Touting that it has seen the light, Cisco claims that by embracing a Web 2.0 mind-set it’s poised to take the tech world by storm. First, it’s hammering away at overcoming that pesky air travel/global warming/cost of flying thing everyone is whining about by allowing companies to hold meetings in which participants can see and hear each other as if they’re in the same room.

As Information Week reports:

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.

For the low price of $300,000 – one of these rooms can be yours!!! (Price excludes furniture).

Imagine – you could create your own room with a theme. Say…hmm, steampunk. Or goth. Vampire or Gor. In any case, create a room….and then get someone ELSE to ALSO buy a room (that’s another $300k please)….and bingo! It’s like being in the same place with someone! You can see each other, talk to each other, share documents or information. I suppose the only thing you can’t do is rez prims.

But speaking of prims, maybe you could buy a whole ISLAND, split it into 512m parcels, decorate each with low cost prims, and for under $4k hold meetings all year, create collaborative work spaces, link out through Blog HUDs, and while you’re at it be able to change your hair cut at will.

Cisco is trying to do us all one better, skipping Web 2.0 entirely and jumping to version 3! Says Chambers:

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.

Excuse me, but that still sounds like heirarchy to me. What about opening up the company and open source? The only semi-encouraging note is that they’ve opened a WIKI for new ideas:

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.

DeBeer’s tone says it all, although it may not be what he intended. “They’re not all good”…..who evaluates whether they’re good or not? Why does an idea need to be worth $1B to merit a metric? Why is 1 in 6 participation a good thing to tell the world about? How many ideas has the company sources from the open market? Last time I checked, Proctor & Gamble had a target of getting 50% of its ideas from OUTSIDE THE COMPANY.

My personal feeling is that Cisco is desperate to recoup its massive investment in CSI New York. We all remember the Cisco signage all over the place don’t we?