computers and telephones, said David Hammarstrom, spokesman for New York-based MetLife.

Indy is one of just a few offices where the satellite approach is being implemented as a cost-saving measure.

Profile of Gen Y job

Monday February 11, 2008

By TAMARA J. ERICKSON

JOBS have long been structured primarily around units of time – a 40-hour work week, an 8-hour day.

The time you spend – or are supposed to spend – determines whether you are working full or part time, with implications for compensation and other benefits.

Face time can serve as a proxy for commitment and ambition. But that comes as a bit of a surprise to many of today's newest employees. Generation Y workers (born since 1980) clearly prefer jobs defined by task, not time. They want to be compensated for what they produce.

That's not a new concept. Workers in agricultural and craft-based economies were rewarded for output – bushels of wheat, the number of cups or bowls. Even in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, workers were paid by the piece.

With the advent of the industrial economy, however, piecemeal pay preserved too many irregularities in an increasingly scientific and mechanised approach to management.

Production shifted from the discrete output of individual workers to a complex, integrated process in which it was difficult to isolate tasks. Logging time made more sense. Post-Depression regulations and the rise of unionisation soon led to standardised hours.

The economy has shifted again, though, and the drumbeat for another change is intensifying, sounded largely by Generation Y – a vital resource for talent-hungry corporations.

Many younger employees find they can complete tasks faster than older workers, perhaps partly because of technological proficiency but even more, in my view, because they work differently.

They spend less time scheduling and are comfortable coordinating electronically. They resent being asked to log hours and stay in the office after their tasks are done, and the idea of face time really annoys them.

Ys love to work asynchronously – anytime, anywhere. One said during our research, "What is it with you people and 8:30am?"

Practical realities are also moving us toward a task-based definition of jobs. Who can say how long it takes to write a piece of software?

Many salaried knowledge workers are already effectively paid for tasks rather than time. Allowing telecommuting and flexible hours is essentially trusting that the task will be accomplished, even when people working from home are expected to put in a specified number of hours.

And institutionalising task-based job definitions is arguably fairer than arbitrarily approving flex work and telecommuting – an approach as ripe for favouritism as the piecemeal systems of the pre-industrial age.

As virtual work continues to spread (already 40% of IBM employees have no official offices, for instance), it's time to match the stated expectation to the operational reality.

What would that look like? At Best Buy's headquarters, more than 60% of the 4,000 employees are now judged only on tasks or results. Salaried people put in as much time as it takes to do their work. Hourly employees in the programme work a set number of hours to comply with federal labour regulations, but they get to choose when.

Those employees report better relationships with family and friends, more company loyalty and more focus and energy. Productivity has increased by 35% and voluntary turnover is 320 basis points lower than in teams that have not made the change.

Employees say they don't know whether they work fewer hours – they've stopped counting. Perhaps more important, they're finding new ways to become efficient: "Do we really need this meeting?"

Going forward, we can devise a better model of how to define work. Think task, not time: Articulate the results you expect – and tie accountability to getting the job done.

Make physical attendance in the office, including at meetings, optional. Gauge performance on the quality of the work performed. Help managers and employees learn to measure dedication in ways other than face time.

Use today's networking capabilities to allow employees to work from anywhere. Support the changes by creating drop-in centres, team spaces and open work areas.

Shift your definition of work from a place your employees go for a specified period to something they do – anytime, anywhere.

Task, not time – a model that dominated employment until a century ago – is a powerful way to draw in the newest crop of workers.

Tamara J. Erickson is the president of the Concours Institute, the research and education arm of BSG Alliance. She is based in Boston.

6 Steps to Successful Telecommuting

Online Telecom Auditing Guide

Telecom consulting and telecom auditing guide.

 

Posted in Telecommuting

Advances in telecommunication and IP technologies has enabled millions of Americans to free themselves from the office environment and become what is now commonly known as "telecommuters".

The 1990s saw a rise in the popularity of telecommuting and there seems to be no end in sight. The International Telework Association and Council predicts that a full one third of the workforce- up to 50 million workers-will telecommute full or part-time by the end of 2006.

The obvious benefits of increased flexibility and less travel time for workers makes telecommuting an attractive choice for many. But employees are not the only ones to benefit from full or part-time telecommuting. By allowing their staff the convenience of working from home, business owners experience lower overhead, an increase in employee productivity, and a higher level of employee satisfaction.

