Did anyone else hear John Chambers interviewed on CNBC Wednesday September 3?  The video is available here.

In response to a question from Australian telecommunications company Telstra’s CEO Saul Eslake about new ways for companies to grow organically, Chambers talked about the growth in video, telepresence and visual networking and it’s potential to increase productivity. 

Chambers made the case that the load on Cisco’s network grew 400% last year with rising use of video a key factor.  He forecasts generally 200-300% network load growth with  increased use of video and telepresence. 

Cisco’s CEO argued that while there has been a lull in U.S. productivity growth following the 3-5% during 1996-2004, he forecasts increases going forward driven by the Internet’s second wave built around visual networking and collaborative capabilities like wikis, blogs, discussion forums and telepresence.

Clearly given Cisco’s WebEx and other collaboration tools acquisitions Chamber’s promoting telepresence has a clear business agenda. Still the discussion about use of telepresence and visual networking in the context of a challenging high fuel costs, slow growth economic environment makes the case for less physical travel and increased technology enabled collaboration compelling.

John Chamber’s forecasts make Celine Roque’s recent post here about Are the reasons against telecommuting valid? a must read especially her closing call to action:

“..these obstacles should be seen as challenges and opportunities for businesses and their employees to grow together and actually make things work.”

No doubt the technology to support remote collaboration will continue to arrive and to compete enterprises must figure how to leverage and adapt organizationally. 

~ Jenny Ambrozek