Enterprise Connect 2014 Rowan Trollope, Cisco

Hello, I'm Michelle Burbick and I'm here with Rowan Trollope from Cisco at Enterprise Connect Orlando 2014. Welcome and thank you for joining me.

Thank you, Michelle. Glad to be here.

Great. So I have a few questions for you today. You participated in the UC Summit yesterday.

I did. That was a lot of fun. Was it?

One of the buzz comments that you made was deployment is dead. It's all about adoption.

That's right.

Yes, I was hoping you could elaborate to tell the audience a bit about that.

Sure, so I think, you know, the history of our technology, IT technology, you know, used to be about what IT selects and then the user just has to use it. But what we've seen with the consumerization of IT, that entire trend is about the end of deployment and the start of adoption. It's saying users are empowered now to bring their own things in from home, right? And they're taking that on themselves to solve whatever problems they need to solve. So if whatever it is that IT deploys to them doesn't work, they're just going to go adopt the technology that they see fit to solve their problems. So that's kind of what I mean. And it's not that we're not going to keep deploying things or anything else. It's that we need to build products that people want. And if you build products that people want, they will adopt them.

Prior to Enterprise Connect, Cisco had an announcement. They did a refresh of their entire video portfolio.

Absolutely. So I would say it's more than a refresh. We've literally launched a brand new line of products for everything from, as you saw today, the browser, right, with our Google Chrome partnership, all the way on up to the room systems. And what we're really trying to do with this, these new products, is to bring, number one, a new level of experience to our users. So we wanted Everything from the industrial design to the user experience needed to be on a level that we've never seen in the enterprise before, right? Something that is so simple and so easy to use. So that's what we released. It's 9 brand new products, including SpeakerTrack 60, which is our brand new dual camera product. So it's everything from low-end SX10, which is do-it-yourself telepresence, all the way up till the high end, which is the MX700 and MX800. So we put a lot of time and thought and care into these products. And, you know, we're really proud to launch them here at Enterprise Connect, and the feedback has been great.

Well, you should be. Actually, one of the things you've said today was, "You ain't seen nothing yet." Yeah. Yes. So we should expect big things from you.

You absolutely should. You absolutely should. We've been— we're working on everything that I showed today. Is stuff that we're shipping. And sort of one of my missions for the team was to say, look, I'm never going to get on stage and show stuff that's not real. I'm not going to use Flash. I'm not going to do other— everything you saw today is real. You can go buy it. It's available from Cisco. It's real code, right? Yeah. And so there's a whole bunch of other things we're working on that aren't ready for public consumption. We're working on stuff in mobility, we're working on stuff in the cloud, and in those two areas we're doing really revolutionary things, but we're just not ready to share that with the world yet. When we are, you'll know about it.

What other trends in collaboration do you and Cisco foresee for the rest of 2014?

I think the trends you're going to see, you'll hear that at the show. Everyone's going to talk about social and mobility and all these different things. You're going to see that. I think a big trend is going to be on this this focus on delivering great experiences. So taking the game up a notch. So Cisco set the bar. We're going to continue to set the bar on that experience in terms of what do people expect from their work tools. I think you're going to see WebRTC really start to grab hold and take off in terms of technology trends. I think you're going to see more and more things delivered through the cloud. I think you're going to see mobility and more apps for the mobile phone, more consumer-like technologies bleeding over into enterprise and coming up through the mobile world. Because I think, you know, the mobile phone, in my humble view, is the most important device in collaboration because it's the thing you always carry with you.

That's true.

So it's always on and it's always with you and you're always available. So the big, big, big trend is going to be that. It's going to be mobility, new apps for mobile delivered from the cloud, and then just a renewed and refreshed focus, sort of led by Cisco, on the importance of user experience.

OK. All right. And in your keynote this morning, there were some Twitter feedback about you being in favor of using your mobile device instead of a remote and things like that. That's right. Yeah.

I don't like remote controls.