Is telecommuting right for you?

Unfortunately for some, many jobs are simply not prime candidates for telecommuting. Careers that require physical labor, or require facilities such as a lab, hospital, etc. are obvious non-telecommuting scenarios. Employees or management executives who spend much of their time attending meetings or who need to interact with employees face-to-face probably will find the need to spend much of their time on-site.

But for those that spend the majority of their day in front of a computer, on the phone or for those that simply do not need to be physically in the office five days a week, telecommuting can be the perfect fit.

Confronting the telecommuting issues

Once the decision has been made to allow for the option of telecommuting, both employee and employer need to agree on a number of basic issues. The following points can serve as a checklist and step-by-step process for successfully implementing a seamless telecommuting solution that works for everyone.

1. Decide on which employees will be allowed to telecommute. Before implementing any technological aspects of telecommuting, the first step is to determine which employees or specific job positions can benefit the most from a telecommuting scenario. Individual work habits of employees should be considered as a basis for identifying possible telecommuting candidates. Working from home carries with it distractions that are not present in the office environment. Personal phone calls, a crying baby, friendly neighbors, television, and a variety of other distractions can be counterproductive to those who do not have the discipline it takes to be a telecommuter. In the beginning, allow just a few workers telecommuting privileges so that all the "bugs" can be worked out.

2. Decide on a PC. Virtually all employees will probably already own a home based PC. The first step for successful telecommuting is to decide on whose PC to use. If the decision is made to use the already existing home PC, the machine will need to be updated with e-mail profiles, VPN and firewall software, and the appropriate applications needed to do the job. It is also a good idea to partition hard drive space to be used for work only and also to implement a reliable means for data storage and backup. Most importantly, the home PC will require current and up-to-date virus software to be installed at all times.

A better choice is to have the employer provide a laptop PC that can easily be transported between home and office. With this option, all of the appropriate software can be installed by the company's IT department. The convenience of a portable laptop also makes for easy maintenance, repair or replacement if necessary.

3. Decide on the Internet connection. The essence of telecommuting involves the transfer of information from one location to another. Since telecommuting requires transfer of both data and voice, a high-speed Internet connection in the home is required - a dial-up connection simply won't cut it. Not only is dial-up painfully slow for even the most simple tasks, it will never be able to handle voice and data due to the low bandwidth and high latency. Implement the fastest Internet connection possible-you won't regret it.

4. Decide on telephony endpoints in the home. Once the broadband connection is in place, you'll need to decide on just how the telecommuter will make and receive phone calls. For purposes of reliability and ease in which others can reach the telecommuter, it is best to have a variety of telephony endpoints in the home. Certainly you will need to decide on an IP-based telephone. It is also a good idea to equip the telecommuter with a IP headset to enable hands-free communication. In addition, having a cell phone in place provides for one additional access point.

The IP-based phone eliminates the need for the telecommuter to use their home phone number for business, as well as the need to have two separate business phone numbers. The IP phone can be set up to provide one number access from both home and office. Since the phone uses the same data connection as the employee's e-mail and file access, it provides seamless access to voicemail and other features used most often within the office environment.

Although the IP phone is the best choice, a more economical option is to connect an analog phone to a one-port gateway in the home. The disadvantage of this option is that it does not provide all the features of an IP-based phone such as caller ID, message waiting, etc.

5. Set up VPN access and Firewalls. Undoubtedly the telecommuter will need access to files located on the corporate file servers. The next step is to set up VPN access and firewalls so that the user can safely and easily access corporate files over the Internet. The necessity for VPN access is also another good reason to use a company owned laptop.

6. Configure existing PBX with a gateway extension. To provide remote workers with the full benefits of PBX functionality-i.e. complete voicemail features, access to calling plan discounts, access to corporate directories, call transfer capabilities, auto attendant, etc. it is advisable to implement a PBX extension or gateway to the existing PBX.

With the PBX-IP gateway, callers can reach the telecommuter by simply dialing the telecommuters normal office number. If the telecommuter is unable to answer, the call will automatically be forwarded to their office voicemail box. The telecommuter connects to the corporate gateway and eventually to the corporate PBX using their IP phone, their IP headset or their analog phone connected to their one-port home gateway.

