Chambers' replacement takes centre stage at Cisco Networkers

There's no John Chambers at Cisco's huge company showcase in Barcelona this week, Cisco Networkers.

Networkers - which pulls together key company executives with Cisco's channel partners and major customers - kicked off with a host of tech sessions on Monday.

But the real show starter was today.

Chambers has found a more than adequate replacement in the shape of European president Chris Dedicoat, who delivered the opening keynote this morning.

The words 'ignite' and 'innovation' are decked everywhere here at Barcelona's International Convention Centre, and Dedicoat's jovial speech followed those themes closely.

British-born Dedicoat was keen to prove how essential ICT is economic growth.

He highlighted concerns over just how few IT graduates universities are turning out, and he argued how Europe is falling behind the US in productivity. Time to do something about that, he urged.

Cue Cisco, which is in a perfect position to do something about that, he explained.

Out came the statistics.

Fact number 1. 4200 patents: the top technology patent holder in the world.

Fact number 2. Cisco has 22,000 engineers, all innovating. (He also snuck in the fact that if you work for Cisco, and sign off the rights to your idea, a creation that yields a healthy new business line will net you quarter of a million bucks. Not bad for a staff perk).

Fact number 3. 125 companies purchased. And that truly is a role call of some of the biggest innovators in ICT.

Delegates were then baffled by Dedicoat's retraction of fact number 1. A bar chart he whacked up on the big screen confirmed that in fact Alcatel-Lucent filed 20percent more patents last year, and that Cisco came only fifth.

Dedicoat's explanation that Cisco's patents were of a higher quality didn't wash.

Dedicoat changed tack by demonstrating some of the key technologies Cisco sees as important in the future.

Digital signage is one. It works like this: advertisers connect their ad hoardings to the internet. Using near-field communications, or a similar short-range radio technology, the hoardings detect who is passing close by, and display an advert which that user might be interested in.

In his example, a woman walking a dog was showed an advert for pet food.

Quite how the individual would be recognised wasn't explained. To do so would have opened up a hatful of privacy concerns, as well as some difficult technical issues.

But Dedicoat was keen to outline that Cisco believes this will be a key technology in the future.

Near-field communications got another mention later in the demo as Dedicoat used his phone to gain entry to his hotel room. NFC is coming along leaps and bounds and has been included in Nokia mobile phones containing built-in Oyster cards for use on London's Tube.

There were plenty of mentions of rapidly increasing bandwidth and the need for networks to grow in size to accomodate spiralling growth in video.

Cue Cisco's latest buzzword, TelePresence.

TelePresence, Cisco's high end video conferencing technology, is becoming increasingly high on its agenda, as I blogged yesterday.

The difference between TelePresence and other vendors' videoconferencing systems, is that TelePresence is high res (each screen uses 5Mbps of bandwidth) and it uses some top-end audio and visual equipment, as well as a dedicated rooom.

There's a full three-screen TelePresence setup being demoed in a meeting room here, with a single screen on the exhibition floor, and Cisco has put in the bandwidth to prove just how hi-res it is.

Also proving the demand for video, Cisco says, is IP-based surveillance.

Dedicoat emphasised how 90percent of CCTV cameras still run over analogue circuits, and how those cameras could integrate with corporate networks if they ran over IP.

It makes sound technical sense, of course. It'll just take a hefty round of technology refreshes for it to happen.

Of course it's in Cisco's interests to talk up businesses' requirements of video, but, quibbling over the precise figures aside, it's seems pretty much bang on with its predictions.