You don't. And you lost the clicker.

I lost my clicker, I did. I'm a little forgetful.

No one noticed.

I don't like remote controls. I think we have amazing supercomputers in our pockets that have touchscreens. And what we had to do, and the hard thing we had to do, is to figure out how to make the no-touch pairing experience. Because I don't know if you've— you probably— do you have a car?

Yeah.

Have you paired your phone to your car on Bluetooth?

My car's old, so not yet. So not everyone's done that. Hopefully soon.

Right. So anybody's out there, they're pairing their phones, they're using Bluetooth. Bluetooth technology is for personal devices. It does not work that well when you're talking about room systems, right? Things that you might walk in for a little bit and then walk out. So we had to invent a brand new technology to make this device work really, really, really well seamlessly and out of the box. That was pretty hard, and we worked hard to make that right. And you saw the example on the stage. I mean, you walk into a Cisco— you walk up to a Cisco device, you just need to be near it. It's all proximity-based. You open it up, it uses our secret sauce, and it connects to the device. We love it.

The secret that you're not giving away.

The secret that we're not giving away. Some things you got to keep to yourself.

What else do you personally find interesting that you've seen at Enterprise Connect?

So I've been back to back. Yeah. I haven't had a chance yet. I haven't had a chance. I have not had a chance yet to walk the show floor. Okay. But I'm really excited, to be honest. So where my heart is, is What are the startups doing? What are the next generation of companies doing? Sort of like all the little booths here, the folks that really have a passion and a belief in something that they want to bring to this space. Because the truth is that most of the innovation and collaboration is not going to happen at Cisco. It's not going to happen at Microsoft. We're going to do a lot, but we're going to be more about building the foundation to enable others to bring a lot of infrastructure. The truth is most people in the collaboration industry don't work at Cisco, and they don't work at Microsoft. It's a big industry. So my— what I really love is to see small companies that are innovating and delivering new solutions, because I think you can see the future there. So I'm going to love to just walk around the little sections here and see what cool new things people are coming up with.

And then my final question is that you made a really big announcement today that you have a partnership with Google. And I was hoping you could tell me a little bit more about that.

Absolutely. We announced an alliance with Google, and what we're doing is we're working to make Cisco and— you know, think about what Cisco has is we've got market leadership positions in voice, video, and conferencing. We're the number one in those three categories. Cisco— I mean, Google is seeing incredible growth and frankly have the best solutions when it comes to productivity applications. So really it's the power of Google plus Cisco together to bring a great solution to our customers. And that's what they want. They say they love the Cisco stuff that we build. They love it. But they also want to get away from Microsoft and get onto, you know, a pure cloud solution with Google Apps. They like that. They like the way that they buy it and everything else. Google very much follows the same philosophy that Cisco does, the philosophy that I've been promulgating in the organization, which is experience first. Make a great experience. Experience for users. Google is all about that too. So when you put those two things together, it is an opportunity for us to really set a new bar in terms of the quality of the experience. So that's what we're doing. It's the integration of apps, number one. And then it's the release of WebEx on Chromebook.

You mentioned you use the two for the network. Are you using WebRTC technology then? With Google?

So we are— that's a good question. So we are building our HTML client to use WebRTC. OK. WebRTC has not been ratified yet by the IETF. So it's still up in the air exactly what WebRTC is going to be.

Right.

But Firefox, as one, for example, have agreed with us to move forward on a set, a one version of the proposal for WebRTC. And we're going to have an incredible experience in Firefox native HTML with WebEx and with our other technologies. So while we work through what the final standards are going to be, we have committed A, to support WebRTC, B, to support a pure native WebEx experience running on Chromebook, but also we're going to support it on all the browsers. Great.

Okay. Well, that's all the questions that I have for you. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you.

It's been great. I'm excited to see what else— I have to stop by Cisco's booth.

Come on by the booth. We'll show you all the cool stuff we've been doing.

Great.