The rise in popularity of telecommuting makes sense mainly because it benefits both employee and employer. In response to changing market demands and resources, many companies are now turning to telecommuting solutions to not only reduce expenses, but to offer their employees a more flexible and satisfying work environment.

Submitted by: TelCon Associates, Inc. 

Cisco's Emerging Collaboration Strategy

More than just a way to eliminate some face to face meetings, collaboration technology ranging from wikis to pricey telepresence systems will reignite productivity, says John Chambers.


By Richard Martin, InformationWeek
Jan. 28, 2008

If you want to catch a glimpse of the future of knowledge work in the 21st century, a good place to start is a small family homestead outside Germantown, Ill., 40 miles east of St. Louis. That's where Craig Huegens, director of architecture for networks, data centers, and unified communication services at Cisco Systems, lives and works.

When Huegens moved there from Northern California in December 2000, it was for the most basic of reasons: He wanted his newborn son to grow up around family, who now live just five miles down the road. Nevertheless, it was something of a revolutionary concept: Huegens was Cisco's first full-time IT telecommuter.

Back then, he got by using e-mail and Internet Relay Chat, a primordial form of instant messaging. It took some accommodation on the part of both Huegens and his colleagues back in San Jose, but they made it work. And over the last seven years Huegens has become the spear point for the philosophy and technology at the center of Cisco's biggest strategic shift since the tech bubble burst in 2001 -- "Cisco 3.0," as CEO and chairman John Chambers likes to call it.

Cisco 1.0 was all about getting people connected by selling truckloads of routers and switches, and it made the company, founded in 1984 by a small group of computer scientists out of Stanford University, one of the fastest-growing in American business history. Cisco 2.0, Chambers says, was cen- tered on business process change--using all that hardware and, of course, a few truckloads of new gear like IP telephones--to drive innovation and productivity gains.

Cisco 3.0 employs even more hardware and software to transform business models, and Chambers, with characteristic evangelical fervor, says it will fundamentally change the nature of work, enabling productivity growth to soar back into the realms last seen in the economic surge of the late 1990s. "We believe that productivity can grow not at 1% or 2%, but 3% to 5% for the sustainable future," says Chambers in an interview in his office in Cisco's San Jose headquarters.

That's an audacious vision, and it will be driven, Chambers maintains, by the type of collaborative, Web 2.0 technology that now keeps Huegens in touch with his team in San Jose: interactive Web forums like wikis and blogs; IM; interactive "teamspaces" mounted on WebEx, which Cisco acquired in March for $3.2 billion; and, above all, videoconferencing and its big brother, telepresence--a life-size, high-def, multiple-screen system for face-to-face meetings among users in multiple locations.

Videoconferencing, of course, has been touted more than a few times over the past decade as the means to transform boring meetings, slash travel budgets, and create a new multibillion-dollar industry. It never quite happened. The question is, is Cisco's latest initiative just Videoconferencing 2.0, or is it really something revolutionary?

WALKING THE WALK
The new emphasis on intensely collaborative technologies at Cisco, a company that epitomizes the catchphrase "eating our own dog food," ups the ante for CIO Rebecca Jacoby, who assumed that post just over a year ago and has been the point person for rolling out telepresence and other new-age tools to the demanding in-house customers at Cisco.

Jacoby, who's been at Cisco for 13 years but is a self-described nontechie (she came up through the manufacturing ranks), takes over at an interesting time. Not only is she Cisco's first female CIO, succeeding the semilegendary Brad Boston, now senior VP of the Global Government Solutions Group, she is also helping to lead Cisco through a transformation as radical as any in the company's 24-year history. To do so, Jacoby says, Cisco is making itself the test bed for the next generation of collaboration tools.

When Chambers first talked to Jacoby about taking on the CIO job, she wasn't sure she really wanted the spotlight that goes with being the chief IT exec for one of the world's most powerful and venerated IT companies. The prospect of transforming the entire company, however, "was irresistible to me," she says.

Jacoby realized that the conventional role of IT--acquiring and deploying new technologies and educating employees on using them--was now, at least in part, flipped. "When you talk about the collaboration tools out there, they're not necessarily initiated by IT," she says. "They're coming from the consumer space, and we're just creating a road map. That's the first thing we do, as opposed to being either an inhibitor or a controller."

