Q&A: Cisco UK managing director Duncan Mitchell

Cisco Systems was one of the companies whose name became synonymous with the growth of the internet and the dot com boom.

Its dominance of the router market means the supplier will always be best known as a networking company.

But the vendor has been broadening its offerings in recent years to include areas such as storage, security and data centres, as well as trying to exploit the growth of IP communications in business and government.

Computing talked to Cisco UK managing director Duncan Mitchell about the company’s future plans.

What are your customers saying are their biggest technology challenges at the moment?

Looking ahead to the next 12 months, be it in large or small organisations, consumer businesses, in the private or public sector – there is a huge demand for people to deploy better IT and drive productivity gains through changing the way people work and the structure of what organisations do. That is good news for us all.

The UK is still not competitive globally. As a nation we fall a long way behind the US in overall productivity, and in work-per-hour productivity behind France and Germany, regardless of what is happening in emerging economies such as China and India. We have to become more productive.

There is a general recognition from government and industry that better use of IT is one of the key issues. Sometimes that means we need better skills, or sometimes we just have to get on and do it, but people are saying they want to deploy bigger and better IT projects to improve productivity.

In Cisco, we are just coming off the back of a mobile technology pilot. I find that very powerful. It is changing the way I am working. Mobility offers a huge opportunity for companies.

And users are also refreshing infrastructures that were deployed in advance of year 2000 – all the deployment that went on in the UK was huge, and that’s now six or seven years old.

Large or small, irrespective of industry, across a diverse mix of technologies, there is a huge opportunity for IT.

What sort of projects are those customers investing in?

We recently held a roundtable with Cisco chief executive John Chambers involving 17 board-level executives from our customers. A large percentage of them said they were going to be spending more money on IT, and were interested in improving customer focus through the use of technology.

When you look at IP contact centres and IP telephony, they want to get to a position where consumers dial in with a specialist question that is easily routed to a specialist who can answer it. They want to do things such as helping customers who ring in and want to speak to an actual branch, not a call centre.

In retail finance, for example, banks are looking at refreshing their branch infrastructures to have IP telephony, IP contact centres, unified messaging, and all of these facilities that make everybody in that organisation feel as if they are in front of the customer. With IP video conferencing you could sit in a branch in a remote rural area, and still have face-to-face access to a specialist sitting in London or elsewhere.

People want to make their networks increasingly intelligent and powerful for what they are trying to do as a business, so that wherever you are in the organisation the network will reach you. I saw a demonstration recently with one of our investment banking clients of an IP trader terminal. If a trader is away from the desk they can have a PDA with functionality to talk to people and record it for audit purposes, even though they are on the move. Wherever you are, the network is in touch with you in some form.

Some of these technologies require a major change to working practices to fully realise the benefits. How are those companies dealing with this cultural change?

If you look at the rate of broadband deployment – it has reached more than eight million homes now. People at home are starting to adopt a web-focused way of working in their own lives.

Most people are becoming more comfortable with doing things on the web or on a laptop or on a desktop. That makes a big difference.

The process of IT-enabled change isn’t going to stop – it will accelerate. We need to make sure we give people the skills they need to make best use of technology – there is nothing more stressful than being expected to use IT when you don’t understand it.

Another part of the challenge is building an etiquette of how you use technology. In a 24/7 world you could be connected and on email all day without sleep. That doesn’t make sense. There has to be personal choice and common sense about the urgency of communication and the right medium to use.

But also, remember that people coming out of education and into the workforce now are very tech-savvy. They arrive at employers and expect IT to be there. They are often a catalyst for their organisation.

I recently met with a group of graduates recruited by Cisco who have just gone out into the field across the company. None of them are anything other than tremendously excited about working in an environment packed full of technology. They will be pushing us ever harder.

What sort of company will Cisco be in five years’ time?

That is a long time in our industry. We believe that the network becomes an ever-increasing asset to any company. The concept of the intelligent information network means having an infrastructure where you have the ability to be very flexible because the infrastructure allows you to do pretty much anything.

For example, it does not matter which office you are in, you can log into a phone, use wireless or wired connections – that is pretty powerful. If you start to bring in things that were traditionally not on the network, such as storage and server virtualisation, or application-oriented networking, that makes the network increasingly the focal point of the IT environment. These are all opportunities for us.

It’s about flexibility, being customer-focused, outward-looking, sensitive to what is happening in the market, and trying to look for change.