John Chambers Keynote at Oracle OpenWorld

Had the opportunity today to see and hear John Chambers at Oracle OpenWorld (recording and presentation available here - may need to scroll down a bit). It was great to hear him talk about Unified Communications / Telepresence and how that will impact business users and consumers.

This is the first time I had the opportunity to hear John Chambers live and I must say that he is a phenomenal speaker, engages his audience very very well and very inspiring. Even though he did raise a bunch of questions around how communications would change with Telepresence, Unified Communications...what I found fascinating was his concept around Enteprise 2.0 - which is Web 2.0 coming into the business world. This is simply great - as it goes beyond blurring functional department boundaries in enterprises to actually blurring the lines between a consumer and business user. This can have a great impact on adoption of tools, especially communication / collaboration tools, and also how these products are marketed and sold.

I am tempted to believe that consumer adoption of Web 2.0 collaboration/communication tools will fuel enterprise adoption as well...as I see the analogy of this in the IM world and how Enterprise IM never took off and got to the level of usage of business users using consumer IM products in their business.

Even though the presentation and demonstrations around the use of Telepresence, etc. in consumer markets was compelling - the skeptic in me wonders....if the consumer products reach a level of quality and reliability that is "good enough", will the costly Telepresence and UC systems see the fate similar to video conferencing systems, i.e. lie around in corners of large enterprises with no real usage?