Much of what Jacoby talks about is hardly earth-shattering--she has become an enthusiastic user of video blogs, or vlogs, she says--but its pervasive use at a company of Cisco's size, and age, is probably unusual. With a globalized workforce of highly connected, tech-savvy users, the adoption and learning flow both ways, to and from Cisco's IT group. Jacoby calls it "creating an environment of directed participation," in which the tools already being used by Cisco employees are adapted, refined, and sharpened to drive innovation and growth. "Our biggest challenge," she says, "is just keeping up with where these ideas are going and seeing how we can participate in how they are shaped and focused."

Among the initiatives Jacoby and her team have undertaken: creating an online "communications center of excellence," where new collaboration tools from wikis to vlogs to telepresence can be deployed, tested, and refined. Video, she says, is "phenomenally effective," particularly in communicating with employees outside the United States.

Equally powerful has been Cisco's I-Zone wiki, a company-wide forum for new business ideas launched not by IT but by the Emerging Technologies Group, headed by Marthin DeBeer. Live for 18 months, the wiki has produced 600 ideas for potential $1 billion-per-annum-size ventures (the minimum level for Cisco to get behind a new business), suggested by the company's 61,000-plus employees. "They're not all good, but even the bad ones may spur a good idea," DeBeer says. According to Cisco, 10,000 employees have participated on the wiki.

Reflecting Chambers' mantra that to lead the next phase of the Internet Cisco must constantly reinvent its own processes, the focus on collaboration has also spurred a reorg of the company's hierarchy. Beginning in the painful 2001 meltdown, when Cisco posted a net loss of $1 billion, Chambers led a shift from the usual product, sales and marketing, and other functional groups toward a more horizontal, less command-and-control structure of "councils," "boards," and "task forces."

"The councils focus on $10 billion-plus opportunities, the boards on $1 billion opportunities, and the task forces are the implementation of any of the above," Chambers says. It sounds like a somewhat communistic way of reshaping a $35 billion-a-year company, but for Chambers this new structure is key to the company's regeneration. "The first few years were pretty painful," Chambers admits. "It's like anything you do--usually it's not the technology that's your limiting factor, it's people, and getting them to change from, instead of command and control, to collaboration." Cisco, however, makes its living leading technology changes, and the key to Cisco 3.0 will be the most sophisticated and expensive: telepresence.

INNOVATION BY DESIGN
DeBeer's executive assistant, Margaret Hooshmand, can be found almost every day outside his office in San Jose. Only she's not there. She's at the Cisco office in Richardson, Texas, and she bilocates via telepresence to the cubicle adjoining DeBeer's office. You can walk by (in San Jose) and chat with her any time, and if you don't remind yourself, you'll forget to ask her how the weather is in central Texas.

Telepresence was the first new product to emerge from DeBeer's Emerging Technologies Group, and it ramped up in record time, from the hiring of the first engineer in February 2005 to the shipping of the first external system in December 2006. Among the design principles, or "Telepresence Rules," DeBeer's team devised were, "People will always appear life-size" and "To initiate a meeting you have to do just one thing," for example, press a button on the handset.

Hooshmand's in two places at once

Today, in Building 10 on Cisco's campus, where Chambers, DeBeer, and other execs have their offices, the second floor is like a telepresence never-never land, with rooms dedicated to different themes--baseball sports bar, golf, and so on. Around the world the company has deployed 160 TelePresence 3000 systems (the three-screen version), along with dozens more of the single-screen 1000s in offices like Jacoby's.

The system weighs in at just over a ton and requires a room at least 15 by 19 feet. It uses the Cisco MCS 7800 series server and the 7970G IP phone, running SIP over a 6-Mbps or better connection for the ultrahigh-def, 1080p version. There are three 65-inch HD plasma displays and an internal Gigabit Ethernet switch, which means if you look behind the curtain, as it were, you'll see that the whole thing runs through a single Ethernet cable. It's a superb chunk of technology.

It's also damned expensive. A single-room Cisco TelePresence 3000 unit goes for about $300,000, and since having one telepresence room is like rowing half a canoe, a full dual-room system, including furniture and other overhead, runs in the range of three-quarters of a million bucks. Which raises the obvious question: Who's going to buy these things?

