Cisco’s “next big thing” is interactivity and video

Cisco has never made its fortunes by living on the bleeding edge. Rather the company has been successful getting behind a technology when it is ready for the corporate mainstream. Video and interactivity are certainly nothing new to most casual internet users, but they have largely been absent as corporate tools or as apps that service providers have been eager to enable.

Cisco at its C-Scape conference in San Jose beat the collaboration drum in laying out its strategy and vision for the future of networking, with video playing a key part of collaboration.

But while Facebook, MySpace and other Web 2.0 technologies are pushing network service providers like AT&T to deploy major upgrades today, those same technologies are not a network growth driver in the enterprise today. (from eweek)

It would appear that high quality video in the interactive space will be just as pervasive as text messaging in the near future. Access providers should heed this warning.