John Chambers spent a year trying to woo Padmasree Warrior (
News -
Alert), 49. No this isn't another cougar story; he wanted her to move from Motorola to Cisco. She finally did.
“John Chambers really worked at it. It took me a year to say yes,” she recalled.
Born in India, Warrior is now the CTO of Cisco (
News -
Alert) with “a key role to play in Cisco's transformation from a switches and router company to a leading platform provider for the next-generation Internet,” according to a good interview recently printed in Forbes India.
Warrior said a CTO today needs to come up with new business models to monetize technology, not just sit around trying to scare up bleeding-edge technology. The entire interview is well-worth reading, a few highlights here.
“My role is very broad. My job is not to know the details of everything but to ask the right questions,” she
told the magazine, a philosophy which could stand as a good approach to most jobs, such as, oh, President of the United States. And Twitter gets a shout-out as a genuinely useful business tool instead of just something to waste time, yours and the poor saps reading your tweets:
“It is important to have a peripheral vision and talk to people I don't normally talk to, and that's where I use Twitter mostly. For example, I asked my 1.2 million followers on Twitter what the next generation of Internet will look like. So you can think of it like crowd sourcing for what is relevant to me,” Warrior said.
A CTO today needs to be able to combine technology expertise with business models. Take cloud computing. While the architecture is important, the consumption models are very different. Which means how we sell what we sell is going to be very different.
Mobile, of course, is at the top of everybody's mind and buzzword list these days. “You need to start thinking of it as mobility, rather than mobile,” Warrior said. “Mobility is just not about the device but how can we enable applications to be available on a mobile platform.”
Cisco is “getting into areas like data centers, you are now in direct competition with your partners like IBM (
News -
Alert) and HP,” the interviewer said. “HP has also launched a router and has acquired your competitor 3Com.”
Warrior concedes yes, that's true. “The industry landscape is changing because of convergence of communication, content, and these will lead to new types of companies competing with each other. It's a natural part of industry evolution. We will compete with companies like IBM and Microsoft (
News -
Alert) in certain areas and partner in others. All companies understand that. Cisco and HP would compete more than they would partner, because there is more of an overlap,” she said.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by
Kelly McGuire