The short answer: C-level execs who want to demonstrate their techno-progressivism--and their deep pockets. "Telepresence is not going to be purchased by the same people as traditional videoconferencing," says Ira Weinstein, a senior analyst at Wainhouse Research. "Telepresence is an executive purchase that comes down from the C-level and is pushed down through the ranks." Think of it as the corporate Lear Jet for a new sensibility.

Consumer products company Procter & Gamble has purchased about 15 Cisco TelePresence units and plans to deploy a total of 48 by April 1. The directive to invest in high-end collaboration technology, says Laurie Heltsey, director of global business services, came from the top. CEO A.G. Lafley challenged P&G managers 2-1/2 years ago to make the company "the most collaborative in the world," Heltsey says. At the same time, CIO Filippo Passerini "is very supportive of video as an enabling technology in many different business scenarios." So much so, in fact, he's been part of Cisco events hawking the technology.

Cisco TelePresence is seen as an especially valuable tool for P&G when collaborating with suppliers, partners, and retailers. "We do have some business-specific processes that are very well-suited for video," Heltsey says, "instances where you need your eyes for a visual review of some subject or item."

That sounds mighty powerful -- as long as the partner at the other end has a Cisco TelePresence room of its own. Despite Chambers' insistence on the potential for the technology to transform intracompany relations, the fact remains that there's no fully interoperable telepresence system in the world today, from Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Polycom, or any other high-end videoconferencing vendor.

Cisco recently announced that its TelePresence units would work with existing standards-based videoconferencing systems, including SIP, H.323, and those supporting high-quality sound with G.711 audio codecs and high-quality video with H.264 video codecs. But those are legacy desktop systems, not other telepresence ones. "It's not like you can pick up a phone, whether it's a Motorola or a Cisco device or whatever, and still connect regardless of which service provider you use," says Nora Freedman, senior analyst for enterprise networks at IDC. "It's still very much you can only dial internally and connect among peers and colleagues." Cisco says it will interoperate with devices from Polycom, Tandberg, Sony, Aethra, VCON, PictureTel, VTEL, Huawei, and Microsoft.

One sticking point: establishing quality of service across carrier networks, particularly internationally. It's one thing to get Verizon and AT&T to connect for a telepresence session. It's quite another to get Verizon to work with BT in London and China Telecom in Shanghai. Much of Chambers' spiel around telepresence has to do with holding multiple meetings on multiple continents in a single day, so that's a serious drawback, albeit less than requiring each participant to shell out for a high-end Cisco system.

Partly, though, it's a Cisco thing. The world's largest provider of networking infrastructure isn't suddenly going to start providing fully open, interoperable, standards-based telepresence systems, even if that's what embracing the wild, wild Web 2.0 frontier entails.

"Cisco is betting on a proprietary approach," says Michelle Damrow, head of product marketing for Polycom's telepresence group. "We think standards-based communications will win eventually."

Indeed, Cisco faces strong competition in this nascent market, from the likes of HP, which introduced its Halo telepresence system before the Cisco product launched, and videoconferencing leader Polycom, which offers a high-end telepresence system with merged, seamless displays, as opposed to Cisco's three-separate-screens approach. Damrow notes Polycom is betting on a standards-based system that will interoperate with any standards-based video codex on the market today. And while HP's Halo is a closed architecture, à la Cisco TelePresence, HP is working with Tandberg and other vendors to introduce some degree of "family and friends" style interconnection.

Even if Cisco sells a few dozen TelePresence units to every P&G-size company in the United States, you've still got a relatively small business by Cisco standards. Where will the growth--and the business-model revolution envisioned by Chambers--come for Cisco 3.0?

The answer, as you might expect, is that Cisco believes its installed base, its brand power, and its marketing muscle will push enough TelePresence units into the market to allow it to become the de facto standard. Telepresence itself, says Chambers, will be offered as an on-demand managed service, at off-site locations for companies that can't or don't want to invest in their own systems. And when interoperability among multiple vendors does come, it will be on Cisco's terms, not industry-imposed.

If that's not quite Web 2.0 enough for you, well, welcome to John Chambers' world. Cisco 3.0: Coming soon to a three-screen, high-definition, surround-sound theater near you.