Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers spoke to NDTV's Vikram Chandra on the sidelines of the annual World Economic Forum meet at Davos. "If I were going to bet on one emerging country in the world I'd bet on India," Mr Chambers said.
Here's an edited transcript of the interview:
Question: Internet of Things. How ubiquitous is this going to get? Are we really going to have televisions talking to refrigerators sort of stuff?
Answer: I think it's simplistic. What's going to happen is you're going to move from a thousand devices connected to the internet... Every country will become digitized. It isn't about connected things. It's about getting the right information at the right time to the right machine or person to change their lives. And so it will create job growth in countries like India. It will create inclusive job growth. It will change GDP. It will change healthcare. It would change education. It will change smart cities. In short, every company, every country, every city, every house, every car, every wearable will be connected to the internet.
Question: How do you think that will (Internet of Things) change the life of a consumer?
Answer: Let's use an example of retail. If everything in the store is connected, the store can cater to the individual interests of the individual. They can basically have very short retail lines when they go out. They can see if you hesitate in an area and ask you if you need some assistance and increase the shopping experience dramatically. But what can it really do for the individual? It can change healthcare. It can change education. It can change the way they do their work, they can do their work from home. Think what it means, it means the last traffic jam ever. You'll have to go the museum to go and see what a traffic jam looks like to explain it to the kids. You know in India, that is a challenge. Think of it as the last retail line you'll have to ever wait in. Think of it as the last piece of baggage you ever lost coming to Davos, and you know what it's like on that. Think of it as the last time a video will ever be disrupted.
Question: But the danger with that is if the net ever goes down, your life comes to a standstill. What do you think?
Answer: It won't come to a standstill. But there are tremendous benefits from it. It will change every aspect of our lives. It is unstoppable. But if you don't have the reliability and the security and the privacy, that will slow its growth down.
Question: One of the big questions about inclusiveness is, especially in places like India, that not everyone has access to the internet. Not everyone has broadband and DSL. In cities, even if you can afford it, you sometimes don't get reliable broadband or WiFi. That's an issue because we potentially could have that digital divide that we keep worrying about. Are you concerned about those things?
Answer: I think you have to be aware and say: 'How do you prevent it?' Your leader, Modi (Prime Minister Narendra Modi), is amazing. If I were going to bet on one emerging country in the world I'd bet on India. And by the way, Cisco is (betting on India). And we are doubling down on India. We believe in the direction that your country has. He (Mr Modi) understands what smart-cities mean. He understands how you do this inclusion for everyone in India, and how over time you bring broadband to everyone in India. Whether it's for education, healthcare or job creation etc. I think your country will be one of the first large digital country in the world.
Question: People think spectrum should be ubiquitous and free, and not licensed out. How do you make sure everyone has access to the internet?
Answer: The most important thing you start with is the realizations of all the advantages when everything becomes digital for country and citizens. So your goal should always be: How do you get everything digital? How do you give everybody access to that? And how do you make sure that the people that build out this infrastructure can get a return? Otherwise infrastructure doesn't get billed out. So you have to balance multiple constituencies and you can make it a win-win. I think with the right rule of government and business working together - with society - you can accomplish that.
Question: When the chairman of SoftBank came to India, he said to Mr Modi, 'When you are building an information super-highway you can't have spectrum in bicycle tracks.' That's what some people are concerned about in India - the sort of digital infrastructure that exists today and not just talking about the rural areas but also the cities. What are your thoughts?
Answer: Masayoshi Son (of SoftBank) is a very good friend of mine from SoftBank. We had worked together for 15 years. He knows how to dream and make dreams come true. If you watch, what you're really saying is it's like having a highway. You don't want to build a four-lane highway within a mile of home and then have to take a trail to get there. You have to connect with high speeds throughout and you have to make the regulatory, the business and the government decisions on what your end goal is. My parents were doctors. So often people would stay hung up on symptom. How do I solve the spectrum issue? How to get this equally divided as opposed to getting the end opportunity? The end opportunity is broadband to everyone. The end opportunity is digital everything. And that's what the business leaders and the governments should be working towards.
Question: Are you optimistic that Mr Modi gets it? You said India is the one country in the world you'd bet on?
Answer: Right now it is the most enlightened emerging market in the world. We are doubling down. We have over 14 thousand employees in India. You're going to see us making huge commitments to the country. Partner with many of the Indian companies. Work on smart-cities together. And help the dream the country has on all levels, including what your leader Narendra Modi has accomplished.
Question: What is your blue print for the smart-cities?
Answer: The smart-cities have broadband everywhere. But people get confused not about connectivity. Merely connecting things gets you nothing. All it does is a lot of data that you can't choose from properly. So you have to think about it in multiple stages. The blueprint has to be how you can combine all this. We did almost all the smart-cities in the world. Barcelona is rated as the top innovation city in Europe. And in Barcelona, the first thing that they did was: How to provide government services better? How do they better traffic control? How do they prefer transportation? How do they change parking forever? How do you work from home with tele-presence? How do you do smart-garbage-collection? And now you see cities like Hamburg, Chicago in the same mode. I think that's what you are going to see in India. But you have think to work together and think in terms of horizontal outcomes as opposed to technology spectrum and a device.
Question: You mentioned tele-presence and I was about to come to that. Tele-presence was first launched with the idea that many of us would never have to travel. And the experience is really great when you are sitting there, you feel you are in the same room as somebody and don't have to travel. Has this technology not yet fully taken off or are you satisfied with the why it's got to?
Answer: I think that's the right summary what you said here. For the top executives, I would have probably doubled the number of customers using tele-presence. I spend much more time on our virtual second floor than our physical first floor with customers. However, the price points were so high, either for a full conference room or down to an individual tele-presence unit. The individual unit might have cost around $25,000 back then. Today it costs around $2000. So you'll see us with tele-presence on every sales representative/sales executive's desktop. 25000 units. That will change productivity and where you are going is collaboration which includes tele-presence. It includes web-conferencing. It includes instant messaging. If we make that really easy to use, the productivity of the workforce will increase 3 to 5 per cent. Cisco intends to lead on that. We also intend to lead on security.
Question: If you had to look at the digital future ten years from now, what would be you other big wins?
Answer: I think you're going to see technology not just move to the next generation, but the impact of the internet of everything - everything, every person going digital. It is probably 10 to 15 times more than the impact of the internet of to date. So it has the chance to change countries and companies and citizens in a way like never before. However, if you don't change, you get left behind. That's a key takeaway from Davos. CEOs get that. Government leaders get that. Two years ago, when I talked about this with other people, they said: 'That's nice but if you don't buy me a drink I'm not going to talk anymore.' Today you have heads of states, board of directors, CEOs saying: 'How do we work with Cisco to transform our company or our country?'
Question: You said the impact of the internet is just starting. There's lots of concern whether the change would be for the good or the bad. Does it mean that you're going to have all these internet devices but people are going to lose their jobs, their livelihood? Is it going to increase inequalities in the world? How do you respond to that?
Answer: I think if we do it right as countries, as governments, as businesses and as citizens. It will be incremental job growth and let's just take this example: We train each year 1 million students on global bases for network academies. We are going to start training next year a100,000 students on the internet of everything. Probably in three years we are going to train 300,000. We are training electricians in Germany instead of just doing electrical work we are training them to create sensors. So it's going to be a rotation and jobs will be created and if companies and countries provide the education to allow their workforce to change, I think it is not only a net major increase in GDP, but is also going to increase average income. I think it's an inclusive one that creates more jobs.
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